Abstract

BORDA, Libertad. Fanatismo y redes de reciprocidad. Trama comun. [online]. 2015, vol.19, n.1, pp.67-87. ISSN 1668-5628.

Due to various factors, among which we can mention the increasing process of commodification of contemporary societies and large-scale dissemination of CMC, both fan practices and the reach of terms like fan/fandom have been transformed. It is then necessary to abandon approaches that restrict fandom/fanship to processes of constitution of subcultures or to a “type” of audience that differ from the other in terms of degree, in order to adopt a view which is comprehensive enough to encompass different phenomena thus enabling the unification of today diffuse field of fan studies in Latin America. My hypothesis is that fandom has become a pool of resources available to audiences but also to industry. For the empirical contrast of this hypothesis, a body of 48 internet forums of Latin American telenovelas has been studied from the point of view of discourse analysis. The realization of many of the components of such pool of resources can be found in this object. In this context, I intend to center on a feature which was always characteristic of fandoms, although it has attracted little attention from the studies on these areas: the tendency to create networks of reciprocity. Although these works derived their conclusions from traditional societies, research in economical anthropology that has approached material and symbolic exchanges may contribute a new perspective to shed light on fan practices focusing on the operational modes of these groups.

Keywords : Fandom; Audiences; Reciprocity; Telenovela; Computer-mediated-communication.

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