Hello and welcome to my easy to understand guide to Henry Jenkins fandom theory. Henry Jenkins basically believes that audiences are a really important part of the media production and consumption and distribution circulation process, in particular fans. Fans are those people who love something. I'm sure we all know somebody who's a massive fan of a particular TV show or musical artist or online personality. And it's those fans that play a really big role in media.
Now, that could be that they play a really big role in production. Maybe they send in their own ideas to their favourite vlogger about what they want them to cover next in their next video. Maybe fans are the ones that comment and share and they're actually distributing the product themselves because they're sharing it with their friends online.
And maybe the fans are the ones helping to interpret the meaning of the product. So perhaps... Fans out there are the ones who are watching the film trailers and going, oh, I think I know what happens. I think I figured out who the villain is or who the killer is.
And then they're sharing their ideas online with other fans and with other people. And so Jenkins believes that fans are responsible for a lot of things within a media product and in particular constructing their own meanings and sharing them with others. So, for example, in humans, if you have a look for humans fan fiction online now.
Just a little bit of a content warning here. Some of it is not appropriate for all age groups. But there are a huge number of websites dedicated to fan fiction for the TV show Humans. And fans from all over the world have created their own stories about the characters in the show.
Mattie, the teenage girl, is the subject of a lot of those fan fiction stories, perhaps because the audience is also teenage girls who kind of look up to her and admire her for being a strong female character. And a lot of the fan fiction stories are about her going off to university, getting into relationships with people, inventing things, becoming part of the kind of computer coding world with regards to synths. So they have basically taken the idea of humans and decided to reinterpret it with their own ideas, creating their own stories online.
And these fans have made hundreds of thousands of pages like this of fan fiction for the show. There are hundreds of examples of fan-made videos dedicated to people like Zoella and Alfie Deyes on YouTube. They bang on and on and on about how much they love them and they upload their own videos talking about Zoella, reviewing her videos, making her own, like taking clips of her videos and talking about them. So fan-made products are becoming increasingly common and that's probably due to... the improvement in domestic technology.
It enables us to film our own videos on our phones, upload them straight to the internet, go viral, become a superstar. So fan-made videos and fan-made products are something that Jenkins fills is very, very common now.