Enterprising

[athena28 2]

The NY Times Magazine Section paid tribute, today, to certain persons who passed away this year. Here's one of the tributes:

 

December 28, 2008

Joan Winston | b. 1932

Enterprising

By ROB WALKER

STAR TREK FANDOM

 

In the annals of fandom, “Star Trek” has a special place. The original series gradually became a pop-culture staple and the cornerstone of an immense commercial franchise largely because of the devotion and — crucially — the collective creativity of its fan base. The original series went off the air in 1969, after three seasons. But fans continued to dream up their own “Star Trek” stories, distribute zines, make videos, write songs, publish newsletters and create visual art. And they gathered at conventions, some dressed in homemade Trek outfits, which is why, in the annals of “Star Trek” fandom, Joan Winston holds a special place: she was an organizer of the first Star Trek fan convention, in 1972.

 

At times all this effort must have seemed thankless. Media accounts regularly portrayed the extreme fans as a bunch of kooks. A famous 1980s “Saturday Night Live” skit included William Shatner himself telling Trekkies to “get a life.” A Trek-specific gathering came about in part because even at science fiction fan conventions (which had gone on for decades), fans of the show were “merely tolerated,” as an entry on TrekCore.com puts it.

 

But there’s another way of looking at such fans: as extremely active media consumers. And there’s another way of looking at the Trek convention culture Winston helped create: as like-minded individuals gathering to connect over a shared taste. In other words, Winston’s world was a template for what is now widely seen as the mainstream-media-consumer paradigm of the 21st century. Henry Jenkins, co-director of the M.I.T. Comparative Media Studies Program, has been studying and writing about media fans for more than 20 years and has summarized the Facebook/YouTube era as fandom without the stigma. “It takes all the things that fans have been doing throughout the 20th century and makes them public, mainstream, commercial,” he told me in an interview. “The mechanisms that fans were early pioneers of have become absolutely widespread in our society, whether we’re talking about early communities or social networks or participatory culture.”

 

Unlike some pundits, Jenkins argues that consumers have not been passive vessels; rather, many were social, critical and even creative about the things they watched. Jenkins cited plenty of active-fan examples in his 1992 book “Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture,” including “Twin Peaks” and “Beauty and the Beast” (supported by more than 50 “major” fan organizations, with “a combined membership of 350,000”) and, of course, “Star Trek.” He noted that a key element of fan activity was “to speak from a position of collective identity.”

 

Kinship with a taste community is just a Google search away these days, but in 1972 that wasn’t the case. Which is exactly why the first Star Trek convention was so important in sustaining fandom. Winston, who grew up in Brooklyn and held jobs on the business side of ABC and CBS, also wrote fan fiction, sent story ideas to “Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry and visited the set of the show — all impressive manifestations of nonpassive media fandom. But her role in making the first Star Trek convention happen — in New York, with an estimated 3,000 attendees — was a lasting achievement. She even wrote a book about it, “The Making of the Trek Conventions.” Aside from making shared fandom apparent to outsiders (journalists, for instance, who chronicled the first Trek convention), the convention made fans apparent to one another. It’s a common theme among some media fans that the fan community ends up meaning more than the object of their enthusiasm.

 

Clearly the active approach to media consumption that Winston and her fellow superfans pioneered is more vital and widespread than ever. In his most recent book, “Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide,” Jenkins writes that fans have moved from the margins to “the center of current thinking about media production and consumption.” And this is undeniably true: content creators are now desperate to find Joan Winstons. As Jenkins told me, events like Comic-Con, a convention for comics fans, draw not only hordes of costumed attendees but also Hollywood stars sent by entertainment conglomerates to court them. These days, he summarizes, the fans are the ones telling the content creators to get a life.

 

 

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[Voyager recruit 0]

I have to say one thing; if a show like ''Heroes'' can recieve all this attention, and acclaim-and I do like it, as one who was in his adolescence a big comics fan-then, blast it, why not Star Trek? Yes, the 'heroes' are still people, given special gifts, and it's all Earthbound, but I wish that the general public would give any trek a chance. Maybe J.J. Abrams will finally make that happen. While I would like it if those who are criticized gets some respect-hello, Rodney Dangerfield!-I certainly don't live by the gen public's feelings. At least we all have each other-even if we don't like the same sereies, or characters. Ultimately, however...in the face of 'oppoosition'...we stand united! Keep on a' trekkin!