"A Pirate's Life For Me": Narrative Theory and Online Fan Community

[Note 12/20/07: The final version of this paper will not be published here for various reasons--mainly because it sucked and I don't feel I'm saying anything we don't already know, either as fans or as scholars, that isn't expressed by the outline here. If you'd like to read the full version, email me for an electronic copy.]

Intro--the day fandom exploded. The event known as "Strikethrough07" can show us how narrative theories might be adapted to examine communal, asynchronous narratives online.

1. Narrative theory as appropriate for studying fan culture and fan text production. Bormann's Symbolic Convergence as a place to start. Fisher (and his respondants), particularly talking about the communal nature of all narrative. Ricoeur on temporality and (re)iteration. In literature: Peter Brooks (Formalism/Structuralism)--justify use of literature by pointing to a lack of other ways to analyze written communication that is neither literature nor tech writing.



2. Fandom--definitions (including overview of LiveJournal as platform), narrative nature of, and counter-hegemonic practices of. Citing Henry Jenkins, Matt Hills, and Camille Bacon-Smith's ethnographic studies of fandom.
   


3. : Strikethrough07 as told "objectively" by news organizations and technology news blogs.
   


4. The narratives of Strikethrough 07. Examples throughout.
   
   
   1. Creating leaders, heroes and villans--this was the first task: "Whose fault is this?" was the first thing most fans asked and began researching.
   
   
   2. Time passage/speed of mythos construction. A single narrative emerged as the dominant version more quickly due to hyperlinking and copy/paste abilities.
   
   
   3. Genre of narratives of Strikethrough is quite clearly that of a detective story. Peter Brooks says this is the most engaging and most basic plot of all--an unveilling, a revelation. Fans constructed their narratives around this most familiar emplottment--because fanfiction is often written like this? Because it is the easiest to write? Because it poses the writer as Revealer?
   
   
   4. Pirates as metaphor. Fans see fandom as a whole by unifying under the pirate metaphor. They also see themselves as counter cultural (and thus heroic). They also identify with one of the major fandoms at that time: Pirates of the Carribbean, drawing on the newly released movie for inspiration, working issues of capitalism, economic dominance and hegemony into their fanfictions (which are usually just about romance).
   
   
   5. Errors and Rumors. As fans retell stories of their Strikethrough experience and attempt to hash out exactly what happened, accusations are made, unfounded rumors told, mistakes get made. The concessions to these errors are minimal, with most fans saying that the details actually *don't* matter--just the sentiment behind the actions. Which is strange, given the point above.
      


5. Contributions to narrative theory
   1. Concession: The particularities of fandom must be considered: Already a strong community, already based in narrative.
   
   
   2. Burke's symbolic action actually worked: By symbolically "flaming" the organization causing grievances (LiveJournal) fans managed to change policy in their favor.
   
   
   3. Strikethrough as example of conflict resolution through narrative actually creating a communal identity from disparate sects (Harry Potter fans met with Sailor Moon fans, Smallville fans met with Pirates of the Carribean fans).
   
   
   4. Strikethrough as catharsis.
   
   
   5. Introduction of desire to catalogue and historicize events through posting narratives online.
   
   
   6. Fans are used to open-ended narratives, to filling in the gaps, so it's no surprise many of the narratives simply stop around the first week of September. References still abound, but the fanaticism has faded. What can this tell us about other community narratives and their longevity?
   
   
   7. The genre choice is interesting, as fans are continuously engaged in "revealing" the subtext of their favorite texts. This could be one of the differences between spoken narratives traded among face-to-face community members informally, and the more formal task of writing a narrative that others will voluntarily *find* then *read*--there must be some suspense built, the craftedness of the story is more important without other social cues.
   
   
   8. Visual narrative-- narratives online are permanent (unless LiveJournal deletes them). Not only are these permanent, but online interaction involves a visual component that may have been traditionally filled with gestural language. Unlike f2f communication, however, narratives online are hierarchically arranged by time: threads of a conversation appear as replies *below* the original comment, and subsequent comments on the same "level" of reply are indented the same amount.
      

Conclusion: Proposals for further study
Strikethrough was just one example, focusing on fandom. But online communities exist outside of fandom, and create narratives as a way of creating identity (Cite Howard Rheingold and Nancy Baym). Anecdotes are the main genre of online communication, but how many of these are narratives that actually help build community? Is there any way to predict which narratives will hold in a community, and which will be just another post?
Structuralism can tell us a lot about the types that survive: Those with strong senses of heroes and villans, those that feature a quest for information (which makes sense, given the medium of the Internet is traditionally used for information-seeking). Further studies might look at how often comments on narratives are themselves narratives, how many times a given narrative is linked to by multiple users.
Continued work on three-d avatars has revealed software engineer's attempts to duplicate f2f communication--how are narratives currently created in 3-d avatar environments, and to what extent do these look like "real" narratives, and to what extent do they seem more like bulletin board posts?