I’ve joked that Buffy the Vampire Slayer made media fandom a ’safe’ topic for ‘mainstream’ science fiction fandom, but I also remember discovering Henry Jenkins’ book on media fandoms, Textual Poachers at a little Madison bookstore in the early 1990’s. Jenkins is a professor media studies at MIT.
The book was a clue thump that there was something to media fandom beyond the sterotypes of “comic book guy.” Hi, my name is Bill and I was a trufan snob.
As mentioned elsewhere, Jenkins now has a blog where he’s talking about fan culture, games, the internet, and other media.
In a recent post, he discusses if Joss Whedon should have tried digital distribution of new episodes of Firefly instead of using his reputation capital to make a major motion picture version.
