week16——SHU YING : Secondary Creations and Reaction Videos: Re-evaluating Audience Agency in the Age of Social Media

In his foundational essay Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse (1980), Stuart Hall fundamentally disrupted the traditional, linear model of mass communication by arguing that media texts are not passively absorbed by a homogeneous audience. Instead, Hall proposed that communication is a complex structure of practices where audiences play an active role in decoding messages, and depending on their cultural backgrounds and social positions, viewers can adopt a dominant-hegemonic, a negotiated, or an oppositional code to interpret the media content. This concept of audience agency was significantly expanded by Henry Jenkins in Convergence Culture (2006) through the framework of "participatory culture," which describes a shift from passive media consumption to active media co-creation. In this modern media ecosystem, consumers are no longer just viewers; they become active participants who reshape, remix, and recirculate media texts. According to Jenkins, secondary creations—such as fan fiction, vlogs, and grassroots edits—are not mere derivatives of corporate intellectual property, but rather cultural toolkits used by grassroots communities to reclaim meaning, challenge top-down corporate narratives, and construct alternative cultural identities within a commercialized public sphere.

Applying Hall and Jenkins’ theories to the current digital landscape reveals an extraordinary and somewhat unusual evolution in audience behavior, particularly in the massive rise of "reaction videos" and "secondary performance highlights" on platforms like YouTube and TikTok. In practical content operations today, we see a fascinating irony where an audience member might spend 3 minutes watching a K-pop idol group's official music video, but then spend 15 minutes watching a third-party "reaction video" or a fan-made "frame-by-frame critique." This phenomenon offers a deep psychological insight into modern media consumption because the secondary creation has effectively surpassed the original text in terms of emotional proximity. When Gen Z audiences watch reaction videos, they are not seeking primary information; they are seeking a simulated community. The independent creator who films themselves screaming, crying, or analytically breaking down a performance acts as a proxy for the viewer's own unvoiced emotions. Through clever video editing, text overlays, and localized memes, these grassroots creators decode a high-budget corporate product and translate it into an accessible subcultural dialect, proving that media consumption is no longer an individual, isolated experience, but an intense form of affective labor where looking at how others look at the text provides more social gratification than looking at the text itself.

While Jenkins and Hall celebrate these practices as triumphs of grassroots agency, this phenomenon raises a problematic question regarding the structural relationship between corporate capital and audience labor, which deserves more elaboration in our class discussions. Specifically, where do we draw the line between creative audience resistance and complete structural dependence on corporate hegemony? If grassroots creators and influencers rely entirely on expanding, looping, and reacting to mainstream commercial intellectual properties, such as celebrity idols or major studio films, to generate their own cultural capital and views, it is worth questioning whether they are truly disrupting corporate dominance. One could argue that by creating endless secondary content, audiences are inadvertently serving as an unpaid, hyper-efficient marketing army for the very capitalist media industries they claim to bypass, allowing the platform economy to harvest this participatory culture and monetize it through the attention economy. Therefore, we need to consider whether secondary creation actually democratizes the media landscape, or if it merely cushions corporate control by making audience exploitation feel like a form of creative freedom.