Lost and Found in Transculturation. The
Citation: Vellar, Agnese (2011), “Lost” (and Found) in Transculturation. The Italian Networked Collectivism
of US TV Series and Fansubbing Performances. In Colombo, F., Fortunati, L. (eds.) Broadband Society and
Generational Changes. Oxford: Peter Lang.
“Lost” (and Found) in Transculturation. The Italian Networked Collectivism of
US TV Series and Fansubbing Performances
Agnese Vellar
University of Torino – Italy
agnesevellar@gmail.com
1 Television Audiences in Networked Publics
The internet has evolved since the late 1990s from text-based technology to the
multimedia and visually communication technology of today. During the 1990s,
television fans adopted social media such as Usenet newsgroups to communicate
with like-minded people, thus participating in the construction of audience
community of practice (Baym, 2000). In the 2000s the reach of the extended to a
much broader public and social media such as web forums, blogs and social
network sites became popular among young people. Adopting and adapting
social media, young people are now participating in the construction of
networked publics (Ito, 2008; boyd, 2008) that are both digital social spaces and
imagined communities. These technological and social changes are affecting the
way television fans consume media products, communicate with like-minded
people and participate in the construction of collective identities. In fact, fan
cultures are evolving from site-based communities to a networked collectivism
(Baym, 2007).
To investigate how Italian television audience participate in networked
publics I conducted ethnographic research on the networked collectivism that
emerged around US TV series, using the case of the community of Italian Subs
Addicted (ItaSA). ItaSA is a fan organization that produces amateur subtitles
(fansubs) for US TV series. ItaSA developed a Web 2.0 portal with a web forum
and chat channels where Italian fans can interact. Staff members are young
adults who work in teams to produce subs without expecting monetary reward.
Their products are consumed by a young audience that is not satisfied by Italian
national television which broadcasts a dubbed version of the US TV series long
after the US distribution. The aim of this paper is to describe how members of
the generation Post (Cohort 1979-1991), by adopting and adapting technologies
and media content to fulfil spectatorship needs that are no longer satisfied by
national broadcasters, participate in the construction of a generational imagined
community in the networked publics.
1
2 Generations of Fandom: from Cultural Dupes to Networked
Amateur Experts
Fans are consumers with an intense engagement with a mass media product. For
a long time they have been represented as cultural dopes both by mass media
and by social researchers. This negative view of fans is a result of the moral
dualism which exists between the high-taste and rationality of the intellectual
élite and the perceived low-taste of fans (Jenkins, 1992). The academic view of
fans as deviants changed during the 1990s when Jenkins proposed
conceptualizing fans not as isolated people, but as productive consumers involved in creative and collaborative social practices that are part of a participatory culture. Then Baym (2000) and Hills (2002) conceptualized communicative and productive practices of fans as performance from which emerges
communities and cultures. However, the way fans participate in the construction
of digital social space and collective identities is evolving with the rapid
changing of the technological and media environment. In the evolution of
television participatory culture three different generations can be identified: (i)
the subcultural fandom of the 1980s, (ii) the online fan groups of the 1990s, and
(iii) the networked collectivism of the 2000s.
2.1 Conceptualizing Fan Practices: from Textual Poaching to
Performances of Fan Audiencehood
Textual Poachers by Henry Jenkins (1992) is considered to be the book that
launched fan studies – an academic field that investigates fan practices from an
ethnographic approach and that contributed to the re-conceptualization of media
fans as productive consumers. In Textual Poachers Jenkins describes a
television subculture that emerged around sci-fi TV series. Jenkins defined fans
as textual poachers because they appropriate professionally produced television
text and create derivative works such as fanfiction and fanvids that expand the
narrative universe, often with alternative meanings. Jenkins thus focused on the
fans’ relations with the media text and conceptualized the amateur production as
a form of resistance to the media industry. Studying the online fandom that
emerged in Usenet newsgroups in the early 1990s Jenkins re-conceptualized
fans as textual hackers, leaving behind the oppositional interpretation and
focusing more on the pleasure fans experience in decoding complex series such
as Twin Peaks, which satisfies their need for cognitive control over the text.
Baym (2000) and Hills (2002) conducted deeper investigation of the interpersonal and emotional dimension of online fan practices. Baym conceptualizes fan
groups as audience communities of practice that emerge from informative and
interpretive discursive performances. The characteristics and the atmosphere of
online groups depend on (a) the technical affordances of the medium that fans
use to communicate, (b) the media genre and (c) the characteristics of the
participants. Focusing both on the psychological and the socio-cultural
2
Citation: Vellar, Agnese (2011), “Lost” (and Found) in Transculturation. The Italian Networked Collectivism
of US TV Series and Fansubbing Performances. In Colombo, F., Fortunati, L. (eds.) Broadband Society and
Generational Changes. Oxford: Peter Lang.
dimension, Hills describes online fan practice as self-performance of audienceas-a-text. Online fans are textual performers that compete and collaborate to
acquire (i) cultural capital (skills, knowledge and distinction), (ii) social capital
(a network of friends, acquaintance, and professionals) and (iii) symbolic capital
(fame, accumulated prestige and legitimation of other conjunctions of capitals).
In performing their fan audiencehood they gain pleasure reliving the cathartic
moments previously experienced during the fruition of the original text, and, at
the same time, they create a second order of text that other fans can consume.
Fan studies of online groups describe how a techno-élite of educated people
with a particular interest in mass media contents adopted mediated technologies
as the Usenet newsgroups to discuss, pool perspectives, share knowledge and
collaboratively analyze text. The online social interaction between fans can be
interpreted as performance of fan audiencehood that a public of lurkers can consume and from which collective identities can emerge.
2.2 Productive Consumers in the Networked Publics: a Collectivism
of Amateur Experts
In the 2000s, the internet and television converged in a cross-media platform
where corporations distribute transmedia storytelling intended to involve consumers in a narrative universe (Jenkins, 2006a). At the same time youth and
young adults of the post industrial countries are adopting a new generation of
social media such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and YouTube, known as
Social Network Sites (SNSs) (Boyd & Ellison, 2007). Youth use social media to
keep in contact with friends (hang out), experiment with new form of learning
and self-expression (mess around) and connect with like-minded people in
interest-driven networks (geek out) (Ito, et al., 2009). Young adults use
Facebook1 to keep in contact with old friends and acquaintances and thus
crystallize ephemeral relationships and accumulate social capital (Ellison, et al.,
2007). Television fans publish self-produced and derivative works in content
sharing sites such as YouTube2 or deviantArt3, thus competing with
professionally produced media texts. The quality and the amount of amateur
content raise a debate on the legitimacy of amateur work and, at the same time,
on the possibility to capitalize on it. In fact corporations aim to create brand
communities and stimulate amateur production that promotes the brand itself. At
the same time mass media present audience productivity as a form of piracy
because consumers appropriate copyrighted material to create derivative works.
Fan groups are adopting SNSs thus evolving from site-based communities to
a networked collectivism (Baym, 2007) of amateur experts (Baym & Burnett,
2009). A networked collectivism emerges around one or multiple texts and is
1
http://www.facebook.com/
http://www.youtube.com/
3
http://www.deviantart.com/
2
3
distributed throughout a variety of offline environment and online sites, which
may be amateur blogs, profiles in SNSs or professional web portals. Through
creating amateur content and participating in a networked collectivism fans
promote their media passion. However, they don’t ask for economic reward
because they are satisfied by other kinds of reward which are social
(relationships that can be of use for future career opportunities) and cultural
(discovery of new content). The networked shape of fan groups raises many
issues concerning the coordination, the coherence and the efficiency of the
productive and communicative practice of fans. However, SNSs give fans many
opportunities to share multimedia material and keep in contact with other fans in
a global digital environment. In cross-media platforms transcultural flows of
amateur and professionally produced content are emerging. Consumers thus
have access to popular content produced in different countries and can develop
new forms of cultural competences, which have been defined as pop
cosmopolitanism (Jenkins, 2006b). Contemporary research on television
audiences should thus investigate the risks and the opportunities raised by the
changed relationship between media industries and productive consumers, by
the adoption of SNSs by fans, and by the emergence of a global interactive
environment where audiovisual content flows across nations.
3 Italian Audiences, US TV Series and Networked Publics
Different generations of Italian audience grew up watching foreign products as
US TV series (Grasso, 2007; Scaglioni, 2006). In fact Italian networks broadcast
TV series that US producers sold at low cost to foreign countries (Williams,
1974) because it was cheaper to buy these than produce their own fiction
programs. However, the consumption habits of Italian audiences are
continuously evolving. Young people are no longer satisfied with the way Italian
networks broadcast TV series, both because the dubbed versions that are
broadcast don’t give them the opportunity to appreciate the original dialogues
and because they are broadcast long after they are shown in the US. This
dissatisfaction is particularly true for the members of the generation Post (cohort
1979-1991) who have grown up through their teenage years watching US TV
series and integrated new media in their consumption habits. Aroldi and
Colombo (2003) point out that older Italian generations have different narrative
models and gain pleasure from television consumption by immerging
themselves in a fictional world (fictional model) or by decoding TV texts
(artificial model). The Post generation, on the other hand, stigmatizes the
medium of television and prefers interactive technologies because of their
performative aptitude (simulator model). Thus they thus have used p2p networks
to download digitalized TV episodes uploaded by US fan groups (crew) working
as rippers. In Italy this phenomenon emerged during the mid 2000s as a result of
the growth of broadband and the great involvement of young audiences in
4
Citation: Vellar, Agnese (2011), “Lost” (and Found) in Transculturation. The Italian Networked Collectivism
of US TV Series and Fansubbing Performances. In Colombo, F., Fortunati, L. (eds.) Broadband Society and
Generational Changes. Oxford: Peter Lang.
complex TV series such as Lost. In fact Lost was intentionally designed with a
complex plot and narrative hooks, with the aim of involving internet users in an
intellectual challenge and engaging television consumers in continuative and
repeated viewings (Askwith, 2007). Italian fans can’t wait for national networks
to broadcast dubbed episodes and so they download original episodes as soon as
the US crew share it on p2p networks. Since many Italian fans don’t understand
English well they use amateur subtitles (fansubs or subs) produced by fan
groups such as Subsfactory4 and ItaSA5. These fan groups are hierarchically
organized volunteer communities that produce derivative works such as amateur
subtitles (fansubs) and thus Italianize US fiction and work as mediators for the
Italian audience (Barra, 2009). Fansubbers can be defined as amateur experts
because they are involved in a time-consuming activity and because they are developing professional expertise without earning anything from their work.
Italian professionals started to capitalize on the skills of fansubbers to produce
professional content without always acknowledging their contribution 6. In the
Italian mediascape the relationship between professional and amateur culture is
evolving and should thus be investigated. To better understand the role of the
fansubbing community from the perspective of the fans themselves I conducted
ethnographic research on the Italian participatory culture that emerges around
US TV series. After an explorative research on the Italian networked publics I
studied the ItaSA community with the aim of investigating (i) the role of
amateur activity in the life of the most enterprising fans and (ii) the emergence
of collective identities in Italian networked publics.
3.1 An Ethnographic Study of the Italian “Starring System”
My study focuses on how participatory culture in networked publics can be
understood as a starring system – a network of individual and collective
performances of fan audiencehood. In the starring system fans compete, collaborate and remix cultural material in order to gain visibility and acquire social and
cultural capital. In performing fan audiencehood on networked publics fans
produce a second order of audiovisual text that can be consumed by an invisible
and potentially broad audience. Focusing on the social dimension of fan culture
makes it possible to describe how Italian audiences participate in the
4
http://www.subsfactory.it/
http://www.italiansubs.net/
6
For example MTV Italia co-opted subbers to produce subs for videos shared on the online
site QOOB (http://it.qoob.tv/). ItaSA subbers also work as unpaid television presenters for the
mobile TV program SpoilerTV produced by La3Tv. Furthermore, professional adaptators
have on occasions informally contacted subbers for advice about how to translate dialogues
that contain references to previous episodes that the professionals hadn’t seen. Subbers also
claim that some professionals use their amateur Italian adaptation to create the dubbed version
of episodes which are then brodcast on commercial TV.
5
5
construction of a contemporary media environment and negotiate their role with
the media industry.
To investigate Italian participatory cultures I conducted a 20month
ethnographic study (March 2008 - November 2009) of networked publics
focusing on the linguistic imagined community of Italian speakers and, in
particular, on the community of ItaSA. I combined a multi-sited participant
observation and a computer aided qualitative content analysis of multimedia
texts. Since I conducted the participant observation on the social context where
the members of ItaSA interact, the research field changed with the evolution of
the community. In the first few months I interacted mainly in the forum and on
the online chat platform. Some of the members then started to use also Facebook
and Twitter7, so I extended my participation to include those SNSs too. My data
consists of digital content produced by fans or co-produced with media
professionals – online text conversations, hypermedia online profiles,
audiovisual fanart, magazine and online articles, radio and TV programs.
Because the quantity of data was so great, I used computer-aided qualitative
data analysis software –NVivo – to analyze the material where the members of
ItaSA perform their fan audiencehood. I then conducted biographical interviews
with 12 of the most participative members of the community (6 male and 6
female) to understand the role of their amateur activity in their personal lives.
3.2 Transnational Fansubbing as Performance of Pop
Cosmopolitanism
ItaSA is the biggest Italian fansubbing community – a demanding and timeconsuming fan practice that involves a team of subbers in the production of
Italian subtitles for US TV series. The team is of three to five subbers and an
editor taking the role of coordinator create the final version of the sub, a textual
file which is published on the web portal 8. The ItaSA community was created in
December 2005 by Klonny, a 17-year-old boy who discovered Legendaz, a
fansubbing community producing Portuguese subs for Brazilian audiences,
whilst surfing the web in search of information about his favourite TV series.
Klonny then contacted other fans that he had met on various Italian forums and
set up a team of subbers to produce the subs for Lost, Smallville, Supernatural,
Joey, Charmed, and C.S.I.. At that time their main aim was to release subs as
soon as they could, partly as a challenge to the other Italian fansubbing
community, Subsfactory, so since it is easier and therefore faster for Italian
subbers to translate from Portuguese rather than from English, they worked from
the Portuguese versions created by Legandaz.
Motivated by the challenge to produce subs quickly, they then developed their
7
http://twitter.com/
Subbers only publish textual files containing subtitles on the portal. The portal has no
links or any reference to video files that are shared in p2p networks.
8
6
Citation: Vellar, Agnese (2011), “Lost” (and Found) in Transculturation. The Italian Networked Collectivism
of US TV Series and Fansubbing Performances. In Colombo, F., Fortunati, L. (eds.) Broadband Society and
Generational Changes. Oxford: Peter Lang.
language skills by learning both English and Portuguese and started to
collaborate with fansubbing communities in such countries as France and China.
Thanks to word of mouth, other fans asked to collaborate, partly with the aim of
developing their language skills but also for the gratification from the productive
practice itself. Subbers enjoy creating Italian dialogues because they feel as if
they are closer to their favourite characters and, at the same time, they can
express their creativity by personalizing the original dialogues. The small group
of fans evolved into a hierarchy of 199 9 who have produced the subtitles for 250
TV series, anime and independent movies (7 Admins, 19 Seniors, 16 Publishers,
80 Traduttori10, 68 Traduttrici, and 9 Synchers11). Most of the staff are young
adults, in particular university students from computer science and
communication faculties. Subbers with the role of admins are more
technologically oriented and developed a web portal with a graphical homepage
and Web 2.0 functionality, in this case a recommendation system and a
personalized interface which works like an amateur program schedule that
Italian fans can use to choose content to watch. The portal integrates a wiki with
a collaborative television encyclopaedia, a collective blog where fans publish
news, spoilers and their own reviews. When the fan group evolved into a larger
staff, subbers started to care more about the quality of the subs and to spend time
not just on the translation of the original dialogues but also on the adaptation of
the textual and cultural references that the US TV series contains. Since subbers
are first and foremost fans, they know the characters and the storyline of the
series better that many professional adaptors. However, an episode of a TV
series may also contain numerous references to American culture, e.g. the youth
culture of teen dramas such as Gossip Girl, the geek culture of The Big Bang
Theory or the lesbian culture of The L Word). To adapt terms that come from the
pop US cultures they make use of online collaborative resources, for example
slang dictionaries such as Urban Dictionary12 or wiki encyclopaedia such as
Wikipedia13 or Lostpedia14.
Collaborating as amateurs, the staff members have accumulated linguistic
capital (English and Portuguese comprehension skills), social capital (that of
9
Quantitative data related to the staff are updated to November 2008, three years after the
creation of ItaSA.
10
Traduttori is the Italian for male subber, while Traduttrici is the Italian for female
subber. It is interesting to note both that a gender difference is made clear and that the roles
are defined in Italian. Staff members prefer to use the Italian Traduttori and Traduttrici rather
than the English subbers.
11
A syncher creates different versions of the sub to adapt it to different versions of video
files that circulate on p2p network.
12
http://www.urbandictionary.com/
13
http://www.wikipedia.org/
14
http://lostpedia.wikia.com/
7
friendships with fans from different Italian local communities, online
relationships with other fansubbing communities and acquaintances with
national professionals) and cultural capital (i.e. textual knowledge about plots
and characters of specific TV series, intertextual knowledge about specific
genres and extratextual knowledge about the culture that is depicted in a series).
Subbers’ accumulation of capitals has led to a growth in their popularity within
Italian networked publics: the ItaSA community has grown to total of 155.392 15
users. Subbers are now recognized as experts by fan cultures and by mass
media16. They are thus motivated to spend time producing subtitles not only by
the symbolical capital they gain but also by the gratification of re-enacting the
actors’ performances in their favourite series. The productive practice of
fansubbing could thus be interpreted as a performance of pop cosmopolitanism
that allows fans to relive the cathartic emotion of the viewing and to perform
their cultural competences. Since some subbers have become micro-celebrities
in networked publics they also function as role models thereby stimulating
younger fans to get involved in productive activity. In 2009 at least 30 fans a
week asked to become subbers. To maintain the quality of the subs the staff thus
developed a formal process of selection and tutorship. Fans must first pass a
subbing test, after which they become Traduttori junior, and then after a trial
month of demonstrating their commitment they officially become Traduttori.
Editors monitor the quality of the work of the members of their team, assessing
their ability in English comprehension, Italian writing and the use of editing
softwares such as VisualSubSync which have been adapted to produce subs.
In four years ItaSA evolved from a small group of fans to an online hierarchical organization with a formal education system and an interdisciplinary staff.
At the same time the forum evolved into a Web 2.0 web portal. When the
community became popular the professionalized subbers struggled to reconcile
the amateur ethos that motivated them to participate in a fan community in the
first place with the highly structured organization that ItaSA became. Because of
that some seniors attempted to involve the new subbers in an online social life so
as not to lose human contact during an highly formalized online productive
process. Some subbers, however, left the community because it had lost its
original amateur ethos. In Klonni’s case, four years after he founded ItaSA, he
decided to leave because he was beginning to acquire morals more common in a
multinational, and then founded Stubborn Italian Jackass17, a new fansubbing
portal. This could be interpreted as a step in the evolution of the Italian
15
Quantitative data concerning the community are updated to 1st December 2009, four
years after the creation of ItaSA.
16
ItaSA has been described as an amateur community of experts in the mobile tv program
SpoilerTv (La3Tv), in webradio shows such as Versione Beta and Dispenser (Radio2), in
national magazines such as Wired Italia and in national tv programs such as Sugo (Rai4).
17
http://www.jackassubs.com/
8
Citation: Vellar, Agnese (2011), “Lost” (and Found) in Transculturation. The Italian Networked Collectivism
of US TV Series and Fansubbing Performances. In Colombo, F., Fortunati, L. (eds.) Broadband Society and
Generational Changes. Oxford: Peter Lang.
fansubbing system from a duopoly to an oligopoly. However, we should
remember that the forms of capital exchanged in this marketplace don’t produce
monetary compensation – they lead instead to social relationships and
transcultural flows from which collective identity emerges.
3.3 Constructing Identity in Networked Publics: ItaSA, Itasiani and
their Audiences
ItaSA is an online platform but at the same time it is a social space where two
different collective identities have been constructed: the official and multi-sited
identity of ItaSA and the emergent and networked identity of the Itasiani. The
official identity of ItaSA has been constructed by the staff in the media, in the
web portal and in the official SNSs profiles. In the media they present
themselves as a generational audiencehood stimulating an identification process
in the young Italian audiencehood18. To differentiate themselves both from
digital piracy and from the professional cultures they stress the fact that they
don’t get paid for their work. At the same time they distinguish themselves from
regular fans because of their high involvement in both analytical and productive
activity. Furthermore, they visually present themselves as a professionalized
community. In fact the portal was designed with a Web 2.0 aesthetic with the
aim of looking like a professionally produced site. To reconcile their amateur
ethos and their professional competences they present themselves with
performance of humor (Baym, 1995). For example they define the time that they
spend producing subs as wasted hours and when asked why they work free they
regularly answer «we’ve got a screw loose»19. ItaSA uses also SNSs to publicize
their activity. They created a Facebook group20 and a Twitter account21 to keep
fans updated with the latest released subs and the latest published blog entries.
The ItaSA Facebook group has 10.755 subscribers posting wall to wall
expressing their gratitude for the amateur work of the subbers and also
complaining when they are not fast enough to release the subs.
In the media, in the official SNSs profiles and on the portal the ItaSA staff
perform their official identity in front of an audience of fans that consume their
products. However, the staff also developed social spaces inside the portal with
18
In the pilot of SpoilerTv’s mobile Tv show, ItaSA introduce the show with these words:
«Who among us who grew up during the 80s can say they never watched their favourite tv
series like MacGyver or Hazzard in the morning when skipping school?». The staff creates
threads in the forum to share memories of their first television passions experienced during
the 1990s.
19
These expressions are English translations of the Italian «ore perse» and «ci manca
qualche venerdì». I asked them to translate the sentences for this article since they use them to
present themselves.
20
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=140795750240&ref=ts
21
http://twitter.com/italiansubs
9
the aim of involving users in participatory activities. The portal integrates chat
channels and a forum with 1.493.236 posts and 51.010 threads structured in 32
thematic boards. The forum is moderated by the most participative users, who
take on the official role of Moderator and coordinated by a Senior (a subber with
an organizational role). Informative and interpretive practices are performed in
the forum using both Italian and English. In fact users share English information
(sometimes translating it into Italian) and comment in Italian on TV series but
integrating English words and slang expressions learned while watching TV
series22. Chat channels have been created by subbers to collaborate in real time
for the production of subs. However, users also join them to hang out with other
fans. Since 2008 Facebook has been adopted by a broad Italian population and a
linguistic imagined community has emerged. ItaSA users adopted Facebook to
communicate with fans that they met on the forum. In Facebook fans
communicate in Italian while in Twitter they also use the English language since
Twitter is still not perceived as a national community. The subbers use their
Facebook personal profiles to notify the community when new subs are released,
to share organizational information with other members of the team and also to
comment on the TV series that they are watching. Subbers also create Skype
collective video calls to watch episodes together. Finally subbers organize
official offline meetings at least once a year, while people in particular
geographical areas (such as Milan or Rome) meet each informally other more
often.
From the ongoing interaction between staff members and the users in
different online and offline sites there emerged (i) a sense of belonging that
characterizes the broad collective identity of the Itasiani (as they call
themselves), (ii) interpersonal relationships between the staff members that
evolved into offline local tight-knit groups and in romantic relationships and (iii)
online friendships between users that are maintained through different social
media. The Itasiani are thus a collective identity that emerged in an online forum
and that is now distributed in multiple SNSs and offline environments and that
has a central role in the broader networked collectivism of US TV series.
4 The Pop-Élite and the Transcultural Networked Collectivism
In this paper I’ve described the emergence of a networked collectivism of TV
fans who adapt a cross-media platform and produce flows of derivative contents
that are consumed by a national generational audience. In the networked
collectivism I’ve observed two main different forms of participation: (i) the
adoption of p2p networks and social media by a generational audience to fulfil
22
For example Italian fans integrate the term “XOXO” (hugs and kisses) in their online
conversations because they have picked it up from watching the teen drama Gossip Girl. It
was used by US young people in online and mobile messages and then incorporated into the
Gossip Girl idiolect..
10
Citation: Vellar, Agnese (2011), “Lost” (and Found) in Transculturation. The Italian Networked Collectivism
of US TV Series and Fansubbing Performances. In Colombo, F., Fortunati, L. (eds.) Broadband Society and
Generational Changes. Oxford: Peter Lang.
their entertainment needs and (ii) the collaboration between individual fans and
fan groups who are adapting both digital technologies and professionally produced fictional contents. Italian fans adopt Skype, Twitter, Facebook, chats and
forums to communicate with peers and other fans. Interacting in those environments they hybridize Italian with the English language and with cultural
references to US TV series thereby constructing a symbolic system that works as
a common ground for an Italian generation that doesn’t identify itself with the
previous television generation that emerged around the Italian broadcasting
system. The most enterprising fans spend time selecting, translating and
adapting US TV contents. Collaborating online they construct new social
structures such as translocal friendships, fan groups and hierarchical
organizations such as ItaSA.
The Italian networked collectivism should be interpreted as a transcultural
and generational imagined community. This emerges from a process whereby
cultural forms such as TV series move through space (transculturation),
undergo hybridization by merging with local features e.g. the Italian language so
that the foreign becomes domesticated, or indigenized (Lull, 1995). Italian fans
of USA TV series domesticate foreign content and digital technologies through
the construction of a symbolic and social environment that they perceive as their
own. This is a generational identity characterized by (a) a networked social
structure due to the adoption of SNSs (technological dimension), (b) a pop
cosmopolitanism atmosphere as a result of interest in foreign products and in US
cultures (media dimension) and (c) a performative aptitude that is typical of the
Italian Post generation (characteristic of the participants).
11
Figure 1: Italian collectivism in the networked multimedia (image created by the author)
Participating in the networked collectivism fans acquire (i) linguistic capital
to translate foreign content for the Italian linguistic community, (ii) transcultural
capital (knowledge and skills about foreign products and cultures; distinction
from preceding Italian generations) which they use to create amateur products
that appeal to a pop cosmopolitan generation, (iii) bridging social capital to develop relationships with other Italian and foreign fans and (iv) symbolic capital
acquired from popularity on networked publics and, at the same time, legitimization by the mass media. They could thus be defined as a pop-élite of
amateur experts who are adapting the networked multimedia to fulfil their
personal needs as fans, thus producing an entertaining platform that an Italian
generational audience is adopting (Figure 1). At the same time they work as role
models for younger fans who are thus stimulated to get involved in collaborative
activity.
To further investigate how Italian audiences construct their generational
identities in networked publics we should thus compare the forms of participation from a transmedia and transcultural perspective. In fact, while corporations hybridize media forms to create engaging (and branded) storytelling,
audiences construct their individual and collective identities by using different
languages, participating in multiple sites and domesticating foreign cultures.
However, new language skills, new forms of literacy and new socio-cultural
competences are required to participate in the digital global environment. In this
article I’ve described the emergence of a pop-élite that has also a formative role
12
Citation: Vellar, Agnese (2011), “Lost” (and Found) in Transculturation. The Italian Networked Collectivism
of US TV Series and Fansubbing Performances. In Colombo, F., Fortunati, L. (eds.) Broadband Society and
Generational Changes. Oxford: Peter Lang.
for younger fans. We should thus investigate the educational opportunities that
are emerging in fan groups, with the aim of understanding how the creation of
derivative content could enhance youth media literacy and cultural competences
and whether collaborative project around pop culture texts can be applied in
traditional educational contexts.
5 Bibliography
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of US TV Series and Fansubbing Performances. In Colombo, F., Fortunati, L. (eds.) Broadband Society and
Generational Changes. Oxford: Peter Lang.
“Lost” (and Found) in Transculturation. The Italian Networked Collectivism of
US TV Series and Fansubbing Performances
Agnese Vellar
University of Torino – Italy
agnesevellar@gmail.com
1 Television Audiences in Networked Publics
The internet has evolved since the late 1990s from text-based technology to the
multimedia and visually communication technology of today. During the 1990s,
television fans adopted social media such as Usenet newsgroups to communicate
with like-minded people, thus participating in the construction of audience
community of practice (Baym, 2000). In the 2000s the reach of the extended to a
much broader public and social media such as web forums, blogs and social
network sites became popular among young people. Adopting and adapting
social media, young people are now participating in the construction of
networked publics (Ito, 2008; boyd, 2008) that are both digital social spaces and
imagined communities. These technological and social changes are affecting the
way television fans consume media products, communicate with like-minded
people and participate in the construction of collective identities. In fact, fan
cultures are evolving from site-based communities to a networked collectivism
(Baym, 2007).
To investigate how Italian television audience participate in networked
publics I conducted ethnographic research on the networked collectivism that
emerged around US TV series, using the case of the community of Italian Subs
Addicted (ItaSA). ItaSA is a fan organization that produces amateur subtitles
(fansubs) for US TV series. ItaSA developed a Web 2.0 portal with a web forum
and chat channels where Italian fans can interact. Staff members are young
adults who work in teams to produce subs without expecting monetary reward.
Their products are consumed by a young audience that is not satisfied by Italian
national television which broadcasts a dubbed version of the US TV series long
after the US distribution. The aim of this paper is to describe how members of
the generation Post (Cohort 1979-1991), by adopting and adapting technologies
and media content to fulfil spectatorship needs that are no longer satisfied by
national broadcasters, participate in the construction of a generational imagined
community in the networked publics.
1
2 Generations of Fandom: from Cultural Dupes to Networked
Amateur Experts
Fans are consumers with an intense engagement with a mass media product. For
a long time they have been represented as cultural dopes both by mass media
and by social researchers. This negative view of fans is a result of the moral
dualism which exists between the high-taste and rationality of the intellectual
élite and the perceived low-taste of fans (Jenkins, 1992). The academic view of
fans as deviants changed during the 1990s when Jenkins proposed
conceptualizing fans not as isolated people, but as productive consumers involved in creative and collaborative social practices that are part of a participatory culture. Then Baym (2000) and Hills (2002) conceptualized communicative and productive practices of fans as performance from which emerges
communities and cultures. However, the way fans participate in the construction
of digital social space and collective identities is evolving with the rapid
changing of the technological and media environment. In the evolution of
television participatory culture three different generations can be identified: (i)
the subcultural fandom of the 1980s, (ii) the online fan groups of the 1990s, and
(iii) the networked collectivism of the 2000s.
2.1 Conceptualizing Fan Practices: from Textual Poaching to
Performances of Fan Audiencehood
Textual Poachers by Henry Jenkins (1992) is considered to be the book that
launched fan studies – an academic field that investigates fan practices from an
ethnographic approach and that contributed to the re-conceptualization of media
fans as productive consumers. In Textual Poachers Jenkins describes a
television subculture that emerged around sci-fi TV series. Jenkins defined fans
as textual poachers because they appropriate professionally produced television
text and create derivative works such as fanfiction and fanvids that expand the
narrative universe, often with alternative meanings. Jenkins thus focused on the
fans’ relations with the media text and conceptualized the amateur production as
a form of resistance to the media industry. Studying the online fandom that
emerged in Usenet newsgroups in the early 1990s Jenkins re-conceptualized
fans as textual hackers, leaving behind the oppositional interpretation and
focusing more on the pleasure fans experience in decoding complex series such
as Twin Peaks, which satisfies their need for cognitive control over the text.
Baym (2000) and Hills (2002) conducted deeper investigation of the interpersonal and emotional dimension of online fan practices. Baym conceptualizes fan
groups as audience communities of practice that emerge from informative and
interpretive discursive performances. The characteristics and the atmosphere of
online groups depend on (a) the technical affordances of the medium that fans
use to communicate, (b) the media genre and (c) the characteristics of the
participants. Focusing both on the psychological and the socio-cultural
2
Citation: Vellar, Agnese (2011), “Lost” (and Found) in Transculturation. The Italian Networked Collectivism
of US TV Series and Fansubbing Performances. In Colombo, F., Fortunati, L. (eds.) Broadband Society and
Generational Changes. Oxford: Peter Lang.
dimension, Hills describes online fan practice as self-performance of audienceas-a-text. Online fans are textual performers that compete and collaborate to
acquire (i) cultural capital (skills, knowledge and distinction), (ii) social capital
(a network of friends, acquaintance, and professionals) and (iii) symbolic capital
(fame, accumulated prestige and legitimation of other conjunctions of capitals).
In performing their fan audiencehood they gain pleasure reliving the cathartic
moments previously experienced during the fruition of the original text, and, at
the same time, they create a second order of text that other fans can consume.
Fan studies of online groups describe how a techno-élite of educated people
with a particular interest in mass media contents adopted mediated technologies
as the Usenet newsgroups to discuss, pool perspectives, share knowledge and
collaboratively analyze text. The online social interaction between fans can be
interpreted as performance of fan audiencehood that a public of lurkers can consume and from which collective identities can emerge.
2.2 Productive Consumers in the Networked Publics: a Collectivism
of Amateur Experts
In the 2000s, the internet and television converged in a cross-media platform
where corporations distribute transmedia storytelling intended to involve consumers in a narrative universe (Jenkins, 2006a). At the same time youth and
young adults of the post industrial countries are adopting a new generation of
social media such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and YouTube, known as
Social Network Sites (SNSs) (Boyd & Ellison, 2007). Youth use social media to
keep in contact with friends (hang out), experiment with new form of learning
and self-expression (mess around) and connect with like-minded people in
interest-driven networks (geek out) (Ito, et al., 2009). Young adults use
Facebook1 to keep in contact with old friends and acquaintances and thus
crystallize ephemeral relationships and accumulate social capital (Ellison, et al.,
2007). Television fans publish self-produced and derivative works in content
sharing sites such as YouTube2 or deviantArt3, thus competing with
professionally produced media texts. The quality and the amount of amateur
content raise a debate on the legitimacy of amateur work and, at the same time,
on the possibility to capitalize on it. In fact corporations aim to create brand
communities and stimulate amateur production that promotes the brand itself. At
the same time mass media present audience productivity as a form of piracy
because consumers appropriate copyrighted material to create derivative works.
Fan groups are adopting SNSs thus evolving from site-based communities to
a networked collectivism (Baym, 2007) of amateur experts (Baym & Burnett,
2009). A networked collectivism emerges around one or multiple texts and is
1
http://www.facebook.com/
http://www.youtube.com/
3
http://www.deviantart.com/
2
3
distributed throughout a variety of offline environment and online sites, which
may be amateur blogs, profiles in SNSs or professional web portals. Through
creating amateur content and participating in a networked collectivism fans
promote their media passion. However, they don’t ask for economic reward
because they are satisfied by other kinds of reward which are social
(relationships that can be of use for future career opportunities) and cultural
(discovery of new content). The networked shape of fan groups raises many
issues concerning the coordination, the coherence and the efficiency of the
productive and communicative practice of fans. However, SNSs give fans many
opportunities to share multimedia material and keep in contact with other fans in
a global digital environment. In cross-media platforms transcultural flows of
amateur and professionally produced content are emerging. Consumers thus
have access to popular content produced in different countries and can develop
new forms of cultural competences, which have been defined as pop
cosmopolitanism (Jenkins, 2006b). Contemporary research on television
audiences should thus investigate the risks and the opportunities raised by the
changed relationship between media industries and productive consumers, by
the adoption of SNSs by fans, and by the emergence of a global interactive
environment where audiovisual content flows across nations.
3 Italian Audiences, US TV Series and Networked Publics
Different generations of Italian audience grew up watching foreign products as
US TV series (Grasso, 2007; Scaglioni, 2006). In fact Italian networks broadcast
TV series that US producers sold at low cost to foreign countries (Williams,
1974) because it was cheaper to buy these than produce their own fiction
programs. However, the consumption habits of Italian audiences are
continuously evolving. Young people are no longer satisfied with the way Italian
networks broadcast TV series, both because the dubbed versions that are
broadcast don’t give them the opportunity to appreciate the original dialogues
and because they are broadcast long after they are shown in the US. This
dissatisfaction is particularly true for the members of the generation Post (cohort
1979-1991) who have grown up through their teenage years watching US TV
series and integrated new media in their consumption habits. Aroldi and
Colombo (2003) point out that older Italian generations have different narrative
models and gain pleasure from television consumption by immerging
themselves in a fictional world (fictional model) or by decoding TV texts
(artificial model). The Post generation, on the other hand, stigmatizes the
medium of television and prefers interactive technologies because of their
performative aptitude (simulator model). Thus they thus have used p2p networks
to download digitalized TV episodes uploaded by US fan groups (crew) working
as rippers. In Italy this phenomenon emerged during the mid 2000s as a result of
the growth of broadband and the great involvement of young audiences in
4
Citation: Vellar, Agnese (2011), “Lost” (and Found) in Transculturation. The Italian Networked Collectivism
of US TV Series and Fansubbing Performances. In Colombo, F., Fortunati, L. (eds.) Broadband Society and
Generational Changes. Oxford: Peter Lang.
complex TV series such as Lost. In fact Lost was intentionally designed with a
complex plot and narrative hooks, with the aim of involving internet users in an
intellectual challenge and engaging television consumers in continuative and
repeated viewings (Askwith, 2007). Italian fans can’t wait for national networks
to broadcast dubbed episodes and so they download original episodes as soon as
the US crew share it on p2p networks. Since many Italian fans don’t understand
English well they use amateur subtitles (fansubs or subs) produced by fan
groups such as Subsfactory4 and ItaSA5. These fan groups are hierarchically
organized volunteer communities that produce derivative works such as amateur
subtitles (fansubs) and thus Italianize US fiction and work as mediators for the
Italian audience (Barra, 2009). Fansubbers can be defined as amateur experts
because they are involved in a time-consuming activity and because they are developing professional expertise without earning anything from their work.
Italian professionals started to capitalize on the skills of fansubbers to produce
professional content without always acknowledging their contribution 6. In the
Italian mediascape the relationship between professional and amateur culture is
evolving and should thus be investigated. To better understand the role of the
fansubbing community from the perspective of the fans themselves I conducted
ethnographic research on the Italian participatory culture that emerges around
US TV series. After an explorative research on the Italian networked publics I
studied the ItaSA community with the aim of investigating (i) the role of
amateur activity in the life of the most enterprising fans and (ii) the emergence
of collective identities in Italian networked publics.
3.1 An Ethnographic Study of the Italian “Starring System”
My study focuses on how participatory culture in networked publics can be
understood as a starring system – a network of individual and collective
performances of fan audiencehood. In the starring system fans compete, collaborate and remix cultural material in order to gain visibility and acquire social and
cultural capital. In performing fan audiencehood on networked publics fans
produce a second order of audiovisual text that can be consumed by an invisible
and potentially broad audience. Focusing on the social dimension of fan culture
makes it possible to describe how Italian audiences participate in the
4
http://www.subsfactory.it/
http://www.italiansubs.net/
6
For example MTV Italia co-opted subbers to produce subs for videos shared on the online
site QOOB (http://it.qoob.tv/). ItaSA subbers also work as unpaid television presenters for the
mobile TV program SpoilerTV produced by La3Tv. Furthermore, professional adaptators
have on occasions informally contacted subbers for advice about how to translate dialogues
that contain references to previous episodes that the professionals hadn’t seen. Subbers also
claim that some professionals use their amateur Italian adaptation to create the dubbed version
of episodes which are then brodcast on commercial TV.
5
5
construction of a contemporary media environment and negotiate their role with
the media industry.
To investigate Italian participatory cultures I conducted a 20month
ethnographic study (March 2008 - November 2009) of networked publics
focusing on the linguistic imagined community of Italian speakers and, in
particular, on the community of ItaSA. I combined a multi-sited participant
observation and a computer aided qualitative content analysis of multimedia
texts. Since I conducted the participant observation on the social context where
the members of ItaSA interact, the research field changed with the evolution of
the community. In the first few months I interacted mainly in the forum and on
the online chat platform. Some of the members then started to use also Facebook
and Twitter7, so I extended my participation to include those SNSs too. My data
consists of digital content produced by fans or co-produced with media
professionals – online text conversations, hypermedia online profiles,
audiovisual fanart, magazine and online articles, radio and TV programs.
Because the quantity of data was so great, I used computer-aided qualitative
data analysis software –NVivo – to analyze the material where the members of
ItaSA perform their fan audiencehood. I then conducted biographical interviews
with 12 of the most participative members of the community (6 male and 6
female) to understand the role of their amateur activity in their personal lives.
3.2 Transnational Fansubbing as Performance of Pop
Cosmopolitanism
ItaSA is the biggest Italian fansubbing community – a demanding and timeconsuming fan practice that involves a team of subbers in the production of
Italian subtitles for US TV series. The team is of three to five subbers and an
editor taking the role of coordinator create the final version of the sub, a textual
file which is published on the web portal 8. The ItaSA community was created in
December 2005 by Klonny, a 17-year-old boy who discovered Legendaz, a
fansubbing community producing Portuguese subs for Brazilian audiences,
whilst surfing the web in search of information about his favourite TV series.
Klonny then contacted other fans that he had met on various Italian forums and
set up a team of subbers to produce the subs for Lost, Smallville, Supernatural,
Joey, Charmed, and C.S.I.. At that time their main aim was to release subs as
soon as they could, partly as a challenge to the other Italian fansubbing
community, Subsfactory, so since it is easier and therefore faster for Italian
subbers to translate from Portuguese rather than from English, they worked from
the Portuguese versions created by Legandaz.
Motivated by the challenge to produce subs quickly, they then developed their
7
http://twitter.com/
Subbers only publish textual files containing subtitles on the portal. The portal has no
links or any reference to video files that are shared in p2p networks.
8
6
Citation: Vellar, Agnese (2011), “Lost” (and Found) in Transculturation. The Italian Networked Collectivism
of US TV Series and Fansubbing Performances. In Colombo, F., Fortunati, L. (eds.) Broadband Society and
Generational Changes. Oxford: Peter Lang.
language skills by learning both English and Portuguese and started to
collaborate with fansubbing communities in such countries as France and China.
Thanks to word of mouth, other fans asked to collaborate, partly with the aim of
developing their language skills but also for the gratification from the productive
practice itself. Subbers enjoy creating Italian dialogues because they feel as if
they are closer to their favourite characters and, at the same time, they can
express their creativity by personalizing the original dialogues. The small group
of fans evolved into a hierarchy of 199 9 who have produced the subtitles for 250
TV series, anime and independent movies (7 Admins, 19 Seniors, 16 Publishers,
80 Traduttori10, 68 Traduttrici, and 9 Synchers11). Most of the staff are young
adults, in particular university students from computer science and
communication faculties. Subbers with the role of admins are more
technologically oriented and developed a web portal with a graphical homepage
and Web 2.0 functionality, in this case a recommendation system and a
personalized interface which works like an amateur program schedule that
Italian fans can use to choose content to watch. The portal integrates a wiki with
a collaborative television encyclopaedia, a collective blog where fans publish
news, spoilers and their own reviews. When the fan group evolved into a larger
staff, subbers started to care more about the quality of the subs and to spend time
not just on the translation of the original dialogues but also on the adaptation of
the textual and cultural references that the US TV series contains. Since subbers
are first and foremost fans, they know the characters and the storyline of the
series better that many professional adaptors. However, an episode of a TV
series may also contain numerous references to American culture, e.g. the youth
culture of teen dramas such as Gossip Girl, the geek culture of The Big Bang
Theory or the lesbian culture of The L Word). To adapt terms that come from the
pop US cultures they make use of online collaborative resources, for example
slang dictionaries such as Urban Dictionary12 or wiki encyclopaedia such as
Wikipedia13 or Lostpedia14.
Collaborating as amateurs, the staff members have accumulated linguistic
capital (English and Portuguese comprehension skills), social capital (that of
9
Quantitative data related to the staff are updated to November 2008, three years after the
creation of ItaSA.
10
Traduttori is the Italian for male subber, while Traduttrici is the Italian for female
subber. It is interesting to note both that a gender difference is made clear and that the roles
are defined in Italian. Staff members prefer to use the Italian Traduttori and Traduttrici rather
than the English subbers.
11
A syncher creates different versions of the sub to adapt it to different versions of video
files that circulate on p2p network.
12
http://www.urbandictionary.com/
13
http://www.wikipedia.org/
14
http://lostpedia.wikia.com/
7
friendships with fans from different Italian local communities, online
relationships with other fansubbing communities and acquaintances with
national professionals) and cultural capital (i.e. textual knowledge about plots
and characters of specific TV series, intertextual knowledge about specific
genres and extratextual knowledge about the culture that is depicted in a series).
Subbers’ accumulation of capitals has led to a growth in their popularity within
Italian networked publics: the ItaSA community has grown to total of 155.392 15
users. Subbers are now recognized as experts by fan cultures and by mass
media16. They are thus motivated to spend time producing subtitles not only by
the symbolical capital they gain but also by the gratification of re-enacting the
actors’ performances in their favourite series. The productive practice of
fansubbing could thus be interpreted as a performance of pop cosmopolitanism
that allows fans to relive the cathartic emotion of the viewing and to perform
their cultural competences. Since some subbers have become micro-celebrities
in networked publics they also function as role models thereby stimulating
younger fans to get involved in productive activity. In 2009 at least 30 fans a
week asked to become subbers. To maintain the quality of the subs the staff thus
developed a formal process of selection and tutorship. Fans must first pass a
subbing test, after which they become Traduttori junior, and then after a trial
month of demonstrating their commitment they officially become Traduttori.
Editors monitor the quality of the work of the members of their team, assessing
their ability in English comprehension, Italian writing and the use of editing
softwares such as VisualSubSync which have been adapted to produce subs.
In four years ItaSA evolved from a small group of fans to an online hierarchical organization with a formal education system and an interdisciplinary staff.
At the same time the forum evolved into a Web 2.0 web portal. When the
community became popular the professionalized subbers struggled to reconcile
the amateur ethos that motivated them to participate in a fan community in the
first place with the highly structured organization that ItaSA became. Because of
that some seniors attempted to involve the new subbers in an online social life so
as not to lose human contact during an highly formalized online productive
process. Some subbers, however, left the community because it had lost its
original amateur ethos. In Klonni’s case, four years after he founded ItaSA, he
decided to leave because he was beginning to acquire morals more common in a
multinational, and then founded Stubborn Italian Jackass17, a new fansubbing
portal. This could be interpreted as a step in the evolution of the Italian
15
Quantitative data concerning the community are updated to 1st December 2009, four
years after the creation of ItaSA.
16
ItaSA has been described as an amateur community of experts in the mobile tv program
SpoilerTv (La3Tv), in webradio shows such as Versione Beta and Dispenser (Radio2), in
national magazines such as Wired Italia and in national tv programs such as Sugo (Rai4).
17
http://www.jackassubs.com/
8
Citation: Vellar, Agnese (2011), “Lost” (and Found) in Transculturation. The Italian Networked Collectivism
of US TV Series and Fansubbing Performances. In Colombo, F., Fortunati, L. (eds.) Broadband Society and
Generational Changes. Oxford: Peter Lang.
fansubbing system from a duopoly to an oligopoly. However, we should
remember that the forms of capital exchanged in this marketplace don’t produce
monetary compensation – they lead instead to social relationships and
transcultural flows from which collective identity emerges.
3.3 Constructing Identity in Networked Publics: ItaSA, Itasiani and
their Audiences
ItaSA is an online platform but at the same time it is a social space where two
different collective identities have been constructed: the official and multi-sited
identity of ItaSA and the emergent and networked identity of the Itasiani. The
official identity of ItaSA has been constructed by the staff in the media, in the
web portal and in the official SNSs profiles. In the media they present
themselves as a generational audiencehood stimulating an identification process
in the young Italian audiencehood18. To differentiate themselves both from
digital piracy and from the professional cultures they stress the fact that they
don’t get paid for their work. At the same time they distinguish themselves from
regular fans because of their high involvement in both analytical and productive
activity. Furthermore, they visually present themselves as a professionalized
community. In fact the portal was designed with a Web 2.0 aesthetic with the
aim of looking like a professionally produced site. To reconcile their amateur
ethos and their professional competences they present themselves with
performance of humor (Baym, 1995). For example they define the time that they
spend producing subs as wasted hours and when asked why they work free they
regularly answer «we’ve got a screw loose»19. ItaSA uses also SNSs to publicize
their activity. They created a Facebook group20 and a Twitter account21 to keep
fans updated with the latest released subs and the latest published blog entries.
The ItaSA Facebook group has 10.755 subscribers posting wall to wall
expressing their gratitude for the amateur work of the subbers and also
complaining when they are not fast enough to release the subs.
In the media, in the official SNSs profiles and on the portal the ItaSA staff
perform their official identity in front of an audience of fans that consume their
products. However, the staff also developed social spaces inside the portal with
18
In the pilot of SpoilerTv’s mobile Tv show, ItaSA introduce the show with these words:
«Who among us who grew up during the 80s can say they never watched their favourite tv
series like MacGyver or Hazzard in the morning when skipping school?». The staff creates
threads in the forum to share memories of their first television passions experienced during
the 1990s.
19
These expressions are English translations of the Italian «ore perse» and «ci manca
qualche venerdì». I asked them to translate the sentences for this article since they use them to
present themselves.
20
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=140795750240&ref=ts
21
http://twitter.com/italiansubs
9
the aim of involving users in participatory activities. The portal integrates chat
channels and a forum with 1.493.236 posts and 51.010 threads structured in 32
thematic boards. The forum is moderated by the most participative users, who
take on the official role of Moderator and coordinated by a Senior (a subber with
an organizational role). Informative and interpretive practices are performed in
the forum using both Italian and English. In fact users share English information
(sometimes translating it into Italian) and comment in Italian on TV series but
integrating English words and slang expressions learned while watching TV
series22. Chat channels have been created by subbers to collaborate in real time
for the production of subs. However, users also join them to hang out with other
fans. Since 2008 Facebook has been adopted by a broad Italian population and a
linguistic imagined community has emerged. ItaSA users adopted Facebook to
communicate with fans that they met on the forum. In Facebook fans
communicate in Italian while in Twitter they also use the English language since
Twitter is still not perceived as a national community. The subbers use their
Facebook personal profiles to notify the community when new subs are released,
to share organizational information with other members of the team and also to
comment on the TV series that they are watching. Subbers also create Skype
collective video calls to watch episodes together. Finally subbers organize
official offline meetings at least once a year, while people in particular
geographical areas (such as Milan or Rome) meet each informally other more
often.
From the ongoing interaction between staff members and the users in
different online and offline sites there emerged (i) a sense of belonging that
characterizes the broad collective identity of the Itasiani (as they call
themselves), (ii) interpersonal relationships between the staff members that
evolved into offline local tight-knit groups and in romantic relationships and (iii)
online friendships between users that are maintained through different social
media. The Itasiani are thus a collective identity that emerged in an online forum
and that is now distributed in multiple SNSs and offline environments and that
has a central role in the broader networked collectivism of US TV series.
4 The Pop-Élite and the Transcultural Networked Collectivism
In this paper I’ve described the emergence of a networked collectivism of TV
fans who adapt a cross-media platform and produce flows of derivative contents
that are consumed by a national generational audience. In the networked
collectivism I’ve observed two main different forms of participation: (i) the
adoption of p2p networks and social media by a generational audience to fulfil
22
For example Italian fans integrate the term “XOXO” (hugs and kisses) in their online
conversations because they have picked it up from watching the teen drama Gossip Girl. It
was used by US young people in online and mobile messages and then incorporated into the
Gossip Girl idiolect..
10
Citation: Vellar, Agnese (2011), “Lost” (and Found) in Transculturation. The Italian Networked Collectivism
of US TV Series and Fansubbing Performances. In Colombo, F., Fortunati, L. (eds.) Broadband Society and
Generational Changes. Oxford: Peter Lang.
their entertainment needs and (ii) the collaboration between individual fans and
fan groups who are adapting both digital technologies and professionally produced fictional contents. Italian fans adopt Skype, Twitter, Facebook, chats and
forums to communicate with peers and other fans. Interacting in those environments they hybridize Italian with the English language and with cultural
references to US TV series thereby constructing a symbolic system that works as
a common ground for an Italian generation that doesn’t identify itself with the
previous television generation that emerged around the Italian broadcasting
system. The most enterprising fans spend time selecting, translating and
adapting US TV contents. Collaborating online they construct new social
structures such as translocal friendships, fan groups and hierarchical
organizations such as ItaSA.
The Italian networked collectivism should be interpreted as a transcultural
and generational imagined community. This emerges from a process whereby
cultural forms such as TV series move through space (transculturation),
undergo hybridization by merging with local features e.g. the Italian language so
that the foreign becomes domesticated, or indigenized (Lull, 1995). Italian fans
of USA TV series domesticate foreign content and digital technologies through
the construction of a symbolic and social environment that they perceive as their
own. This is a generational identity characterized by (a) a networked social
structure due to the adoption of SNSs (technological dimension), (b) a pop
cosmopolitanism atmosphere as a result of interest in foreign products and in US
cultures (media dimension) and (c) a performative aptitude that is typical of the
Italian Post generation (characteristic of the participants).
11
Figure 1: Italian collectivism in the networked multimedia (image created by the author)
Participating in the networked collectivism fans acquire (i) linguistic capital
to translate foreign content for the Italian linguistic community, (ii) transcultural
capital (knowledge and skills about foreign products and cultures; distinction
from preceding Italian generations) which they use to create amateur products
that appeal to a pop cosmopolitan generation, (iii) bridging social capital to develop relationships with other Italian and foreign fans and (iv) symbolic capital
acquired from popularity on networked publics and, at the same time, legitimization by the mass media. They could thus be defined as a pop-élite of
amateur experts who are adapting the networked multimedia to fulfil their
personal needs as fans, thus producing an entertaining platform that an Italian
generational audience is adopting (Figure 1). At the same time they work as role
models for younger fans who are thus stimulated to get involved in collaborative
activity.
To further investigate how Italian audiences construct their generational
identities in networked publics we should thus compare the forms of participation from a transmedia and transcultural perspective. In fact, while corporations hybridize media forms to create engaging (and branded) storytelling,
audiences construct their individual and collective identities by using different
languages, participating in multiple sites and domesticating foreign cultures.
However, new language skills, new forms of literacy and new socio-cultural
competences are required to participate in the digital global environment. In this
article I’ve described the emergence of a pop-élite that has also a formative role
12
Citation: Vellar, Agnese (2011), “Lost” (and Found) in Transculturation. The Italian Networked Collectivism
of US TV Series and Fansubbing Performances. In Colombo, F., Fortunati, L. (eds.) Broadband Society and
Generational Changes. Oxford: Peter Lang.
for younger fans. We should thus investigate the educational opportunities that
are emerging in fan groups, with the aim of understanding how the creation of
derivative content could enhance youth media literacy and cultural competences
and whether collaborative project around pop culture texts can be applied in
traditional educational contexts.
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