he’ll be an expert on monkey TV series, cartoons, comics, and video games; he’ll know his way around monkey websites; he’ll chat on forums, Facebook, and by e-mail with other fans; he’ll go to conventions, buy signed souvenirs, posters, and photos, adding them to his monkey collection; he’ll buy a monkey suit and, all dressed up, haunt the convention corridors; he’ll meet the actors, authors, graphic artists, and costume designers of the “monkey planet”; he’ll meet other fans, swap addresses and experiences, and exchange all kinds of trivia on monkey products.
Science Fiction has the oldest and largest fandoms, and apparently their conventions draw the biggest crowds. Anime and manga fandoms are pretty popular too. Among many others, there are fandoms for karaoke, Tolkien, Star Trek (fans are Trekkies), Harry Potter, and something known as a “furry,” whose fans are into comics, cartoons, literature, painting, and other forms of cultural production that feature anthropomorphic heroes and motifs. A “furry” possesses both animal and human characteristics, whether mental, physical, or a combination of both. A “furry” can also simply refer to a “furry” fan.
Fandoms use all available forms of media—websites, podcasts, song videos, fan art. At conventions they work out schedules of activities, which include everything from promotional events to specially organized tourist trips and foreign language classes. Manga and anime fans go to Japan, the popularity of both having made learning Japanese cool again. Although informal communities, fandoms become more and more complex, developing their own language (incomprehensible to a non-fan), codes, rituals, and etiquette. A Big Name Fan, for example, has the right to give his autograph to other fans, meaning that he can create his own personal fandom within the larger community. Fandoms are also gender conscious: there are fanboys and fangirls.
As far as Bradbury’s anxieties about literature go, not all is completely lost. Although coined a century ago, today the word Janeite denotes a person who displays a voluntary idolatrous enthusiasm for Jane Austen. First adopted as a badge of honor by Austen lovers within the academic and cultural elite, the coinage has undergone a recalibration. When Austen was canonized in the 1930s, and her place within the upper echelons of English literature put beyond doubt, the coinage simply came to mean—a fan. In more recent times film and television adaptions of her work have made Austen a cult writer, and as such, today’s Janeites engage in ever more elaborate fandom activities: reading clubs, outings, dress-up parties, tea parties, discussions, trips to where Austen or her heroes and heroines lived. Janeites practice their “mad enthusiasm” in every which way, studying everything from her characters’ genealogy to the fabrics of the era.
Fandoms allow for a random, unstructured, and chaotic self-education. Fascinated by the films of Aki Kaurismäki, a young woman I know started learning Finnish. A friend of mine who is an actress has starred in two popular American TV series. The head of her fandom is a shy Canadian office worker, who, knowing that her idol is originally from Croatia, has spent the past several years diligently learning Croatian.
While unschooled and disadvantaged by his low caste, the boy hero of the film Slumdog Millionaire unexpectedly wins a television quiz show, the Indian version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” Everything he knows he picked up through random life experiences. Today, millions of adolescents acquire knowledge in a similarly wild, unstructured, and random way, owing everything they know to “playful enthusiasm” and technology. The wave they surf is popular culture. Injected with popular culture, few will become astrophysicists. The majority will just become fans.
Avatars
We live in a time in which fantasies of the surrogate are no longer reserved only for the famous. Today the Internet disseminates, enriches, and popularizes fantasies of the surrogate. The surrogate is no longer our replica, but a second, third, fourth, and fifth self, one we design and redesign, model and remodel, one we control or make disappear with the touch of a fingertip.
The Guardian article “Second Life Affair Leads to Real life Divorce” (November 13, 2008) reports the case of an English couple, Amy Taylor and David Pollard, who met in an Internet chat-room, fell in love, and got married. In Second Life, an Internet computer game, both had an avatar, and these avatars, “Laura Skye” and “Dave Barmy,” were lovers. Then Taylor caught her then lover in flagrante: Pollard was watching his avatar make love to a prostitute. In virtual life, the embittered Taylor broke off the relationship between her and Pollard’s avatars, but in real life she and Pollard remained a couple. Some time later Taylor decided to test Pollard’s fidelity and went back into Second Life as a virtual private eye, setting a honeytrap, which “Dave Barmy” (i.e. Pollard) successfully avoided, claiming that he was in love with “Laura Skye.” “Laura Skye” and “Dave Barmy” then got married, a marriage soon followed by the real life nuptials of Amy Taylor and David Pollard. The final twist was when Taylor again caught Pollard cheating in virtual life and so in real life applied for a divorce. Pollard admitted to the virtual ex-marital affair but said it hadn’t even gotten as far as cyber sex, and that he hadn’t done anything wrong.
Created by Linden Lab and launched in 2003, Second Life is but one of the numerous online virtual worlds, which users, or residents, enter through their avatars. Avatars can take whatever shape or form a user chooses, and although most often human, they can actually be animal, mineral, or vegetable. But few choose to be a plant in their second life. Avatars can be completely different or strikingly similar to their real life users. In the virtual world, avatars do more or less the same things as their real world users. They buy virtual goods (land, houses, cars, clothing, jewelry, works of art), they hang out, go to Sexy Beach, visit virtual sex shops, play computer games, spend special Linden dollars, and apparently, some also earn real American dollars. Second Life is home to companies, educational institutions, libraries, universities, and religious groups. Avatars can sign up for different classes and pray in the virtual temples of every faith. Embassies are located on Diplomacy Island. The Maldives was the first country to open a virtual embassy, followed by Sweden. The Swedish Minister of Foreign Affairs, Carl Bildt, announced that he hoped to get an invitation to his embassy’s virtual opening. Serbia bought and created its own diplomatic island as a part of another virtual project known as “Serbia Under Construction.” Visitors can visit the Nikola Tesla Museum, the famous trumpet festival in Guča, and the Exit music festival in Novi Sad. Estonia opened an embassy in 2007 and was followed by Columbia, Macedonia, the Phillipines, and Albania. Avatars can play sports, visit museums and galleries, and go to concerts and the theatre. In 2008 the Second Life Shakespeare Company gave a live performance of the first act of Hamlet. Many companies flocked to advertise on Second Life and many got burned. Coca Cola allegedly pumped big money into opening Coke’s Virtual Thirst Pavilion, which attracted fewer than thirty avatars. All in all, it seems that Second Life is conceived as a paradise built to human dimensions. The only thing missing is funeral services.
Avatars fulfill our fantasies of being someone else, somewhere else. Adult users return to childhood, by definition a comfort zone. The virtual world is also a comfort zone. Adult users of Second Life experience life free of risk or consequence—they fly without falling, have unprotected sex, make risk-free acquaintances, and teleport themselves free from the risk of forever remaining in a virtual world. Users have the world under absolute control; they are Gods, able to connect and disconnect at will. Through this simulation game young users of Second Life learn about the world of adults. A young girl made her Second Life avatar a prostitute. It wasn’t so bad, she said. And besides, she wasn’t prostituting herself, her avatar was.
Can we live two lives? The American documentary Second Skin follows the lives of several players of the online game World of Warcraft (WoW). WoW is a “massively multiplayer online role playing game” (or MMORPG) situated in the fantasy Warcraft universe. Statistics suggest that some fifty million people, of whom sixty percent are between twenty and thirty years old, play the game. The documentary follows four addicts who live together; each spend about sixteen hours a day on the game. Asked why the “synthetic world” is better than the real one, the gamers reply that in the synthetic world the starting line is the same for everyone and that everyone has equal opportunities.
