The Virtual-community-based Utopia Of Fans

In this paper, the researcher focused on Chinese online community of fans, chose Harry Potter fanfiction fans as an example,arid used the methods of online participant observation, individual in-depth interviews and other research methods.By researching a kind of closed online fan community, to which text reproduction is the main activities, the study found:For the depth fans, re-interpretation of the text is the main form of activity. As the emergence of virtual community, the fans have a more comfortable space to open interpret the text, and then fans come together to become a COMMUNITY. As a kind of producer-style text, the popular culture has the characteristics of not only excessiveness but also obvious, and these features of popular culture makes it easily to be re-produced. Within these features,"excessive" contains the factor of "parody" Through the creation of different types of fanfiction works, Harry Potter fanficton fans "parody" meta-text to achieve online carnival. In their fanfictions, fans mock the gender order; the order of Good and Evil, and also the power order in the original Harry Potter works. However, this parody brings a violent conflict with the original works and even the real world, and that makes the need of self-segmentation of the fans.They close the circle, aficionados establish an unconventional reality Utopia exclusively for their online community. Within and just within this range, they share all the resources.In order to make the carnival undisturbed, fanfiction-fans establish a boundary around the virtual community in order to establish a limited utopia. The use of code-mixing language is a natural gate-keeper of their virtual communities, fans community becomes an Utopia where only the depth of fans can get access permissions. The circle members create resources for the community, non-discriminatory sharing of resources, and thus get a sense of belonging to the community. Different virtual community of fans scattered, but not isolated. Between different fan community, people share part of the same language code, which also makes their fans more interaction. The fan communities whith intersect through virtual communities continue their Utopia in the real world. But because of the subculture conscious, on the one hand is the mass media’s misreading, in their daily lives of individuals, fanfiction-fans still choose to conceal the identity of their own.