Andrew J. Kirk

"Fiske Online (And I’ll Take Fries with That)"

As a testament to Ronald McDonald, a young woman in the Philippines known as “Miss McDonald” dressed up as the beloved clown for Halloween in 2004, and that idea blossomed into a photography project that she posted to the World Wide Web.  To say the least, she is one of the McDonald Corporation’s biggest fans—a state of being characterized by a diverse set of practices where “identification, both with the object of fandom (e.g., a celebrity) and the community of fans, is central” (Soukup, 2006, p. 322).  Various performances mark this terrain, with the objects of fandom and the results of these practices commonly referred to as “popular culture.”  However, in doing so, consumers oftentimes “actively produce [their own] cultural meanings through creative appropriations and recontextualizations of mass cultural commodities” (Coombe & Herman, 2001, p. 926).  This results in oppositional interpretations of popular culture texts, yet concurrently highlights the “the agency and inventiveness of subordinated cultures” (Rogers, 2006, p. 484) that submit to the pleasures of fandom. 
 
In this regard, Fiske (1989) suggests that consumers will “make their own culture out of the resources and commodities provided by the dominant system” (p. 15), thus establishing their own subversive meanings for those products, i.e., excorporation.  However, in order to manage such reappropriations, thereby maintaining some semblance of control over their consumers, corporations try to reintegrate those ideas whenever possible.  This re-integration is referred to as incorporation, and it allows producers to absorb “the signs of resistance…[back] into the dominant system and thus attempts to rob [subordinated groups] of any oppositional meanings” (p. 18). 

While audiences the world over actively construct meanings for the texts they consume based on their own experiences and frames of knowledge (Hirschman & Thompson, 1997, p. 45), their rejection and reappropriation of old meanings and their public dissemination of new meanings problematize Fiske’s original ideas about incorporation and excorporation.  As illustrated through the case of Miss McDonald, the advent and availability of Internet technologies across the globe enables a truly international body of fans to become new meaning makers rather than meaning re-makers, with the latter serving as the common conclusion in traditional audience analyses.  Ultimately, fans are able to sidestep the original producers thanks to the Internet, bestowing them with power to communicate directly with other consumers who can then re-appropriate and re-disseminate texts like Miss McDonald’s as they see fit. 

In this paper, I use the work of Miss McDonald to problematize Fiske’s dated yet foundational model of popular culture to illustrate the meaning-making that can occur when cultures collide.  I begin by providing an overview of globalization and fandom, including the ways that Internet technologies have helped shape contemporary fan practices, as well as review Fiske’s original model of popular culture production and consumption.  Assisted by Miss McDonald and her online images, I ultimately argue that dramatic increases in Internet usage and availability, coupled with the onslaught of globalization, necessitate that we revisit and revise Fiske’s model to reflect our current global reality.