Writing in the Margins: Organic Development of Canon in FanFic and Game-Playing

It is the common cultural attributes of media that allow us to decipher the "code" of visual text. Unlike spoken language, which is a result of a consensual cultural tradition and subject to the input of various external sources, visual text--especially that of moving visual text-- is a result of a limited arbitrary pool of conventions being presented as a truncated form of 'language', much in the vein of a computer code. The limitation of the system is that the community from which it arises--and therefore the resultant language that emerges from it-- is even more arbitrary than usual. However, there is a tradition of cinematic and visual media conventions that form a core of reference as much as any language in existence. Even though cinematic language is only about 120 years old, it has already built up a sufficient repertoire of references that we need to realise that it is a language unto itself. Like all languages, although the choice of signifier might be arbitrary, the reception of it is not; like all languages, Media is subject to approval and acceptance by the recipients. We as media consumer-critics look at this mass of incoming signal and decide which of these conventions we will accept and perpetuate and which we will reject. There is the concept of cultural acceptance and compatibility that Malcolm Gladwell has labelled “stickiness”(Gladwell 1996).