Andrea -- Sorry to hear about your difficulty locating copies of my book, TEXTUAL POACHERS. I am hearing this from people everywhere. You can, of course, order it from Routledge, Chapman and Hall, 29 West 35th St., NY, NY 10001-2299. The ISN# is 0 415 90572 and the paperback edition is priced at $14.95. Some of the Screen-L readers will have received a mailing from Routledge offering exam copies. So you might try asking for one. Now, on to the questions. Andrea asks about the use of computers within the fan community. So far, the home computer has not had quite the same impact as the VCR has on fandom. The VCR really revolutionized fandom as I suggest in the book, making it possible to have access to series which never played in your area and to watch them more closely, more often, and with greater control over the flow of story information. I intended a panel on computing and fandom at a recent media fan convention. Many fan editors said they were now using desktop publishing for their zines and I could point you to some noteworthy examples of this. There is also growing fan interest in Protigy, which was strongly promoted at this con. My sense is that fannish discussion on Usenet, etc. does not reflect the same group as the fan culture I describe. I discuss Alt.rec.arts.twinpeaks in TEXTUAL POACHERS as an example of an alternative mode of fannish criticism and discourse which reflects the predominantly masculine composition of the newsnet readership and its greater ties to major research universities and technical companies. I do more with this question of computer net discussions in a chapter I just finished for a book I am writing with John Tulloch which looks cross-culturally at the audiences for STAR TREK and DOCTOR WHO. The key question is access to technology. I have no doubt that fans would use any new technology they can afford access to, but that few of them have the institutional affiliations to allow easy access to USENET, etc. They also don't have access to make the interactive narratives that are emerging, though I know many writers there would loosely describe themselves as fans and I have found people at MIT's Media Lab very interesed in the book for what it says about existing ways that fans create a kind of interactive narrative from traditional forms of mass culture. Andrea also ask about my use of the term, "meta-text" in my BEAUTY AND THE BEAST essay and whether it could be used to apply to fan's conception of stars/ characters. For those who haven't read my writing, the term, "Metatext" refers to the mental construct which fans construct surrounding the series text which includes not only information explicitly offered in the program narratives but also extratextual information (interviews with stars, producers, etc.; novelizations; writer's guides) and inferences by fan critics, etc. I see the metatext as part of the collective property of fandom with much overlap between fans in terms of their interpretation of the series, but also open to idiosyncratic inflection by individual fans so that it generates constant debates about interpretation. The fan meta-text is vitally concerned with issues of characterization, since character is a primary focus of their interest in the series narratives, especially the interplay between characters and the back stories of characters. There is no doubt that they also form some common understandings of the stars, their personalities, etc. Some fans are more star-centered\ than others. Most of the fans I write about would say their primary interest is in the characters not the stars, though they will go to see them on occassion at cons. There are commercially run cons which primarily function to bring in stars and fan-run cons which mostly function to sustain the circulation of fan generated products. Often, the people who attend one do not go to the other. A key issue arrises when the stars want to control what is written about the series, since some fans will side with the stars and producers, others with the fan writers. Many a fandom has split over these questions and to some degree, the continued dispute in Beauty and the Beast fandom over the third season reflects different commitments and access to the stars, producers, writers, etc. This issue enters into disputes about fan art as well since fan artists claim their works depict the characters not the stars, even though the characters (as media figures) bear the physical likeness of the stars. So, a picture showing Kirk and Spock having sex does not depict William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy having sex even though it would be impossible to draw a recognizable Spock that did not bear a strong resemblence to Nimoy. So -- the fans may form interpretations of the stars (which may be more or less important to individual fans) but those interpretations would be seen as distinct from their metatext of the fictional universe of the program, which is how I use the term in the book. I don't know if this answers your question or makes any sense but the question you pose is a complicated one. --Henry Jenkins