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- Module on Grossberg and Ito
For each of the following quotes from the assigned essays, interpret and summarize the quote in your own words—in about two to three sentences in length.
- Lawrence Grossberg, “Is There a Fan in the House?: The Affective Sensibility of Fandom,” in The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, ed. Lewis, Lisa A. (London: Routledge, 1992), 50–65.
- Mizuko Ito, “Japanese Media Mixes and Amateur Cultural Exchange,” in Digital Generations: Children, Young People, and New Media, ed. David Buckingham and Rebekah Willett (Mahwah, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 2006), 49–66.
- “For many years, the only alternative to this image of fans as cultural dopes came from various arguments that divided the audience for popular culture into two groups: the larger segment is still seen to be cultural dopes who passively consume the texts of popular culture. But there is another segment, much smaller and more dispersed, who actively appropriate the texts of specific popular cultures, and give them new and original significance” (Grossberg 51).
- “Empowerment is an abstract possibility; it refers to a range of effects operating at the affective level. It is not synonymous with pleasure; nor does it guarantee any form of resistance to or evasion of existing structures of power, although it is a condition of the possibility of resistance” (Grossberg 64).
- “Specifically, otaku culture destabilizes certain key socialcultural categories: the distinction between professional and amateur cultural production, the commodity form of media, aged-based boundaries for media consumption, and normative forms of gender and sexuality” (Ito 55).
- “I am interested in how doujinshi production and exchange, even in the pre-Internet era, represent the activist participatory media cultures that are proliferating in tandem with the spread of digital media. In a sense, they are prototypical of niche communities of disenfranchised youth who are mobilizing through the Internet to create communities of interest to challenge elite and adult sensibilities” (Ito 62).