Tavia wrote:
My usual retort to those who classify fandom with trainspotting (ie most of my acquaintance) is that nearly everyone watches television (some fans less than average), non-fans are content to sit and watch, while fans try to participate in social and/or creative ways.
IIRC, Jenkins had a hypothesis about that. Something along the lines of ordinary people wanting to define their own passive consumption of television (something like five hours a day for the average American, I think!) as "normal," even though most people have the feeling, deep down, that there may well be something vaguely wrong with staring passively at the tube like that for large chunks of time. But if you can point to someone whose TV-watching behavior is really unsual, it can make your own habits seem "normal" by comparison, and therefore, somehow, OK. "Yeah, sure, I watch a lot of TV, but at least I'm not like *those* people! They're obsessive!" (I may be slightly mischaracterizing Jenkins' argument, there... I don't remember it terribly well, and I don't have the book here with me to check. But I've certainly seen variants of that kind of reasoning first-hand, occasionally in some rather amusing contexts.)
-- Betty Ragan ** bragan@nrao.edu ** http://www.aoc.nrao.edu/~bragan Not speaking for my employers, officially or otherwise. "Seeing a rotten picture for the special effects is like eating a tough steak for the smothered onions..." -- Isaac Asimov