The idea is to build an essay over time. There will be overlap between parts, but the idea is to develop the crux of a more formal essay for submission to a conference or journal. I know, I know: lame!! But this is what I like.

I think we can call 'narrative' a set of rules or shared assumptions for structuring desire - that is, for focusing interest on certain things that aren't intrinsically interesting, e.g. whether Anna and Vronsky end up together, who or what exactly Eusa is, whether the buggers win or lose the war, how Grendel feels about his inevitable death, or what Dave and Toph do at the beach. The reader signs an implicit contract: I will accept your assertion, Author, that this stuff matters. You will work within this frame to make this stuff compelling. I will get something out of my investment. (But like any investor's contract, there's the risk of low return. So what does each novel affirm? What does it assert?)

Television works no differently. We get 'swept up' in a story at least in part because we want to - we are drawn to spectacle, to be sure, and we have built-in sympathies (or tendencies toward sympathy) for certain figures/situations (I can't bear to see fathers crying for their children, for instance). When you walk by an episode of Friends and are 'compelled' to sit down - it's 'Must See TV', right? - you're being pulled in half by a biological response to attractive people, and half (I imagine) by your wish to see people who blend beauty, wit, success, and unbelievable luck. Passing by Seinfeld as you flip channels, you are drawn to the experience of people doing and saying the most astonishing things and getting away with them.

But that's not why you stay with these programs. You stay because of the Contract - you trust that the narrative will satisfy the expectations set up within it. You arrived in the first place because of expectations that you brought with you. The process by which you become a Reader (which from now on I'll use as the generic term for 'interactor with a media text') is one of acculturation.

Lemme assert something that I'll come back to in a little while: at the heart of a contemporary TV narrative (we might say: 'genre TV' or 'cult TV') is a basic (linear) story into and out of which the plot moves. One of the key elements of serial TV narrative, one of its most uniquely satisfying qualities, is the tension that comes from a blurry line between the ongoing evolution of the characters (the 'organic' story of their lives) and the forward-motoring of the plot itself (what happens to them). With a novel, you can generally assume that you're always in the plot. Same with a movie. (Even in Gravity's Rainbow and Ulysses, the 'stories' such as they are are never really left behind. The saga of Byron the Bulb mirrors Slothrop's own state, enmeshed in the conspiracy, suspended between force and Counterforce...) Television moves on entirely different timescales, at the same time.

Fan culture can provide those alternate timescales. Because fan culture puts texts and culture into an explicit dialogue, essentially serializing a field of discourse. We might say the same thing for academics - who insist on placing themselves in one or another 'school', in order to give continuity to the start/stop progress of human ideation. (It's frightening to think that human history was totally unpredictable, that human thought is the same way. Maybe we built the universities for precisely that reason?)

This is the last bit for now: contemporary culture is becoming more 'fannish'. More and more, kids are able to involve themselves in 'fannish' ways with all manner of media texts.

A narrative like the Matrix series exemplifies this shift: when you talk about the movies, you find yourself talking about possibilities for their world, the meaning of their characters. The basic modes of watching the Matrix movies are seeking-spectacle fodder-for-exegesis. The former is the way we traditionally think of American moviegoers. The latter is how fans work. The balance is shifting.