Textual Poaching in Fight Club

This Screen Junkies Honest Trailer is an example of “textual poaching”; Michel De Certeau’s notions of textual poaching Identifies / debunks an elitist myth, dating back to the 18th century, that sees “readers” as passive consumers, who need to be informed by the “producers” of knowledge & communications media. He states that “This legend is necessary for the system that distinguishes and privileges authors, educators, revolutionaries, in a word, ‘producers’, in contrast with those who do not produce.” (De Certeau, 1984). I decipher from this that there is an ideology of the producers who create the content and the consumers who consume the content. However with recent developments in Web 2.0 it can be argued that this ideology has been destroyed with the rise of the ‘Prosumer’. Gauntlett (2008) discusses this as the way in which media consumers have gone from being passive consumers to active consumers. As in the past most people merely consumed media whereas now many are media producers themselves this is largely due to the internet and web 2.0 which has lead to wide possibilities for users to produce their own content such as creating videos and posting them on Youtube, as well as the ability for audiences to voice their opinions and comment on news articles giving them the chance to have a large social interaction with different voices from across the globe and giving their ideas and allowing their thoughts to be heard which allows for a more satisfying experience for the audience.
Henry Jenkins applies De Certeau’s notions to “fandom”, in order to examine the ways in which fans “poach” elements of popular culture, through copying and sharing the original text, or creating fan fiction. “Like the poachers of old, fans operate from a position of cultural marginality and social weakness. Like other popular readers, fans lack direct access to the means of commercial cultural production and have only the most limited resources with which to influence the entertainment industry’s decisions” (Jenkins, 1992) However this has now vastly improved and changed over time due to advances in technology and the previously discussed “Rise of the Prosumer’. I believe that it can be argued that the prosumer is also where the rise of Textual Poaching is partly down to. This is because as the audience of products develop into creators themselves and thus becoming ‘Prosumers’ this is often where experimentation with textual poaching occurs. A prime example of that would be the previously discussed ‘Honest Trailers’ series, because its creators are fans of the films that they mock in there videos, but they just poach the media text in there own certain way in order to manipulate it into showing something that maybe was not intended by the original producers of the media text, such as how they find humour in what’s really happening in the film trailers.