Henry Jenkins and Robert Kozinets recently released the third book in their Frames of Fandom book series, Fandom as Consumer Collective and the fourth book, Fandom as Subculture, will be published before the end of 2025. Altogether, fifteen volumes have been planned in this series and are at various stages. The books are being self-published and print-on-demand on Amazon. This post provides an excerpt from the third book, which examines how consumer collectives overlap with, include, and also transcend subcultures and audiences to form a new type of social grouping, simultaneously engaged with and critical of consumer culture.
Henry Jenkins and Robert Kozinets recently released the third book in their Frames of Fandom book series, Fandom as Consumer Collective and the fourth book, Fandom as Subculture, will be published before the end of 2025. Altogether, fifteen volumes have been planned in this series and are at various stages. The books are being self-published and print-on-demand on Amazon. This post provides an excerpt from the third book, which examines how consumer collectives overlap with, include, and also transcend subcultures and audiences to form a new type of social grouping, simultaneously engaged with and critical of consumer culture.
BUY FRAMES OF FANDOM
About Fandom as Consumer Collective
Consumer collectives overlap with, include, and also transcend subcultures and audiences to form a new type of social grouping, simultaneously engaged with and critical of consumer culture. The book explores this tension—between individual consumer and social collective, participation and resistance, community and market, consumer and producer—unpacking how consumer collectives challenge existing commercial norms while also embracing the cultural opportunities they offer. It demonstrates a bridging of unhelpful disciplinary divides and calls for an enhanced appreciation of the creative, critical, and transformative potential of consumer collectives. Furthermore, it builds and then demonstrates an integrated conceptual toolkit for better understanding a world where passionate consumers participate in collectives that provide them with a deep sense of fulfillment. For scholars, practitioners, and fans alike, this book explores fandom as a critical engine of cultural production, a source of creative collective effervescence, and a force for cultural expression in an increasingly fragmented world.
This selection uses three publications targeted at Star Trek fans (and others) to illustrate the different ways fan works might relate to consumer culture.
Chapter 9: Canaries in the Gemeinschaft
All About Star Trek Fan Clubs
Figure 9.1: All about Star Trek Fan clubs magazine cover, circa 1977
We begin with an example from Rob’s personal collection of memorabilia (Henry has a copy of it as well!). It is a magazine called All About Star Trek Fan Clubs, whose cover is pictured, and a sample table of contents is provided. We chose it because it exemplifies an intriguing and important aspect of consumer collectives, including fandom: the ability of these collectives to combine both economic value, as indicated both by the price tag on the magazine’s cover and the fact that Rob bought it in his neighborhood convenience store, and the cultural values it possessed that derive from its interaction within a communal or gift economy.
The theory underlying this understanding goes back to Tönnies’ influential book, which postulated a core division in social groups. The first form, Gemeinschaft, translates to community in English and has many of the same positive connotations. In Kozinets (2002, p. 21), Rob explained the communal ideal as “a group of people living in close proximity with mutual social relations characterized by caring and sharing,” placing its origins within “the deep trust and interdependence of family relations,” and linking it to Robert Putnam’s (2000) theory of dwindling social capital and the need for a renewed gemeinschaft-like sense of belonging, civic engagement, and social contribution.
Figure 9.2: All about Star Trek Fan clubs magazine cover, circa 1976
The second type of social group, Gesellschaft, is the dark sister in this theoretical story. The English word society only roughly captures the connotations of Gesellschaft. Gesellschaft describes a relational situation opposite to that of familiar or familial relations. Where families are informal and help one another, societies are formal, contractual, and transactional. When people interact in a large marketplace, they are interacting with the roles and rules—the social logics—of a Gesellschaft: keeping a distance, getting the best deal, and making a profit. Gemeinschaft communities prioritize caring for and sharing with those within the group, whereas Gesellschaft markets emphasize transactions with outsiders where each player is trying to get a better deal at the other’s expense. Both settings are characterized by their own power dynamics. However, the divergence in social logics appears to account for the historical spatial and temporal confinement of markets to specific locales, occasions, and roles. People and institutions have sought to maintain a clear separation between the more ruthless and exploitative social logics of the Gesellschaft market and communal social institutions like home and family.
With the advent of industrialization and later, postindustrialization, market influences have increasingly permeated aspects of life traditionally dedicated to communal relationships. Times, spaces, and roles once exclusive to community-oriented interactions now often accommodate market-driven activities. Theorists like Biggart (1989), Frenzen and Davis (1990), and Granovetter (1985) have argued that markets and communities—Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft—are now interdependent and even embedded within one another. This encroachment of market logic into communal spheres has led to criticism that the foundational communal values of caring and sharing are being eroded, as market-oriented self-interest reshapes the nature and quality of communal relations, making the actualization of the caring and sharing communal ideal in modern societies ever more challenging.
Communities and Markets: Contrasting yet Interconnected
A substantial body of research on consumer collectives and fandoms has explored these interconnections. In Jenkins (1992), Henry observes that many media fan communities establish nonprofit trade relationships to create a sense of shared communal experience. In Kozinets (2001), Rob suggested that Star Trek fans' distinction between the commercial and the sacred reflects a broader cultural tension between consumer communities and markets. Henry and Rob, along with others too numerous to mention, tended to hold the fort, noting the differences and tensions between these two pervasive and historically important forms of social logic.
Conversely, another strand of research suggested that the relationships between communities and markets might be less problematic than they seemed. Studies on various communities, including river rafters (Arnould and Price 1993), Harley-Davidson subcultures (Schouten and McAlexander 1995), and Macintosh, Saab, and Bronco brand communities (Muñiz and O’Guinn 2001), show little tension between consumer communities and markets. As we noted above, Schouten and McAlexander suggest that marketers and subcultural communities could pursue a symbiotic relationship, implying benefits to both of them. Perhaps even more strongly, Muñiz and O’Guinn (2001) suggested that brands and communities had merged, a transformation they cast as generally positive.
A Commercial Artifact in a Communal World
Now, let’s start to think about what went into the “All About Star Trek Fan Clubs” magazine and what else it tells us about how market and communal logics work. We can see how the magazine, despite being a widely distributed commercial product that was sold for profit, is deeply intertwined with the nonprofit, gift economy-driven elements of the Star Trek fan community. That interrelationship demonstrates some of the complexities inherent in many consumer collectives, which are hybrids where market and communal forces coexist and influence each other.
First, it is crucial to position this magazine in relation to the broader theoretical frameworks we have established. Star Trek fandom is a quintessential culture of consumption, as we have defined it—a vast, interconnected system of commercially produced images (the starship Enterprise, Spock's ears), texts (the episodes, films, and novels), and objects (phasers, uniforms, and model kits). This magazine, as a piece of merchandise, is undeniably one of those objects, produced by a media company whose goal is to profit from mass culture. By its very nature, popular culture depends on mass culture, and thus fandom is interrelated in its very DNA with the market logics of contemporary corporate capitalism.
However, the magazine occupies a fascinating, paradoxical space. Like fan fiction, its content and the core of its appeal are heavily reliant on the gift economy that fuels the fan community. It makes the legitimating claim that it is “made by fans for fans” (and there is no reason to doubt it, either). Although the eye-catching cover illustration features the trinity of Classic Trek characters and the iconic U.S.S. Enterprise, the magazine is not dedicated to Star Trek, per se. It is dedicated to Star Trek fan clubs—although, strangely, fans never graced any of the covers of its six-issue run. The Fanlore wiki describes its content as “a fusion of professional boosterism of Star Trek and its actors, and of fandom boosterism” (Fanlore, 2024). In this fusion, the magazine acts as a node, a physical artifact that channels the global flows that Arjun Appadurai (1990) describes. It circulates ideas about fan identity (the ideoscape), showcases fan art and stories (the mediascape), and provides the organizational know-how for fan-run conventions (the technoscape), all while being part of a commercial flow (the financescape).
From Individual Fanship to Collective Structure
The magazine’s content reveals its role as a bridge, designed to guide what we might call the "fandom-curious" from individual engagement into deeper, more structured forms of collective life. In 1977, before the mass availability of the Internet, a fan's experience could be isolating. The magazine's articles serve as a direct intervention in the size and intimacy dynamics of the collective. The first major story mentioned on the cover, "how to run a convention,” serves as a type of blueprint for transforming an unstructured gathering into a highly structured, self-governing event. It provides the tools for fans to scale up their activities from small, intimate groups into larger, more organized forms.
The second cover story, about a fan club dedicated to Leonard Nimoy, illustrates another key function: making specific fan collectives visible and accessible. By featuring this club and a fan painting of Mr. Spock, the magazine takes an unofficial, grassroots entity and grants it a form of official legitimacy by placing it within a professionally produced, commercial text. It serves as an advertisement for a specific subgroup within the larger fandom, offering a pathway for an individual fan to increase the intimacy of their involvement by joining a dedicated group. This process of highlighting and legitimizing unofficial fan activity is a primary way that the commercial marketplace identifies and engages with the energy of its most passionate consumers.
Figure 9.3: Star Trek Official Fan Club magazine cover
The final cover story, offering reviews of three "great sci-fi films," is particularly revealing. It acknowledges that fans are often "omnivorous" in their tastes and do not exist within a single, hermetically sealed culture of consumption. As we and numerous others have found, many Star Trek fans are not exclusively loyal to the show. This article functions to deliberately broaden the boundaries of the Star Trek culture of consumption, linking it to the wider universe of science fiction fandom, emphasizing the intersection of different cultural consumption circles, as we depict in Figure 7.1. The article on sci-fi films acts as another type of bridge—encouraging fans to explore the adjacent territories and demonstrating the fluid, overlapping nature of these cultural worlds.
Upon examining the table of contents, the mission to shape fan identity becomes even more evident. The lead story, “Who is the Trekker today?,” is an explicit act of identity construction. By using and validating the (then-preferred) term “Trekker,” the magazine tells its readers, ‘Look, others might call you a Trekkie, but you are a Trekker. You can take your fandom seriously. We have worked these things out for you, and there is a community waiting for you.’ Following the articles that profile the show's creators and actors, the magazine shifts its focus to the main topic: “Star Trekkers: Those Fantastic Fan Clubs.” It features six specific fan clubs, offering instructions on how to join them. By profiling an “ultimate fan,” listing collectible fanzines, and providing a 13-page “fan’s guide” to all 79 original episodes, the publication provides a comprehensive toolkit. It offers a prepackaged identity, a directory of collectives to join, and the cultural capital (episode knowledge) needed to participate, effectively serving as a primer for building a deeper, more structured, and more socially connected fan life.
Making It Official
We can usefully compare the “All About...” magazine with another, much longer-lived publication, Star Trek: The Official Fan Club magazine, which was renamed Star Trek Communicator after its 99th issue. The most important word to note regarding the magazine’s title is the term “official.” The magazine actually began as a fan publication created by Dan Madsen at the age of 18 as an outgrowth of the fan club he started. Madsen’s publication found its way to Paramount, who asked him to license the publication—and, later, to make his fan club the “official” one. As the cover featured in Figure 9.3 shows, the publication’s focus is not actually about fan clubs per se, but the Star Trek franchise itself. The cover in the figure offers fans exclusive information such as “first photos from the set of Star Trek: Generations.” But it does not offer them information about fandom and how it operates or how to identify oneself as a fan, although Dan Madsen—who is also a devoted Star Wars fan, fan organizer, and publisher—continued as publisher of the magazine until it was sold and stayed on until it was abandoned by its new owner.
Official publications are beholden to rights holders and as a consequence, they are policed to ensure that nothing occurs that might raise the risk of damaging the value of the franchise. Official organizations typically support affirmational forms of fandom (see Defining Fandom) but allow much less space for unauthorized and transformative fan activities. Zines, in the old days, might be sold under the table at a Creation con but other fan conventions center around fan works, which are openly displayed and celebrated. Fan authors have the opportunity to read excerpts from their works. Huge piles of new and vintage fanzines may be displayed on the dealer’s tables rather than the kinds of authorized merchandise that are sold at, say, San Diego Comic-Con. The same fan may go to official and unofficial conventions but an experienced fan knows what to expect from each.
We can see from this analysis that the “All About” magazine, although it is a published market offering, serves the function of helping to educate and potentially build individual fanships into collective fandoms. It provides a socializing and enculturating platform for individual fans. It offers them DIY and how-to-type guides on things like starting a convention, broadening their tastes and knowledge, buying merchandise, and collecting fanzines. It caters to fans' sometimes eclectic tastes, such as featuring poetry written by Classic Trek star and fan favorite Nichelle Nichols, something that would not be likely to appear in the official magazine. The general fan community benefited from the presence of the “All About” magazine. The All About magazine's existence generates value for the fan community by facilitating connections, circulating knowledge, and providing a sense of shared identity. This value generation aligns with the communal aspects of a gift economy, where the focus is on mutual benefit and shared resources.
Figure 9.4: Datazine zine cover
Datazine: Unofficial and Unbound
We might contrast both of these publications with Datazine, which, from 1980 to 1991, served as a key resource for—rather than about—the fan fiction community (see Figure 9.4). Unlike the other two publications, which engaged to some degree with the commercial sphere, Datazine was totally unauthorized—by any official group, including the copyright holders. Datazine was closer to Factsheet Five which had been central to the larger zine movement coming out of the underground press efforts of the 1960s counterculture. The magazine never sought nor needed a mass audience, as long as it maintained the support of highly motivated readers who were themselves often also producing its content. Witness the fact that it makes extensive use of fan slang and jargon: you have to be invested in the community to understand what’s being said. Put differently, Datazine could be insular and exclusive. Unlike the commercial publications, Datazine had no incentive to broaden the ranks of fandom. Datazine was uninterested in formal fan clubs unless they had grassroots publications to offer. Datazine published notices from fan editors about their publications, where you could order them, and how much they cost. In one sense, these were advertisements, but the underlying logic was that of a gift economy since, in most cases, the zines were sold at cost.
Henry found Datazine to be a key resource when he began his work on Textual Poachers (Jenkins, 1992). The world Henry described in that book was largely circumscribed by the contents of this publication in ways he would only belatedly recognize. At that point, what had begun as a female fandom around Star Trek was expanding to incorporate more and more other fan objects, although mostly within the realm of genre films and television series. Thus, a passion for Star Trek led to interests in Star Wars, the original Battlestar Galactica, the British Blake’s 7, and so forth. But it also includes cop partner shows like Starsky and Hutch or the British series, The Professionals. Datazine also played important roles in identifying and codifying genres of fan fiction. Kirk/Spock, understood as a very particular relationship, was expanded there to the concept of slash, which could incorporate any number of other same-sex partnerships from across the spectrum of popular media. Some of the publications supported by Datazine were multimedia publications where smaller and diverse fandoms worked together. These zines might introduce readers to shows they had never heard of before, but if readers followed particular writers and editors, their range of fan objects might broaden. Datazine paved the way for today’s even more inclusive fan fiction archives like Archive of Our Own (discussed in Fandom as Participatory Culture).
Datazine also provided other resources in support of fan creators, such as advice columns and, somewhat more controversially, reviews of fanzines. Fans had a heated debate about whether reviews were negative, especially in a public context, or whether they could be vital in nurturing the creative development of the fans involved. Were reviews—which often imply a consumer orientation (“should you read this story?”)—consistent with the caring and sharing ethos of the fan gift economy?
The readers were assumed to be invested in building up the infrastructure of a fandom perceived to be a loosely affiliated network of people who both consumed and created fan works. In this realm, Datazine’s low production values were a badge of honor. Datazine, thus, has a different conception of how fandom was structured than publications that delimited themselves around Star Trek, sought to support the interests of formal fan clubs, and were primarily oriented around commercial efforts rather than grassroots publications. Datazine was very much a byproduct of a counterculture conception of DIY production as applied to the realm of fandom.
Datazine thus represents a fascinating and powerful form of consumer collective, one that can be understood through the frameworks we have developed. It stands as a prime example of a self-governing or grassroots commons formation—fiercely unofficial and valuing its unstructured, networked nature over any formal hierarchy. This structure directly influenced its relationship with size and intimacy.Datazinedeliberately operated at the small-scale, high-intimacy end of the spectrum, in contrast to the commercially oriented magazines that sought to expand their audience using the market logic of the gesellschaft. Its use of insider jargon and its focus on a gift economy were cultural mechanisms used for maintaining a manageable size and cultivating deep, trusting bonds among a core group of highly dedicated participants. The zine acted as a gatekeeper, prioritizing the quality of connection among initiates over the quantity of a mass readership. In doing so, it became the connective tissue for a multitude of overlapping cultures of consumption. While the other magazines primarily focused on the singular Star Trek culture of consumption,Datazinecurated a space where fans could fluidly move between the Star Trek,Starsky and Hutch, andBlake’s 7cultures, among others. The unifying principle was not a single fan object, but a shared passion for a specific creative practice—the writing and circulation of fan fiction—which itself became a vibrant, meta-level culture of consumption, complete with its own distinct objects (the zines), texts (the stories), and social norms.
Biographies
Henry Jenkins is the Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California. He arrived at USC in Fall 2009 after spending more than a decade as the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. He is the author and/or editor of twenty books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture, and By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism. His most recent books are Participatory Culture: Interviews (based on material originally published on this blog), Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change, and Comics and Stuff. He is currently writing a book on changes in children’s culture and media during the post-World War II era. He has written for Technology Review, Computer Games, Salon, and The Huffington Post.
Robert V. Kozinets is a multiple award-winning educator and internationally recognized expert in methodologies, social media, marketing, and fandom studies. In 1995, he introduced the world to netnography. He has taught at prestigious institutions including Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Business and the Schulich School of Business in Toronto, Canada. In 2024, he was made a Fellow of the Association for Consumer Research and also awarded Mid-Sweden’s educator award, worth 75,000 SEK. An Associate Editor for top academic journals like the Journal of Marketing and the Journal of Interactive Marketing, he has also written, edited, and co-authored 8 books and over 150 pieces of published research, some of it in poetic, photographic, musical, and videographic forms. Many notable brands, including Heinz, Ford, TD Bank, Sony, Vitamin Water, and L’Oréal, have hired his firm, Netnografica, for research and consultation services He holds the Jayne and Hans Hufschmid Chair of Strategic Public Relations and Business Communication at University of Southern California’s Annenberg School, a position that is shared with the USC Marshall School of Business.
