In my last post, I sketched out, as a fan, some broad categories I see in the structure of genre TV. In this post, I want to speculate a little on how these might lead to very different kinds of fan involvement and learning. In the spirit of full disclosure, the two shows on my previous list that I find most engaging these days are Lost and Heroes, so I’ll be discussing those at the greatest length.

The thing about Lost that has been most interesting to me is how fans deal with the extremely slow reveal of the “big story” — as I suggested in the previous post, it appears that the show’s creators are planning to uncover only small parts of the puzzle each season, and are holding off on “the big payoff” until late in the series’ run. This can be frustrating for many casual viewers; the show’s lack of quick resolution, plus having a distinct style makes it ripe for some great spoofing such as CollegeHumor’s Losticil video (click to play):

“Will there ever be one?” Well, that’s the big question, isn’t it? And, I argue, the one that characterizes Lost fan activities as quite different than other genre TV.

Lost‘s narrative is fragmented in an interesting (but often confusing) manner: Each episode features a character-specific flashback, lending to a specific narrative arc for that episode, and while each season seems to have loose themes (“Getting Inside the Hatch,” “Hanging Out In The Hatch,” and now “Who the Hell Are the Others?”), these seem clearly in service of the bigger story. I classified the show at the far end of the “narrative payoff” scale in my previous post.

I’m interested that the anticipations of how that larger story will unfold has been the focus of a great amount of “fan theorizing” — so much that Lostpedia, the largest Lost wiki, has been forced to enact a “theory policy” to explain what members of that community deem worth discussing. How is this different from other fan activities around genre TV shows?

In his classic text Textual Poachers, Henry Jenkins described the ways that fan communities around a number of TV shows used fan fiction and fan creations (Star Trek being the canonical example, but Beauty and the Beast and Twin Peaks also receiving some attention). Often, fan fiction served as a venue to reclaim elements of a show’s narrative, then develop new creations using these “poached” bits of the show’s text. While highly-sexualized subgenres get the most press (because, let’s be honest, 99% of it is hilariously weird), the idea behind fan fiction in general is quite interesting to me. Why do people do this, and how does the structure of a given show affect the shape of what fans create?

I suspect that one would see a larger proportion of romance-themed stories from a Beauty and the Beast fan community than, say, a Babylon 5 community, given the centrality of the show’s overt romantic content. Similarly, I hypothesize that there simply isn’t much traditional fan fiction (of the type Jenkins discussed) in the Lost or Heroes communities. The amount of “narrative space” in the stories is necessarily limited because the creators have repeatedly implied that there is a set of answers to the “big story” coming, and this would presumably dissuade fan communities from writing their own answers to the story. One might find this in the Harry Potter fan communities as well — meta-knowledge of how the larger narrative arc is unfolding (along with a timescale for the reveal) may influence the nature of the creative work that fans write. I conjecture that traditional fanfic in the Lost and Heroes communities focus more on “interludes” and character pieces rather than stories which uncover major plot points, leaving those to be discussed at length in a series of non-narrative “fan theories.”

This is in direct contrast to fan fiction in other, established communities. Antecedents in other genres seem to me to often involve creating stories to resolve narrative incosistencies — Sherlockian/Holmesian explanations of why Watson’s middle name must be “Hamish,” for example, or Star Trek fans’ explanation of the Vulcan “moon” T’Kuht. But, with shows such as Lost and Heroes, I see the being “worked out” in forms that seem much more akin to informal scientific reasoning than creative writing. Theories are proposed, argued, defended, and revised in competitive and collaborative ways on online forums when, for other genre TV, these theories may have been developed and evaluated primarily through fan fiction. If I’m correct, this seems like a fundamental shift in how genre TV fans interact with the stories, and the kinds of contributions they make to them.

So, what might account for this? I argue that the overt narrative structure of the show might be leading fans to postulate theories in this fashion rather than via creative means. If shows on the “Star Trek model” end of the spectrum prioritize intra-episode narrative over extra-episode narrative, there’s simply a lot more room for the fan to jump in and make connections. Also, if the “meat” of the show’s story is compartmentalized into smaller chunks, perhaps the fan sees a much easier path to contributing their own elements to the story. That is, both the strong episodic structure of an episodic show might lend itself to fan creativity while the strong “arc” nature of shows like Lost might make fans feel as though their work might more easily be invalidated by plot developments in the ongoing show.

The implications for learning might be that the kinds of interaction fans have with these shows could then influence the kinds of informal learning that occurs in fan communities. Might we see, then, that Star Trek fan communities lead to improved creative writing skills and Lost fan community interaction might lead to better development of informal scientific reasoning and argumentation skills? These are empirical questions, and I’m presently unsure how one would answer them, but my interest is piqued.

Finally, what about the difference between a show structure like Heroes and a show structure like Lost? Both perpetuate long-term storylines, just carve up the importance of narrative within each season differently. Would we expect to see differences in the ways that fans theorize about Heroes due to the structure of how the narrative is meted out?

These are, clearly, just hypotheses at this point, but point toward ways that an analysis of popular media might help uncover the hidden ways that the media afford different kinds of informal learning. We’ve seen over and over again that the structure of devices and communication systems — from cars to websites to languages themselves — lead to different uses of those tools. Why should genre TV be any different?