Star Trek Fandom Subculture Analysis

After studying the two most popular popular culture theorists, Theodor Adorno and John Fiske, I find myself agreeing with the ladder’s point of view on the subject. While Adorno is pessimistic and oppositional to the culture industry, arguing that it is damaging to its passive consumers, Fiske has a much more positive outlook on the industry. He argues that, although the culture industry creates mass media for its audiences, the audiences are the ones that reinterpret and reconfigure those media as popular culture; they create the productive meaning of the text - without an active audience, it would be meaningless. This is not something that happens behind closed doors or behind the creators’ backs. I, like Fiske, believe that the media celebrates …show more content…
For my purposes, I am separating fandoms and subcultures; a fandom may be a subculture, a subculture is not a fandom. In my opinion, a fandom surrounds a specific person, team, or fictional series, while a subculture is more of a general community that relates to a more broad topic, such as a particular genre of music, or even music in general, but not necessarily a specific artist. Fandoms are fascinating to study, it was one of my favorite aspects of this course, and I am especially interested in the Star Trek fandom because of its cultural impact. Trekkies (or Trekkers, depending on the intensity of their loyalty) took a science fiction TV program and created an entire universe to surround it. They adopted the practices of those aboard the USS Enterprise, including their fashion and language, and implemented them into their own lives on Earth - that’s unprecedented. The idea of cultural capital in the Star Trek fandom was evident in the documentary, Trekkies, which featured die-hard fans going about …show more content…
I’d like to focus on do-it-yourself subcultures and the Roll Up Your Sleeves documentary, because grassroots subcultures are easier to disassociate from fans of an already existing text. The safe communities fostered by these subcultures support Fiske’s optimistic view of popular culture because individuals who may feel like misfits in the public scope can find comfort in a subculture made of of others who have similar values and interests. The Roll Up Your Sleeves documentary illustrated this very nicely for our class. The majority of us agreed that we did not enjoy the heavy alternative music that the subjects of the short film specialized in, but we appreciated that members all gathered to support their movement and one and other’s music. They didn’t care if the public liked it or not, what was important is that they valued the genre and found a forum to share that interest

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