Soap opera fans may feel they don’t have much to celebrate for 2010.. Two of the most venerable representatives of the genre, Guiding Light, and As the World Turns left the air with no replacements scheduled. Soapnet, a cable outlet for classic and current soaps, announced it would change over to children’s programming.
What they can celebrate is that they learned they can organize around their genre. They organized protests at the networks and the production offices of Procter and Gamble. They attempted to draw in one of the biggest media celebrities and moguls, Oprah Winfrey, to their cause. They also learned that academics take them and their favorite genre very seriously.
New Book Examines Soaps and Their Fans
A book released in December 2010, examines the genre of the soap opera from various angles as the genre appears to be near its demise. One of those angles is the genres fan base, which has a history of speaking out about its favorite genre.
Henry Jenkins, a communications professor at the University of Southern California. He has written about and researched media fandom. He also held a question and answer session with the editors of The Survival of the Soap Opera, along with other interested parties. One of those academics is Abigail De Kosnick, a media and theater professor at UC-Berkley. De Kosnick, who counts herself as a soap fan, says even though fans are organizing on the Internet, their impact may be limited,
"The Web gives an illusion of what others have called ‘participatory democracy,’ but just sending a bunch of e-mails obviously isn't the way to change the minds of the minority who are the decision-makers."
She adds that fans have had limited effect on characters and story lines because those decisions were made a long time before the fans ever see them on the screen. In the case, of whether the shows will continue, decisions, again, may have been made long before fans even hear of them.
Nonetheless, the fans are out there and are using social media to rally the faithful to their cause via such Facebook sites as Save Our Soaps.
But will their presence on the web and their activism save their genre>
Does Fan Activism Work?
There are instances of fans having some limited impact on programming. The most famous case of this was the pre-Internet drive to save Star Trek in the late 1960s, which resulted in one more season of that show being broadcast.
But, fans have yet to save an entire genre of programming. In 2011, at least, it appears that as long as there is a movement of soap opera fans to study, academics will devote some of their time to studying them.
Jon Pike - Pike is a Ph.D. in communication and writes about activism and popular culture topics for Suite101.
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