11/17 Readings: FlashForward

I’ll cut right to the chase today: the main connection I noticed between the two articles on FlashForward was that they were both written by people outside the typical demographic of fandom.  I’m not sure if this is the right way to say this, but something about each author’s situation made their fan experience different in some way: the first writer was 70 years old, placing her outside the typical age range of fannish practices (TiVo-ing episodes, doing further investigation online), and the other writer was from Australia, where the broadcasting delay on American programs places her (I assume Tama is a woman’s name) puts her at a disadvantage for experiencing digital content in the way it is intended.

The unusual perspective they both wrote from helped to bring out two things: how diverse fan practices can be, and just how much FF (last week it was GG, now FF…) has contemporary fan practices encoded into its DNA.  I’ll be writing about this, of course, in my screening response, so I don’t want to dig too deeply into it and use everything up.  The first article explains this quite well, especially because the author was not someone otherwise inclined to interacting with texts in a fannish way (in fact, she said that going to the internet for more was a practice completely new to her before FF).  Then, article #2 show just how integral the show’s digital extratextual material is to its experience by explaining how she missed out by not being able to consume this material in the proper context.  Anyway, I’ll be talking about all of this more in my screening response later.