Get a Life!

In “Get a Life!“ Henry Jenkins discusses textual poaching. According to Jenkins, poaching is “an impertinent raid on the literary preserve that takes away only those things that are useful or pleasurable to the reader.” Jenkins says that what you need to enjoy and should enjoy is told to you. Boundaries of taste are in continuous struggle. At a young age, we are taught that bad taste is unacceptable, and what is considered bad taste. In addition, in school we are taught how to understand things. When we read works from different authors, our teachers expect us to understand it correctly. When an author writes a text, they put some form of meaning to it. Thus, if we do not understand the author’s intentions and meanings of their writing, then our teachers reduce our grade.

Fans on the other hand, read and interpret texts differently than how it is taught in school. Fans read author’s texts, take part of their texts or paragraphs, rearrange, rewrite, and do whatever they want to it. They distort the meaning to introduce new meanings. This is what Jenkins describes as poaching. Fan reading is more participatory than reading for educational purposes. Fans don’t want to sit in couches all day and be locked down to authority. They are obsessed with, love, and adore some form of art but are frustrated because something is implied but not pursued. Thus, they decode and fragment the text and recreate another form text. They participate in the creation of their own meanings, which is where the production of other forms of media comes into place.

Through this, Jenkins states that there is a constant struggle for controlling the meaning of texts. This is why teachers penalize students for not understanding the author’s meaning of their text. Through this, they do not allow any forms of expression. If students were to express their thoughts about text differently than the author’s intentions, then they would fail. This is a form of control that the teacher has in order to control the meaning of texts. There’s a struggle for controlling the meaning in texts. Regardless of if the meaning is implied or not, it still introduces contradictory meanings, or things that would annoy the author. Many people do this.

An excellent example of poaching is shown through a YouTube Video of the Teletubbies. The Teletubbies is a show for young children. However, someone took clips of the Teletubbies dancing on tv and put it on a video with a rap song called “Shake that ass bitch.” On this video, the Teletubbies are dancing to this rap song that is not appropriate for kids. There are a bunch of Teletubbies videos in which they are dancing to different vulgar rap songs. People poached the Teletubbies shows. Some reasons people poached these videos were for a different intended meanings. Many people have mocked the Teletubbies shows and have questioned if the show is really educational or not. Thus, people have taken portions of the Teletubbies videos and have recreated them to show a different, bad meaning. Click here to see this video.