Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Critical Contexts: Television Studies, Fandom Studies, and the Vid
- 2 Approach: How to Study a Vid
- 3 Proximate Forms and Sites of Encounter : Music Video and Experimental Tradition
- 4 Textures of Fascination: Archives, Vids, and Vernacular Historiography
- 5 Critical Spectatorship and Spectacle: Multifandom Vids
- 6 Adapting Starbuck: Dualbunny’s Battlestar Galactica Trilogy
- Conclusion
- References
- Index
1 - Critical Contexts: Television Studies, Fandom Studies, and the Vid
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Critical Contexts: Television Studies, Fandom Studies, and the Vid
- 2 Approach: How to Study a Vid
- 3 Proximate Forms and Sites of Encounter : Music Video and Experimental Tradition
- 4 Textures of Fascination: Archives, Vids, and Vernacular Historiography
- 5 Critical Spectatorship and Spectacle: Multifandom Vids
- 6 Adapting Starbuck: Dualbunny’s Battlestar Galactica Trilogy
- Conclusion
- References
- Index
Summary
Abstract
What can television scholars and historians learn from vids and vidding? This chapter considers the vid form and vidding practice in existing scholarship. The bulk of academic engagement with vids and vidding is in the loosely defined field of fan studies rather than in television studies. However, vids are possible because of the changing form and shape of television, from home videocassette recording through to digital video. Audience control over watching television, theorized as ways of controlling that flow, also provides the technological tools for making vids. The vid form is textual proof of fans using the tools at their disposal to intervene, respond, and create in a context wherein they have no official role.
Keywords: fanvids, television, fan studies, vidding, television studies, quality television
Vids are made about—and made out of—a vast range of source material. One of the exciting parts of studying vids is seeing how vidders iterate the form: for example, beyond television, vids are also used to comment on the pleasures and frustrations of films and video games in order to draw the web of paratexts and intertexts that inform contemporary (transmedia) fan experience. However, vidding's origins in television fandoms of the 1980s, continually enabled by the affordances of domestic media technologies (e.g. home video, both videotape and digitally), means that the vid form deserves to be explored through television. Indeed, in the first years of the American vidding convention VividCon, up to ninety percent of vids shown each year were made from television sources. Though this proportion dropped off to around half in the convention's later years, vids remain a supremely televisual form. Television studies offers a complex and hybrid set of ways to think about television technology, texts, and audiences and therefore those of the vid. Therefore, this chapter focuses on vidding's relationship with television through fandom studies’ approaches to television audiences, and through television studies. The subsequent case study chapters adopt a range of frames, in line with my overall purpose to explore the vid form through a range of theoretical approaches.
In this chapter, I discuss the relatively understated place of the vid form in current television scholarship and fan studies literature.
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- Information
- FanvidsTelevision, Women, and Home Media Re-Use, pp. 27 - 48Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020