The author speaks from the perspective of an academic who is also a regular Soap Opera viewer. She had been contributing
regularly to an Internet discussion group about soap operas, and like Henry Jenkins, she believes that being part of the community gains her access and insights that academics looking in from an outside detached perspective would not have.
The book focuses on one discussion group (rec.arts.tv.soaps or r.a.t.s.) and specifically on one soap (All of My Children or AMC) and explores issues of media reception and the sociality of fandom. It is in many ways a personal account as the author clearly considers herself as being in some way part of that community, and her first-person perspectives are often used in the book. She asserts that ‘rather than judging from the outside, we need to listen closely to what members of new media communities have to say to one another and to those who ask. Only then will we understand their diversity and the opportunities and challenges they offer.’
The main question that this book strives to answer is how audience members use mass media to structure and articulate their social relationships and make the world ‘intellectually meaningful, aesthetically pleasing, and emotionally compelling’ (quoting Jensen & Pauly, 1997:163)
Finally, the author also emphasizes the fact that fan communities should not be considered a homogeneous whole, asserting that: ‘as we come to live in an ever-expanding array of specialized communities, the issue of how those communities interweave is crucial to understanding culture.’
The sociality is obviously a crucial aspect of the viewing according to the author as she asserts that ‘looking at this group as an audience community leads to the understanding that when an audience becomes collaborative, it changes what it means to be a fan. The pool of relevant information is expanded, the range of interpretations on offer is broadened, genre expertise is refined and cultivated, and the opportunity to discuss the private worlds of feelings and relationships with others is enhanced.’
Baym points to the ‘stereotype of soap opera viewers, and fans more generally, as mentally and socially deficient’. The author argues that fan communities are aware of this marginalized status and perception of fandom in general as an unworthy practice. This awareness of the outside world perception of fans in itself denies the stereotype of the recluse fan buried in a fantasy world and oblivious to reality. Like in videogames, there is a pervasive sense that soap fans are too close to the object of their fandom and have therefore lost the ability to separate it from reality. She argues that ‘the image of the fan who revels in low-taste culture rather than displaying appropriate shame can thus be seen not as a reflection of the fan but as a ‘projection of anxieties about the violation of dominant cultural hierarchies’. This is also applicable to videogame fans, who are seen as being overly engaged in a childish and trivial pursuit. Jenkins concurs by stating that ‘Whether viewed as a religious fanatic, a psychopathic killer, a neurotic fantasist, or a lust-crazed groupie, the fan remains a ‘fanatic’ or false worshipper, whose interests are fundamentally alien to the realm of ‘normal’ cultural experience and whose mentality is dangerously out of touch with reality’ (Jenkins, 1992: p. 15). The use of the term ‘addiction’ is often used to describe fan activity and loyalty, implying a media text that is empty and mindless while simultaneously retaining the power to take over the weak and inferior minds of those foolish enough to let themselves by trapped by it.
In order to have a strong and developed sense of ‘self’ within fan communities, fans tend to build themselves as being in opposition to other groups, notably the producers of the texts. ‘Jenkins (1992, p.86) describes fandom as ‘an institution of theory and criticism, a semi structured space where competing interpretations and evaluations of common texts are proposed, debated, and negotiated and where readers speculate about the nature of the mass media and their own relationship to (them)’. In fandom, Jenkins finds that fans appropriate the texts, engaging them in all the ways one would expect from previous analyses of media texts but also using the shows as the raw material for their own creative impulses.’
Fans in this study express the feeling of being part of a group of people who have exclusive insight of what the correct interpretation mode of their chosen object of fandom is. For Soap Opera fans (as for videogame fans in similar environments) the existence of such fan-exclusive areas gives them ‘possibility of expressing one’s emotional responses to the show to a sympathetic audience.’ This means that knowledge and practices central to a fan’s life, which are likely to be derided in the outside world are valued and engaged with within the fan community.