Revised: Introduction

Original Introduction Post Located Here

Note: The information on AOJE provided in this entry dates to 9.18.13; the series has progressed considerably since.

Introduction

Participating in online fan activities has been a considerable part of my life since I was twelve, when I simply couldn’t contain my enthusiasm for Harry Potter anymore and had to turn to the internet for support. Throughout my many years in fandom, I’ve grown accustomed to certain conventions – particularly the frequent war of sorts between fandom (the online fan following of a work of fiction) and canon (the actual source text the fandom centers around). Generally, the authority of the creators of canon is a tense matter; fans often feel that they could have handled the story better and that the creators are somehow out of touch with the nuances of their own text. This feeling often motivates fan remixes in various mediums: fiction, video, visual art, etc.

However, with the rise of social media in the past few years, the boundaries between fans and creators have become much more flexible. Now more than ever, fan reactions and input have a real chance of impacting canon, because the fans and the creators have a direct and instantaneous means of one-on-one communication.

But what happens when a canon text is created in the same spaces that have been traditionally reserved for fandom activity? Sites like YouTube, Tumblr, and Twitter are traditionally spaces where fans gather to create and share fan contributions. Composing a source text within that space is still relatively uncharted territory, but it makes sense in the current climate of storytelling, where many new creators of canon are bound to have past experience as participants in fandom.

This brings me to the focus of my study: a YouTube series called The Autobiography of Jane Eyre. It is a modern day adaptation of (you guessed it) Jane Eyre, in which the story is told in the format of a video blog. The Autobiography of Jane Eyre's format was inspired by last year's very successful video blog adaptation of Pride and Prejudice entitled The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. New episodes of AOJE are posted twice a week (Wednesdays and Saturdays), and are usually between 2 and 5 minutes long. The series currently has 26 episodes, and is approximately 40% into the original novel's storyline.

The Autobiography of Jane Eyre follows The Lizzie Bennet Diaries' tradition of incorporating transmedia in its storytelling; Jane's updates to Twitter and Tumblr expand upon the events that take place in the YouTube episodes. (Some of the other characters also have Twitters, websites, etc.) Being digitally literate -- more specifically, literate in social media -- is fundamentally tied to the way the story presents itself. AOJE uses social media to conjure a far-reaching verisimilitude for its audience. I'm extremely curious to examine just how that audience responds to this story as it progresses.

Rather than taking on the formidable task of tracking AOJE's presence across the entire internet, I have selected one particular site that has an active AOJE fanbase community: Tumblr. (The YouTube comments are another interesting site to consider, but Tumblr's posting format lends itself much more easily to lengthy discussion.) Tumblr serves as a home base for many fandoms; if any significant events happen within a fandom, it's usually on Tumblr almost immediately afterward. Therefore, it seems like the best space to track in order to keep up to date with the AOJE fan community's interaction.

I will be following the activity on Tumblr’s “aoje” tag, located at http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/aoje. If a Tumblr user makes a post about the series on their personal blog and then tags it “aoje”, it will show up on the main tag linked in the previous sentence. There is a small variety of tags used when discussing the series: “the autobiography of jane eyre” is another one. I have chosen to follow “aoje” instead because it is an abbreviation agreed on by the fan community to represent The Autobiography of Jane Eyre, and therefore users who use it are active enough in the fandom to know the chosen fandom nickname of sorts for the series.

I plan to engage with the AOJE fandom on Tumblr both as an observer and an occasional participant. In following the AOJE tag, I will observe these three specific areas:

1. How AOJE uses digital literacies conventions – specifically, social media sites and trends – to translate the story of Jane Eyre to a modern day online environment.
2. How AOJE Tumblr fans in the affinity space of the “aoje” Tumblr tag synthesize and respond to the narrative’s use of transmedia.
3. How the AOJE cast and crew also use the “aoje” Tumblr space to communicate with fans about the narrative on an extradiegetic level. 

By observing these three areas, I hope to gain insight into the arising genre of the independently produced web series, as well as what it might portend for the evolution of fandom in an age where digital literacy has become so widely spread. Just how popular can a zero budget video blog adaptation of one of literature’s most beloved Victorian novels become? Time will tell.