Hypermodal practices of Glee fans on Tumblr: Diverting is believing

Abstract

In response to the process referred to as media convergence, this article presents the fans of the Glee TV series (which runs on Brazilian TV Fox Channel since 2009) as produsers, that is, as digital culture subjects whose discursive practices challenge the traditional division between the roles of media producer and media consumer (or user). The practices that were addressed in this work feature an intensive exploitation of hypermodality, conceived as a productive conflation of multimodality, multimidiality and hypertextuality supported by digital information and communication technologies. The corpus comprises the trajectories of textual productions posted on Tumblr by two Glee fans between December 2011 and February 2012. We mapped out the semiotic process that resulted in the referred posts starting from the pertinent scenes originally broadcasted on TV and analyzed them using principles and methods from Social Semiotics and insights from Actor Network-Theory appropriated by social semioticians through the concept of re-semiotization. The findings show that, on manipulating elements brought from the original episodes, not only did the subjects construct orientational, presentational and organizational changes that biased meanings implied in the narrative, but, through the reflection about their own practices, they also sustained representations of a collective identity that distinguishes them from “ordinary” viewers and motivates them to confront “official” media contents through an investigative attitude. We conclude by discussing the possibility of exploiting fan practices in order to foster critical literacies in formal education.

Keywords: media convergence, re-semiotization, critical literacies.