Transformative Works and Cultures, special issue: Fandom and/as

labor, No. 15 (March 15, 2014)

Editorial

Mel Stanfill & Megan Condis, Fandom and/as labor

Praxis

Bethan Jones, Fifty shades of exploitation: Fan labor and Fifty Shades of Grey

Robert Moses Peaslee, Jessica El-Khoury, Ashley Liles, The media festival volunteer: Connecting online

and on-ground fan labor

Christina Savage, Chuck versus the ratings: Savvy fans and "save our show" campaigns

Giacomo Poderi & David James Hakken, Modding a free and open source software video game: "Play

testing is hard work"

Bertha Chin, Sherlockology and Galactica.tv: Fan sites as gifts or exploited labor?

Rose Helens-Hart, Promoting fan labor and "al things Web": A case study of Tosh.0

Matthias Stork, The cultural economics of performance space: Negotiating fan, labor, and marketing

practice in Glee’s transmedia geography

Symposium

Tisha Turk, Fan work: Labor, worth, and participation in fandom's gift economy

Joly MacFie, Better Badges: Image as virus

Interview

Bertha Chin, Bethan Jones, Myles McNutt, & Luke Pebler, Veronica Mars Kickstarter and crowd funding

Review

Stephanie Anne Brown, Digital labor: The Internet as playground and factory, edited by Trebor Scholz

Simone D. Becque, Cognitive capitalism, education, and digital labor, edited by Michael A. Peters and

Ergin Bulut

Anne Kustritz, Gaga feminism: Sex, gender, and the end of normal, by J. Jack Halberstam

Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC), ISSN 1941-2258, is an online-only Gold Open Access publication of the nonprofit

Organization for Transformative Works. TWC is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0

Unported License. Download date: March 15, 2017. For citation, please refer to the most recent version of articles at TWC.

Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 15 (2014)

Editorial

Fandom and/as labor

Mel Stanfil and Megan Condis

University of Il inois, Urbana-Champaign, Il inois, United States

[0.1] Keywords— Community; Gift economy; Media industry; Value; Work

Stanfill, Mel, and Megan Condis. 2014. "Fandom and/as Labor" [editorial]. In "Fandom and/as Labor," edited by Mel Stanfill and Megan Condis, special issue, Transformative

Works and Cultures, no. 15. http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2014.0593.

1. Introduction

[1.1] It has long been recognized both within academia and in the various communities

organized around fandom that the practice of being a fan does not merely consist of passive

consumption. Rather, fans are also producers, making everything from interpretations of

their favorite television shows to extratextual products like wikis, fan fiction, and fan videos

to data about their own consumption habits and those of their peers that can be used to

market new products. It is now well established that watching television can usefully be

conceptualized as work (Jhally and Livant 1986; Smythe 1977), and a labor framing has

been applied to usergenerated content by critical media studies scholars (Andrejevic 2009;

Fuchs 2012; Hesmondhalgh 2010). However, fans have not often been approached this way.

This disjuncture partially comes from the fact that fan activity is by all appearances both

freely chosen and understood as pleasure, neither of which is typically associated with work.

Instead, fan action has been framed as being active or participatory, and while these

conceptualizations have been productive, when the lens of labor is applied, unique and

crucial questions come into view.

[1.2] To speak of labor is to attend to the value fans generate—an antidote to surprisingly

tenacious notions of fan activity as a valueless pleasure. Once we have conceptualized fan

work as generating value, we can also inquire into how that value is distributed and whether

work circulating between fans in gift economies or among fans and industry is potentially

exploited labor. This special issue of Transformative Works and Cultures takes the premise

that if fans are a vital part of the new economy, then we have to take the economy part as

seriously as the vital part. When such a stance is taken, it turns out that fan labor, like duct

tape or the Force, has a dark side and a light side, and it holds the universe—or at least

fandom—together. The contributors to this special issue demonstrate a wide variety of ways

that labor functions in fandom.

2. Come to the dark side (We use cookies—see our privacy policy)

[2.1] In the contemporary moment, labor issues are once again coming to the forefront of

many people's political consciousness. When we proposed this topic, the February and March

2011 Wisconsin union protests were recent events, and Occupy Wall Street and its discourse

of the 1 percent versus the 99 percent was still to come. Since then, this sort of conflict

around labor and the distribution of resources to workers has become ever more central,

with Walmart and fastfood worker strikes forming part of an increasingly mainstream

struggle over dignified working conditions and a living wage.

[2.2] Labor conditions in media are also in the midst of a largescale transformation. There

was a marked increase over the first decade of the 21st century in what used to be called

runaway production (and is now maybe just production), with TV series increasingly being

produced in Canada and films increasingly being made in New Zealand. The same period saw

an explosion of unscripted series. Both of these production strategies employ writers, actors,

directors, and other personnel in ways that skirt the terms of union contracts in order to

lower labor costs (Lotz 2007). One major issue in the 2007–8 Writers Guild of America strike

was an insistence that Web content was creative work and creators were thus eligible to be

paid at creative rates, rather than promotional work that creators were obligated to

participate in for free (Gray 2010; Leaver 2013; Russo 2010). The kinds of paratexts or

pieces of ancillary content that were at stake in the WGA strike are quite like what fans

produce, and turning to fans rather than paid staff for such work thus looks increasingly

good for the bottom line. After all, even against the baseline of declining labor strength in

Hollywood, fan work is a bargain for industry.

[2.3] Fan value creation—in terms of meaning, loyalty, commitment, and promotion—is not

new, but industry recognition and encouragement, as well as the contemporary expansion of

monetization, are. The contemporary era has seen technologically enabled visibility of fan

practices that in many instances existed before current media technologies (BaconSmith

1991; Coppa 2008; Jenkins 1992). One of the first to make sense of user activity on the

Internet as labor was Tiziana Terranova (2000, 37), who contended that "free labor is the

moment where this knowledgeable consumption of culture is translated into productive

activities that are pleasurably embraced and at the same time shamelessly exploited." We

find that simultaneity of pleasure and exploitation to be key.

[2.4] For example, the video game industry has long been working to blur the line between

labor and play in its own ranks by recruiting fans as beta testers for games that are about to

be released. Companies routinely emphasize the benefits and the prestige associated with

early access: alpha and beta testers are said to have the ear of game makers, to be

influential in shaping the final product. Similar rhetoric abounds in recruitment materials

aimed at young workers looking to break into the industry. Entrylevel workers, like game

testers (otherwise known as QA, for quality assurance), are promised a paying job that

hardly feels like work at all. Who wouldn't want to spend their day earning money for doing

something that they were already doing just for fun? Game industry workplaces are designed

to create an atmosphere that further reinforces a playful aesthetic. Employees describe "an ambience of 'cool' built up around unregulated hours, lax dress code, studio pranks, free

food, fitness facilities, lavish parties, funky interior design, and an array of other perks and

promises" (DyerWitheford and de Peuter 2006, 604). Some gaming companies have built

entire marketing strategies around the notion that they are fun places to work: Sony, the

maker of Playstation game consoles, made three seasons' worth of reality television

competitions called The Tester in which it gave away QA jobs as the grand prizes ( The Tester 2014).

[2.5] Unfortunately for fans who aspire to become industry professionals, the realities of

game testing are far less glamorous than they initially appear. Game testing is a brutal,

monotonous, repetitive, poorly paid, insecure job—and testers aren't the only ones in the

games industry with grievances. Even workers with more prestigious, higherlevel jobs in the

industry run afoul of exploitative labor practices, such as crunch time, an "industry term that indicates an apparently unusual period of crisis in the production schedule" (DyerWitheford

and de Peuter 2006, 609). According to the International Game Developers Association

(IGDA), crunch time is "omnipresent" in the gaming industry (2004, 18). Gaming companies

justify crunch time by pointing to looming deadlines such as a release date that will be in

time to catch the Christmas rush (IGDA 2004, 18), and yet Nick DyerWitheford and Greig

de Peuter describe crunch time as "apparently" unusual because, in fact, companies in the tech industry rely on crunch time as a costsaving mechanism that is built into the corporate

culture. Indeed, "normalized crunch time…points to a very elementary economic fact: it is a

good deal, a steal in fact, for game companies" (2006, 609). In other words, from the

perspective of games companies, crunch time panics are a planned feature of the working

environment, not a bug. Such working conditions are made possible in large part by the

exploitation of the blurry boundary between labor and fandom.

3. The light at the end of the tunnel may be you: Valuing fan work

[3.1] If one trajectory locates fan work as generating surplus value that is ultimately

extracted and exploited by industry, a second would focus on the proliferation of value

generated by fans for fans. Fandom runs on fan labor, and this work produces enjoyment,

collectivity, and various material and immaterial goods that give fandom shape as a practice,

community, or culture. Calling attention to this action as labor stakes an important claim to

that production precisely as a production of value.

[3.2] It can be difficult to think of fan activities and labor in the same register. Fans freely

engage in these activities—or they are at least not coerced by the intractable need to earn a

living. People enjoy doing them. Thus, it seems as if it isn't really labor and fans don't

require payment because enjoyment is enough, or because fandom rejects capitalist logics

(De Kosnik 2012; Fiske 1992; Noppe 2011). However, fan labor also dovetails with

contemporary labor practice through the rise of pleasurable work as a widespread or even

normative phenomenon. Eran Fisher (2012, 173) describes nonalienated work as carrying

the "possibility to express oneself, to control one's production process, to objectify one's

essence and connect and communicate with others." Fan work is precisely this sort of selfexpression and connection, which fans produce under their own control. This lack of alienation has frequently been noted as common in, if not endemic to, contemporary labor in

general (Cohen 2012; Postigo 2009), but because of the heretofore rigid separation of

leisure/pleasure from labor/drudgery (Meehan 2000), pleasurable labor often does not

register as labor at all, as indeed it does not tend to with fan work.

[3.3] Rather than conceptualizing fan activity as labor, the production and circulation of

goods in fandom has generally been described as a gift economy (Hellekson 2009; Scott

2009). Participants in such an economy use gift giving as the means to circulate goods and

services; this exchange does not typify the colloquial notion of a gift as a freely offered

expression of affection but rather is obligatory (Hellekson 2009; Mauss [1925] 2000;

Pearson 2007) and is organized by status (Boyle 2003; Hyde [1983] 2007; Mauss [1925]

2000). To modify the open source software saying "Free as in free speech, not as in free

beer," fan work is "For free as in a gift, not for free as in without pay." The emphasis in fan circulation of gifts is in producing and reinforcing fannish identities and relationships. As

Abigail De Kosnik (2013) frames it, "'Free' fan labor (fan works distributed for no payment)

means 'free' fan labor (fans may revise, rework, remake, and otherwise remix massculture

texts without dreading legal action or other interference from copyright holders). Many,

perhaps even most, fans who engage in this type of production look upon this deal very

favorably." Because of the way fan gift economies run on identity, connection, and

production according to one's own desires in a way antithetical to our usual beliefs about

work, labor has not been a prominent conversation thus far.

[3.4] However, recognizing and valuing fan work as work is vital. Fan labor, for example,

has enabled the crown jewel of online fandom, the Organization for Transformative Works'

fan fiction archive, the Archive of Our Own, to recently pass the milestone of a million fan

works uploaded (AO3 2014). Fans built it; fans maintain it; fans produce and auction off

creative works to raise funds for it (ao3auction 2013). The light side is the work fans do for

each other. Fans produce wikis and episode transcripts, allowing a depth of knowledge and

engagement with objects of fandom that industry products alone could never satisfy. Fan

work also produces things for other fans more concretely, as can be traced in the dedications

and shoutouts appended to fan artworks. Perhaps most importantly, fan work creates fan

community—fandom itself—through the production and maintenance of affective ties. Calling

this work "work" opens up appreciation for the skills involved, much as with feminist

insistence on care work as labor (Arber and Ginn 1995; England and Folbre 1999; Hochschild

1989). The labor framework provides a powerful way to value what fans are doing, in

contrast to the dismissals that have long attended fandom. If industry has not framed fan

action as work to avoid payment, then the pleasure framework sells fans short visàvis what

they do for each other. This special issue examines these considerations as well.

4. About this issue

[4.1] One theme running through the articles collected here is that of promotional labor.

Matthias Stork discusses the ways the Fox series Glee has recruited its fans to do both the work of distribution for official promotional content and the creation of their own content that

promotes the show, parsing how different kinds of labor are called for across what he calls

Glee's transmedia geography. Rose HelensHart similarly describes how the design of the

Web site for the Comedy Central program Tosh.0 teaches users to share its brand with their

personal social networks. Christina Savage's analysis of the "save our show" campaign

around the NBC TV series Chuck notes the promotional labor fans did to get others to not

only watch but watch visibly—during the regular airing, by buying the sponsor's products,

and by using a hash tag when making online posts.

[4.2] A second common refrain among the pieces gathered here is a consideration of gift

economies and volunteerism. Bethan Jones's analysis of Fifty Shades of Grey demonstrates

the ways in which much of the fan outrage over converting a fan fiction story into a

commercial novel has to do with violation of the expectations of fandom as a gift economy.

This, she argues, is why selling fan crafts is considered vastly more acceptable, as it is

clearly a market transaction rather than a gift transaction. For her part, Bertha Chin

contends that calling fan work "exploited labor" misses the role of the gift economy in

organizing fan production; to understand this social phenomenon, she argues, we must

attend to fans' own explanations of why they do what they do. Likewise, Robert Moses

Peaslee, Jessica ElKhoury, and Ashley Liles contend that motivations of fan volunteers at

media festivals include the desire to be a good citizen of the fannish community. Moreover,

Stork notes that Glee positions its transmedia materials as gifts in exchange for fans'

devotion, which he notes has been quite effective in getting fans to join in. Tisha Turk's

Symposium piece is a careful thinking through of gift economies. She advocates moving

beyond considering only traditional items such as fiction or vids to be gifts, suggesting that

fans take seriously such gifts as an archive, a link, or an AO3 kudo. She also advocates

getting past the traditional notion of onetoone gifting to think about how fans give gifts to

the community writ large.

[4.3] Other articles collected here focus on the dark side—the potential for harm to fans

around or through their labor. Giacomo Poderi and David J. Hakken describe how pleasurable

undertakings like the creation, play testing, and distribution of video game mods can cause

fans to reconsider their relationship to the objects of their fandom by structuring that

relationship as an act of labor as opposed to an act of play. Stork describes fans as being

given false promises of interaction and access when Glee's production staff had no intention of actually including them. Jones notes the ways in which the conversion of gift economics to

market economics undermines fan collectivity and trust. In addition, the roundtable

discussion between Bertha Chin, Bethan Jones, Myles McNutt, and Luke Pebler questions the

ethics of Hollywood's use of crowd funding tools like Kickstarter to generate funds for major

motion pictures like the forthcoming Veronica Mars feature film and Zach Braff's Wish I Was Here. In the book review section, Stephanie Ann Brown asks in her review of Trebor Scholz's edited collection, Digital Labor: The Internet as Factory and Playground, whether fannish

labor necessarily entails exploitation, and whether that exploitation resembles that described

by traditional Marxist models. Simone Becque questions how it is that popular texts beloved by fans seem perfectly able to imagine any number of fantastic endoftheworld scenarios

even as they seem unable to imagine the end of capitalism in her review of Michael A. Peters

and Ergin Bulut's edited volume Cognitive Capitalism, Education, and Digital Labor.

[4.4] In contrast, several of the other pieces focus on the savvy exhibited by fans. Savage

describes how the fans of Chuck used their knowledge of how television is financed to

convince the network to keep their show on the air by making a visible, public display of

support to brands like Subway that advertised during the show. Joly MacFie provides a

fascinating personal history of punk button badges and zines, discussing how the

relationships between fan producers and artists in that era were relatively symbiotic. Chin

describes the careful navigation of fandom and professionalism that gives the fan site

runners she interviewed access and status. Indeed, status is a key counterpoint to harm,

with Chin, Stork, and Peaslee, ElKhoury, and Liles all noting the desire to increase one's

own social standing and influence in the community as something that should be taken

seriously as a major factor in motivating fans to do such work. Finally, the book reviews also

grapple with the potential for political upheaval that is sometimes hidden in popular culture.

For example, Anne Kustritz's review of J. Jack Halberstam's Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender,

and the End of Normal considers how silly or trashy pop culture vehicles, from romantic

comedies to animated children's movies to Lady Gaga's concert performances might be

martialed toward feminist and queer activist ends.

5. Coming up

[5.1] The next issue of TWC, No. 16, will appear in June 2014 as a guestedited special

issue: Bob Rehak edits a special issue on Materiality and ObjectOriented Fandom. TWC No.

17, to be released in September 2014, is an unthemed issue.

[5.2] TWC welcomes general submissions. We particularly encourage fans to submit

Symposium essays. We encourage all potential authors to read the submission guidelines

(http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/about/submissions#onlineSubmissions).

6. Acknowledgments

[6.1] It is not possible to properly acknowledge the depth of appreciation we feel toward

everyone who has helped make this issue of TWC possible. They have suffered hard

deadlines, late nights, and short due dates. As always, we thank the authors in this issue,

whose original work makes TWC possible; the peer reviewers, who freely provide their time

and expertise; the editorial team members, whose engagement with and solicitation of

material is so valuable; the board members, listed in the journal's masthead, for their

support; and the production team members, who transform rough manuscripts into

publishable documents.

[6.2] The following people worked on TWC No. 15 in an editorial capacity: Megan Condis and Mel Stanfill (guest editors); Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson (editors); Cameron

Salisbury (Symposium); and Louisa Stein (Review).

[6.3] The following people worked on TWC No. 15 in a production capacity: Rrain Prior

(production editor); Shoshanna Green, Karen Hellekson, and Christine Mains (copyeditors);

Rrain Prior (layout editor); and Carmen Montopoli, Amanda Retartha, and Vickie West

(proofreaders).

[6.4] TWC thanks the journal project's Organization for Transformative Works board

liaison, Andrea Horbinski. OTW provides financial support and server space to TWC but is not

involved in any way in the content of the journal, which is editorially independent.

[6.5] TWC thanks all its board members, whose names appear on TWC's masthead, as well

as the additional peer reviewers and Symposium reviewers who provided service for TWC

No. 15: Lindsay Giggey, Simon Lindgren, Juli Parrish, Sharon Ross, Cameron Salisbury, and

Olli Sotamaa.

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tester.html.

Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 15 (2014)

Praxis

Fifty shades of exploitation: Fan labor and Fifty Shades of Grey

Bethan Jones

Aberystwyth University, Wales, United Kingdom

[0.1] Abstract— This exploration of the debates that have taken place in fandom

over the ethics of pulling fan fiction and publishing it as original work draws on the

notion of the fannish gift economy, which postulates that gifts such as fan fiction

and fan art have value in the fannish community because they are designed to

create and cement its social structure. Tension exists between fans who subscribe to

the notion of a fannish gift economy and those who exploit fandom by using it to sell

their pulledtopublish works. An examination of E. L. James's 2012 Fifty Shades

trilogy (comprising the books Fifty Shades of Grey, Fifty Shades Darker, and Fifty

Shades Freed), which began as Twilight fan fiction, in addition to Twilight fan art

sold through sites such as Redbubble and Etsy, demonstrates a tension between the

two modes of fan expression: sale of artworks appears to be an acceptable practice

in fandom, but the commercial sale of fan fic, even when marketed as original

fiction, is widely contested.

[0.2] Keywords— Commercialization; Fan art; Fan fiction; Gift economy; E. L.

James; Twilight

Jones, Bethan. 2014. "Fifty Shades of Exploitation: Fan Labor and Fifty Shades of

Grey. " In "Fandom and/as Labor," edited by Mel Stanfill and Megan Condis, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 15.

http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2014.0501.

1. Introduction

[1.1] In April 2012, UK media was overrun with reports about a book series that had

recently hit the shelves. Fifty Shades of Grey and its two sequels, Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed, authored by British writer E. L. James, proved wildly

successful; much of the media attention devoted to the series focused on its erotic

content. The books center on virginal college student Anastasia (Ana) Steele and her

BDSM relationship with billionaire CEO Christian Grey. A second area of media interest,

however, lay in the series' genesis as Twilight fan fiction. Debates took place in

fandom on the ethics of pulling fan fic and publishing it as original work. Implicit in this

conversation were the notions of a gift economy versus Web 2.0 notions of fans as

prosumers, this making evident the tensions between these concepts of fan

production.

[1.2] James originally wrote and published Fifty Shades of Grey and its sequels as a multichapter fan fic under a pen name. The fic was well known in the Twilight fandom;

it had been published on FanFiction.net before moving to James's personal Web site

after FanFiction.net removed the work for violating its terms of service on mature

content. After this move, the series was picked up by The Writer's Coffee Shop

(http://www.thewriterscoffeeshop.com/), an online publishing house formed by

Twilight fans that specialized in publishing pulledtopublish fan fiction—that is, fan

fiction that has been removed from the Web, has character names and descriptions

changed, and is published commercially as original fiction (Tan 2012) (note 1). The

Writer's Coffee Shop published the Fifty Shades novels in ebook and printondemand

format until they were picked up by Vintage, a Random House imprint, in 2012.

[1.3] Fifty Shades became the bestselling book of all time in Britain, with ebook

and print sales topping 5 million copies by the end of summer 2012, not to mention

the more than 65 million copies it has sold worldwide to date (note 2). Despite this, however, the book has been derided by critics, readers, and Twilight fans alike,

although not always for the same reasons. The Fifty Shades trilogy brought BDSM to a

wider mainstream audience, and with that came both feminist and BDSM critiques of

the series. The blogger Smash (2012) argues that Fifty Shades' promotion of BDSM

reveals the way in which BDSM is culturally identical with domestic violence. Similarly,

an English domestic violence charity called for copies of the book to be burned in

protest against its normalizing of violence against women (Flood 2012a). BDSM

activists have countered these arguments, however, arguing that the series

demonizes, rather than depicts, BDSM. Pamela Stephenson Connolly (2012) suggests

that the character of Grey is "portrayed as a coldhearted sexual predator with a

dungeon (that word has been wisely swapped for 'playroom'), full of scary sex toys.

Worst of all is the implication that his particular erotic style has developed because he

is psychologically 'sick.'" The quality of the writing was also criticized in the

mainstream press. The Guardian announcement that the trilogy had been nominated

for the National Book Award in the category of popular fiction book of the year (Flood

2012b) garnered comments such as, "With the greatest of respect, why don't they just

call it the Shit Books Award?"; "Fifty Shades of Grey is hilarious…full of clichés and so contrived," and "Can I submit a copy of Razzle or Penthouse for the NBA, if it's open to pornography?" Both popular and critical discourses thus denigrate the novels as

lacking in literary merit while positioning the commenters as in possession of more

cultural capital than Fifty Shades' fans (Harman and Jones 2013).

[1.4] Fannish commentary also shares these critiques, criticizing the books for their

bad prose, but fandom also has its own set of concerns, which draw on different

discourses than those of the mainstream press. A search for Fifty Shades of Grey on

the blogging platform LiveJournal reveals a number of communities dedicated to

criticizing the series. Positioned as sites of antifandom (Gray 2003, 2005, 2006), these communities contain links to parodic videos such as those in the "X reads" series as

well as dedicated entries sporking the trilogy (note 3). Among the critiques raised against the series in these entries are Grey's predatory and abusive actions; the

presentation of stalking and controlling another person as romantic; the

misrepresentation of BDSM; and the poor quality of the prose. With the publication of

Fifty Shades of Grey, fans expressed concerns about its impact on fandom. As blogger

audreyii_fic (2012) writes, James is "embodying the worst stereotypes about fan fic

writers. That we're lazy, that we lack talent, that we're leeching off the 'real' creativity

of others. It makes every last one of us look bad." Beyond fandom at large, however,

Twilight fans are critical of James and Fifty Shades. Bonnie, commenting on Aja

Romano's article " 50 Shades of Grey and the Twilight Profic Phenomenon," writes,

[1.5] Terrible plot, terrible character development, and terrible writing are

what "Fifty Shades" is, and many of us in the Twi fandom are truly

embarrassed that this is the fic that puts us on the map. There are far better

writers in the Twi fandom who deserve this success—Debra Anastasia and

Jennifer DeLucy are a few. Unfortunately this poorly written and poorly

edited soap opera that was "published" to line James's and TWCS's [The

Writer's Coffee Shop] pockets gains fame. It's a truly sad day for our

fandom…On the other end of this is the growing number of our writers

leaving our community, either pulling published and WIP fics in the hopes of

becoming the next E. L. James, or out of disgust for the now mercenary

attitude of some writers. Some have, in fact, posted that if you want to know

the end to their story you have to "buy the book." What makes a fandom

work is the respect and trust that the writers and readers have for one

another. James and TWCS have betrayed this, and many of us fear this will

destroy the fandom we love so much. (March 26, 2012;

http://www.themarysue.com/50shadesofgreyandthetwilightprofic

phenomenon/#comment476564778)

[1.6] For fans, then, the success of Fifty Shades raises concerns beyond those

evidenced in mainstream media. The series is not simply badly written, poorly

researched, misrepresentative of BDSM, and antiwoman; it is also not representative

of fan fiction and is potentially damaging to fandom. These conversations have been

largely ignored by the mainstream press and framed through the lens of fan

exploitation.

2. Fan production and the gift economy

[2.1] The fannish gift economy may be used as a framework for understanding how

fandom can function in opposition to a capitalist economy. Fan cultural production is

perhaps most commonly thought of—at least in the wider media—in relation to fan

fiction, but within fandom, it takes many forms. From fan fic to videos, meta to fan

art, and icons to memes, the range and style of fannish work is as varied as the fans.

Much academic work on fan production to date has drawn on Henry Jenkins's concept

of textual poaching. Jenkins positions fans as active consumers of media products and

challenges the existing stereotypes of fans as "cultural dupes, social misfits, and

mindless consumers" (1992, 23). He further argues that fans "actively assert their

mastery over the massproduced texts which provide the raw materials for their own

cultural productions and the basis for their social interactions" (23–24). Jenkins and

other scholars of fandom (BaconSmith 1992; Baym 1998; Chibnall 1997) have made

much of fan activity as resistant, but not everyone is convinced of this analysis.

Christine Scodari and Jenna L. Felder (2000) suggest that some claims of resistance

made in early examinations of fan fiction have been overstated, while others (Kaplan

2006; Parrish 2007) emphasize the role played by the communal nature of fandom.

Melissa Gray (2010) writes,

[2.2] This is why fandom is so rewarding: the vast sharing of points of view

and creativity that makes it our universe, belonging to the fans as well as

the creators of the canon, with our own characters and settings and

situations. I can no longer watch episodes the way TPTB [The Powers That

Be] likely intended. I bring not only my unique experiences to my viewing,

but also the wealth of fanon background material that I've absorbed over the

years.

[2.3] The notion of fandom being the fans' universe speaks to this communal nature.

Fans do not simply upload art, fic, or vids; they also beta read each other's work,

correspond with readers and other writers in mailing lists and discussion forums,

respond to challenge communities, upload fan art as bases for icons, create videos

based on other fans' song requests, meet in conventions, and share advice on

cosplaying, among other activities. These activities work to foster a sense of

community within fandom. This allows those engaged in fannish production to bounce

ideas off each other; it also allows them to work collaboratively to create stories, art,

music, and vids. Seen this way, fan production becomes less about acts of resistance

than a means of reinforcing community. In other words, it forms part of what Lewis

Hyde (1983) refers to as the gift economy. Hyde suggests that gift economies are

distinguishable from commodity culture as a result of their ability to establish a

relationship between the person giving the gift and the person receiving it. This giving

and receiving creates a communal bond founded on a sense of obligation and

reciprocity (Scott 2010). Drawing on Hyde, Karen Hellekson (2009) argues that

fandom can be seen as a gift economy, in that exchange in the fan community is made

up of three elements related to the notion of gift: giving, receiving, and reciprocating.

She argues that the notion of the gift is central to fan economy, not simply because

"the general understanding is that if no money is exchanged, the copyright owners

have no reason to sue because they retain exclusive rights to make money from their

property" (114), but because the gifts themselves have value in the fannish

community. They are designed to create and cement its social structure:

[2.4] Fans engage with their metatext by presenting gift artworks, by

reciprocating these gifts in certain approved, fandomspecific ways, and by

providing commentary about these gifts. Writer and reader create a shared

dialogue that results in a feedback loop of gift exchange, whereby the gift of

artwork or text is repetitively exchanged for the gift of reaction, which is

itself exchanged, with the goal of creating and maintaining social solidarity.

(115)

[2.5] Suzanne Scott (2009, ¶1.1) notes that "recent work on online gift economies

has acknowledged the inability to engage with gift economies and commodity culture

as disparate systems, as commodity culture begins selectively appropriating the gift

economy's ethos for its own economic gain." This commodity culture is perhaps best

exemplified through the case of FanLib, which sought to commodify fan fiction at a

newly created archive. FanLib's creators targeted and emailed fan fic writers and

encouraged them to upload fic to the site in exchange for prizes, participation in

contests leading to epublication, and attention from the producers of TV. As Hellekson

(2009) and Jenkins (2007) both note, FanLib's persistent misreading of community as

commodity alienated fans, illustrating that "attempts to encroach on the meaning of

the gift and to perform a new kind of (commercebased) transaction with fancreated

items will not be tolerated" (Hellekson 2009, 117).

[2.6] However, it is not simply the binary of commodity culture and gift economy

that work with (or against) each other. Milly Williamson argues that fan culture itself is

influenced by two opposing sets of values that dominate the cultural field and that fans

take positions in line with: cultural value based on the profit motive, and cultural

production for its own sake—that is, the gift economy. This can lead to a split in

fandom, with some fans influenced by economic principles and other influenced by

"fandomforfandom'ssake" (Williamson 2005, 119). This split is epitomized in the

controversy over James's Fifty Shades of Grey.

3. Fifty Shades of Grey and the ethics of pulling to publish

[3.1] Analyzing the reactions of fans to the publication and widespread success of the Fifty Shades series reveals two results: fans either applaud James for making the leap

from fan fic to pro fic, or they criticize her for exploiting her fans and bringing fandom

into disrepute. Both of these results are crucial to understanding the debates around

fan labor and fan exploitation, but I will focus on the latter first. To do so, however,

requires a deeper understanding of the genesis of the Fifty Shades trilogy.

[3.2] Fifty Shades of Grey and its sequels were originally written as an allhuman

alternate universe Twilight fan fiction called Master of the Universe, in which Edward

Cullen was a rich CEO and Bella a college student. The fic was well known within

Twilight fandom, and James, writing under the name Snowqueens Icedragon, had

amassed her own fan following. Tish Beaty (2012), Fifty Shades' editor with The

Writer's Coffee Shop, writes that by the time she got into the story, it had over 2,000

reviews on FanFiction.net, and Anne Jamison (2012) notes that although it is difficult

to know for certain how many readers Master of the Universe had—the story moved

from FanFiction.net to James's own Web site—it certainly had tens of thousands, if not

hundreds of thousands, of readers. As Jane Litte (2012a) comments, "During the

height of its popularity, an auction for the series raised $30,000. The author appeared

on a fan fiction panel at the 2010 ComicCon and attended a three day conference in

DC thrown by her fans" (note 4).

[3.3] When James contracted with The Writer's Coffee Shop to publish Master of the

Universe as Fifty Shades of Grey, the work was pulled offline and the Twilightspecific details removed. When the series was picked up by Vintage, its fan fiction origins were

acknowledged but downplayed, with the publishing house issuing a statement

declaring, "It is widely known that E. L. James began to capture a following as a writer

shortly after she posted her second fanfiction story. She subsequently took that story

and rewrote the work, with new characters and situations. That was the beginning of

the Fifty Shades trilogy" (quoted in Litte 2012b). Vintage had asserted that Fifty

Shades was wholly original fiction, deviating substantially from the original fan fic, and

Vintage stated that Fifty Shades and Master of the Universe were two distinct pieces of

fiction. In March 2012, however, the Web site Dear Author (http://dearauthor.com/)

carried out several comparisons on both pieces (figures 1 and 2), concluding, "Vintage

says of MOTU and 50 Shades 'they were and are two distinctly separate pieces of

work.' Turnitin (an internetbased plagiarism detection tool used by schools and

universities) says they are 89% the same" (Litte 2012b). Fifty Shades of Grey was

thus not substantively different from the fan fic it had originally been published as—a

point that remains a bone of contention for James's critics.

Figure 1. Screen shot of Turnitin comparison of Fifty Shades of Grey and Master of

the Universe posted on Dear Author Web site, March 13, 2012. [View larger image.]

Figure 2. Screen shot of comparison of Master of the Universe and Fifty Shades of

Grey posted on Dear Author Web site, March 13, 2012. [View larger image .]

[3.4] The central issue in relation to fan exploitation and labor is that fan fic readers

and reviewers did some of the work in creating Master of the Universe, but James took

sole credit for its success. The role that the fannish community played in shaping what

would become Fifty Shades of Grey, often discounted by the mainstream media, which

asks how other fan fiction writers can become pro, is discussed and contested within

fandom. As Has notes, "E. L. James has used and taken advantage of Twilight fandom,

yes she's got her fans and supporters but overall she's left a huge wankfest on her

road to publication…when you are writing a FF [fan fic], you are writing for that

fandom and the universe which you love, no profit should be made from it because

isn't that is [ sic] taking advantage and using a fanbase to get a step up" (March 13,

2012; http://dearauthor.com/features/industrynews/masteroftheuniverseversus

fiftyshadesbyeljamescomparison/#comment356698). Ros expresses a similar

viewpoint:

[3.5] I cannot imagine ever taking one of my fan fics and rewriting it as

original fiction. Not even the ones where I invented my own characters and

plots, let alone the ones where I used characters from the source material

and imagined them in new situations. Not because I am afraid that I would

be breaking copyright—I'm pretty confident I could do a good enough job of

the rewriting to avoid that—but because I would be breaking the trust of my

fannish readers. Those were the people for whom I wrote, the people who

loved the same fandoms I did and wanted more from them. They were the

people who encouraged me and gave me feedback and let me do my

learning and making mistakes without giving up on me. Those stories were

freely offered and I was grateful for every single person who read them,

commented on them or recommended them to others. In some way, those

stories belong to my early readers as much as they belong to me. I do think

that this is a huge difference between the way that fan fic works and the

way that published fic works. Readers are much more involved in the

process. Feedback comes with every chapter. Writing prompts are set and

challenges posed by readers. And so on. It is an interactive process in a way

that published writing is not. So if I were a Twilight fan who had read MOTU,

I would be feeling seriously betrayed by the author. (March 13, 2013;

http://dearauthor.com/features/industrynews/masteroftheuniverse

versusfiftyshadesbyeljamescomparison/#comment356702)

[3.6] Sarah Wanenchak (2012) notes that "given that fannish works are driven

primarily by collective love for a particular media property, there is a sense among

most members of fandom as a whole that the seeking of monetary gain from fannish

works is not only legally questionable but sullies the respect that fans ideally have for

the object of their fandom." She suggests that this collaborative process—the

production of work, its consumption, the production of a response, its consumption,

the production of new work—is the point at which copyright issues intersect with the

ethics of fan culture and necessitate the consideration of prosumption. Discussing

prosumption—that is, the simultaneous role of being a producer of what one consumes

—George Ritzer and Nathan Jurgensen (2010) argue that Web 2.0 facilitates the

process through such examples as Wikipedia, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and the

blogosphere. With the advent of these new media technologies and the way in which

they affect fannish engagement with objects of fandom, producers are becoming more

reliant on fan labor to build their brand and increase their product's longevity, as

Alexis Lothian (2009) points out:

[3.7] In recent years, media producers have explicitly sought to solicit fan

participation as labor for their profits in the form of usergenerated content

that helps build their brand. Many fans perceive these developments as a

desirable legitimation of fan work, but they can also be understood as an

inversion in the direction of fannish theft. Rather than fans stealing

commodified culture to make works for their own purposes, capital steals

their labor—as, we might consider, it stole ideas from the cultural commons

and fenced them off in the first place—to add to its surplus. (135)

[3.8] Fifty Shades complicates the concept of prosumption, however, as James "built

a following within a community founded in part on the explicit rejection of monetary

gain in favor of fannish love, and then used that community and the work it helped her

to produce in order to make a name—and a fair amount of money—in mainstream

publishing" (Wanenchak 2012). James thus straddles the line between producer and

fan, stealing from commodified culture to create Master of the Universe while stealing

from fandom to make a success of Fifty Shades . The question of whether James's fans

would have been so involved in supporting and reviewing her work if they were aware

that their efforts would result in her profit—although ultimately unanswerable—is

nevertheless a valid one, and I would suggest that these debates suggest a subtle

change in the relationship between fan and producer. From being in a position of

cultural marginality where they poach from texts, fans are now the ones potentially

being poached from (Andrejevic 2008; Milner 2009). Milner (2009) notes that as active

audiences become more prevalent, producers of media texts are fast recognizing the

value of courting niche groups of prosumers. Julie Levin Russo (2009) details how

Video Maker Toolkit invited fans to be part of the Battlestar Galactica TV reboot

(2004–9) by making a 4minute film, the best of which would be aired on television—

in return for fans giving up their rights to the vids. J. J. Abrams, creator of Alias

(2001–6) and Lost (2004–10), has commented that he regularly reads Internet fan

message boards; he claims that listening to realtime audience feedback gives his

shows some of the characteristics of a live play (Andrejevic 2008). Similarly, James's

reading of reviews and engaging in a dialogue with fans creates an author/editor

dynamic. Andrejevic (2008, 26) suggests that as a result of this more active, critical

approach to viewing, "fan culture is at long last being deliberately and openly

embraced by producers thanks in part to the ability of the internet not just to unite

farflung viewers but to make the fruits of their labor readily accessible to the

mainstream—and to producers themselves."

[3.9] Andrejevic (2008) further suggests that the promise of accountability, which

forums like Twilighted (http://twilighted.net/) and FanFiction.net

(https://www.fanfiction.net/) provide, also works to foster identification on the part of audiences with the viewpoint of the producers. Similarly, James's involvement in

fandom provided her with the opportunity to use fans' knowledge while also causing

fans to identify her as one of them. Tish Beaty notes that the Twilighted forum on

which James posted Master of the Universe is where James built her original fan base.

She writes, "The Bunker Babes are a group of Fifty Shades fans that supported and backed James no matter what direction she took the story. They promoted Fifty

Shades all over Twitter and the fan fiction communities. They were her sounding board

and cheer squad, and were a force to be reckoned with" (2012, 300). The role of the

Bunker Babes here aligns with that of fans participating in a gift economy. As

Hellekson notes, "In terms of the discourse of gift culture, fandom might best be

understood as part of what is traditionally the women's sphere: the social, rather than

the economic" (2009, 116; emphasis added). By promoting and backing James, the

Bunker Babes were also policing the boundaries of fandom and its subjects, with their

motivations being "ultimately about protecting, rather than controlling, the ideological

diversity of fannish responses to the text" (Scott 2009, ¶3.2).

[3.10] Reading the Bunker Babes' support in terms of prosumption, however, results

in a different understanding of the relationship between them as fans and James as a

producer. As Jenkins (2006, 134) notes of the delicate relationship between the

producer and productive consumer in the age of the active audience, "The media

industry is increasingly dependent on active and committed consumers to spread the

word about valued properties in an overcrowded media marketplace, and in some

cases they are seeking ways to channel the creative output of media fans to lower

their production costs."

[3.11] Fandom's position in Web 2.0 and its use of new media technologies means

that publishers working with pulledtopublish fic already have a source of fan labor

that they can use to build their brand and increase their product's longevity. However,

"enlisting unpaid customers to coproduce the products and services, which are

converted to money in the market…corresponds to the expropriation of surplus value

from consumer labor" (Zwick, Bonsu, and Aron 2008, 180). James's use of fannish

resources, coupled with her failure to acknowledge that support, is, for some fans, an

exploitation of fandom. As AlwaysLucky1 notes,

[3.12] I only bought the book because I did [read] MOTU when it was

original. I paid to buy Fifty because I felt I was supporting a fan fiction

"friend." She didn't "force" me to buy her book, as you put it. But, I am

disappointed that she didn't somehow acknowledge her fellow fan fictioners

in the Fifty acknowledgement…Here's the thing. She's a writer. As she was

writing the fan fic…people were reviewing it. That's why her publishing

company paid attention to her. There were so many reviews on the story

already. She was getting alot of positive feedback on something so racy. As

she posted a new chapter every week. We reviewed every week. As much as

she fed us, we fed her with our comments AND suggestions in how far she

could or couldn't take the story. (May 29, 2012;

http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/fiftyshadesofgreywayback

machine_b49124#comment540658007)

[3.13] However, some fans, such as Debra Conway, have applauded James for

turning fan fiction into successful original fiction:

[3.14] Do you honestly think the "captive audience" of Twilight is the same

one buying Fifty Shades of Gray? Not unless they've found Twilight fan fic.

I'm laughing out loud. And that she somehow cheated her fan fic readers,

somehow forcing them to buy her books?…Ms. James wrote an original story

—the characters themselves and their experiences were original. She used

names from her favorite book and put her story online for free for a while.

She still owns the story. Period. James is now a published, successful author.

Her book busted the boundaries for the acceptance of what women read and

is a phenomenon. I applaud her. You should too. (May 28, 2012;

http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/fiftyshadesofgreywayback

machine_b49124#comment540641358)

[3.15] The possibility of fans monetizing their own modes of production is posed by

some scholars as an alternate form of preemptive protection. Abigail De Kosnik (2009,

123) argues that the "rewards of participating in a commercial market…might be just

as attractive as the rewards of participating in a community's gift culture" and puts

forth the idea that fans initiating the commercialization of fan production "gifts"

insiders, rather than outsiders, the right to profit. Scott (2009, ¶1.3) suggests that De

Kosnik's model "clearly identifies the value of fan labor and encourages fans to develop

a competitive model to profit from their labors of love rather than continuing to feed

an industrial promotional machine." I examine this next.

4. Twilight fan art on Redbubble and Etsy

[4.1] John Fiske (1992) notes that while most fan producers gain considerable

prestige in the fan community, with a few exceptions, they earn no money for their

work; the main historical exception appears to have been fan artists who sell their

paintings and sketches at conventions and fan auctions. The increase in commerce

sites such as Redbubble (http://www.redbubble.com/) and Etsy

(http://www.etsy.com/), however, has resulted in what Brigid Cherry calls "an

extremely commercial niche for entrepreneurial fans" who sell, among other things, Tshirts, prints of artwork, jewelry, shoes, bags, notebooks, yarn, and patterns (2011, 137). Cherry's analysis of vampire fandom knitters on Ravelry

(https://www.ravelry.com/) demonstrates the ways in which fan production can be

commodified, as members are able to sell patterns in the marketplace, with costs

ranging from $3 to $12. However the arguments that Cherry makes can also be

applied to other fanproduced objects. Just as ads often appear in vampire fan knitting

forums, and just as yarns produced by a specific dyer develop a cult status, becoming

highly sought after in their own right, so too do specific producers of fanmade jewelry

or Tshirts become well known within their specific fandoms. Furthermore, sites like

Teefury (http://www.teefury.com/) and Qwertee (http://www.qwertee.com/), which

offer fandesigned Tshirts for $8, feature interviews with the artists and encourage a

cult status by both limiting the sale of Tshirts to a 24hour period and encouraging

users to vote for their favorite designs for potential sale again in the future. This cult

status is dependent not only on the quality of the products but also on the shared love

of the fannish text between producer and consumer. This problematizes the

market/nonmarket dichotomy that appears in accounts of fandom as a gift economy

and in fandom's reaction to pulledtopublish fan fic.

[4.2] The ethical prohibition against selling work in such a way as to exploit fans is

further problematized when taking into account these artcommerce sites. Historically,

fanzines were sold at cost rather than for profit, a result of the ethical prohibition

against profiting from the object of fandom. The argument could similarly be made

that the sale of fanproduced objects like jewelry is acceptable because the items cost

money to make: electrons are perceived as free, but creating a Harry Potter–themed

scarf requires buying yarn and equipment. It is possible that any money made selling

these items only covers the cost to produce them, thus positioning these products

similarly to fanzines. The rise of sites like Redbubble problematizes this, however,

because the cost of producing the item falls on Redbubble itself rather than on the fan

producer. On Redbubble, artists upload designs and choose which items they would

like those designs applied to. An artist might create a Doctor Who image using digital

art packages, upload the design to the Web site, and specify that she would like it to

be made available on Tshirts, bags, and phone cases. There is therefore no cost to

the fan producer in creating the piece of work; instead, Redbubble takes a percentage

of the sale cost. In that respect, posting work to Redbubble is closer to fan fiction than

physical fan art. Yet the sale of fannish goods on Redbubble remains acceptable

among fans, whereas pulling fan fic to publish it professionally is not.

[4.3] Sal M. Humphreys (2008) suggests that we should consider "hybrid market

environments where there is no such clear distinction between the social and

commercial economies—where instead they coexist in the same space, and where

some people occupy different positions over time within the same markets."

Humphreys's analysis of the Ravelry discussion boards suggests that the social

matters as much as the commercial and the financial, and indeed in many ways

influences both production and consumption. Similarly, Etsy's community forums

function to provide a social space where Twilight fans can discuss the text while

sharing links to the Twilight items they produce and sell. The "Show me your favorite

Twilight item" thread in the Twilight Ladies group contains both discussion of favorite

characters (with Edward and Jacob featuring strongly) and links to items to buy.

Members of the group thus combine fannish interaction with commercial interaction,

often with no line dividing the two.

Figure 3. Mrs. Edward Cullen ring by danandesigns, sold on Etsy. [View larger image.]

[4.4] This fannish/commercial interaction also takes place on sites that are more

commonly thought of in relation to fan fic. The twilight_crafts LiveJournal community,

for example, encourages sales posts and stipulates that all items must be related to

Twilight (note 5). Many users of the community who also sell Twilightthemed items

on Etsy offer free shipping to buyers directed to their shop by the LiveJournal site,

thus recognizing the fannish gift economy while commodifying fan labor. As

Humphreys (2008) notes, "It's possible to identify people who both give away and sell

their content. People negotiate and occupy positions within social, reputational, gifting,

and commercial economies—sometimes simultaneously, sometimes sequentially."

[4.5] The rise of epublishing is of particular interest in relation to these producers,

as is its role in the success of the Fifty Shades series . J'Aimee Brooker (2012) notes

that epublishing gives writers much more control over their work in terms of content,

distribution, marketing, and pricing. She writes that the financial benefits of epublishing are also markedly higher than those of traditional publishing: "Selfpublished authors listing their product with Amazon are privy to a royalties rate of 70% compared to 15–20% of royalties offered by traditional publishing houses."

Penguin's 2012 acquisition of the selfpublishing platform Author Solutions

(https://www.authorsolutions.com/) also suggests that traditional publishers are

becoming aware of the opportunities afforded by selfpublishing platforms. At the time

of this writing, Amazon had just announced that it was launching a new platform,

Kindle Worlds, where fan fic writers can upload and sell their work. Kindle Worlds

enables companies such as Warner Bros. to license their copyrighted material and

allows fans to publish their fan fic as ebooks for the Kindle ereader

(https://kindleworlds.amazon.com/). Royalties will be paid to both the original author and the fan fiction writer. Although full details remain to be published about how this

will work, fans may be able to publish their work on Kindle Worlds while also posting it

on free sites such as FanFiction.net, thus negotiating and occupying a range of

positions (note 6).

[4.6] Not all fan entrepreneurs give away and sell their content, however.

Redbubble, although containing forums similar to Etsy's, is much more commercial in

appearance. Whereas Etsy forges its identity as a site for handcrafters, Redbubble

markets itself as a site for independent artists. Cornel Sandvoss (2005) contends that

while fandom per se is not necessarily gendered, specific fan activities, interests, and

communities are often marked as feminine or masculine. The differences between the

Etsy and Redbubble sites appear to reinforce that gendered difference—and the ways

that fan labor is commodified on each of them.

Figure 4. Superiorgraphix's "Bite Me Edward" Tshirt on Redbubble. [View larger

image.]

[4.7] Craig Norris and Jason Bainbridge (2009) note in their study of cosplayers that

the wearing of "tshirts or caps with logos such as the Autobot or Decepticon insignias

from the Transformers [is] connected to a more general otaku experience, marking

out people as fans of a certain manga/anime property." Similarly, wearing Tshirts

featuring logos such as the team emblem from Gatchman or the NERV symbol from

Neon Genesis Evangelion marks the wearer as a member of fandom, although through

a play with identity where others have to be able to recognize the design to recognize

the property being emulated. This consumption as classification (Holt 1995) is a

fruitful way to understand fan consumption of art, clothing, and jewelry. Unlike the

purchase of a book of pulledtopublish fan fiction, fannishthemed clothing and

accessories mark the wearer as belonging to a specific group or community. Ruth

Deller and Clarissa Smith (2013, 937), in an analysis of reader responses to Fifty

Shades of Grey, note that "the ebook format and the paperback books' understated

cover designs…were cited by several of our readers as a key appeal of the novels,

either for themselves or others, because they 'disguised' the books' content." Among

the responses given by readers were the following:

[4.8] You can read it on your kindle and nobody knows that you're reading

it! The classy covers also help because they don't look like genre fiction,

more like literary fiction. (Reader 5)

[The covers are] Genius. If you know what the images represent, then it's

very cheeky, a subtle reminder of all their "kinky fuckery." But if you don't,

it's completely innocuous, and not cheesy. (Reader 10)

They are anonymous, fit quite well with books but not too embarrassing on

train! (Reader 47) (quoted in Deller and Smith 2013, 937–38)

[4.9] These responses suggest that a Fifty Shades community did not exist among

readers of the books; there were no moments of recognition between passengers on

the subway, as there would between Neon Genesis Evangelion fans—although Deller

and Smith do point out the contradiction that lies at the heart of the anonymizing

covers and their recognizability. There are, however, Fifty Shades–themed items on

Etsy and Redbubble, suggesting another contradiction between readers consuming the

books anonymously on Kindle and readers consuming fanmade items.

Figure 5. FrillsByStudioK, Fifty Shades of Grey party signs on Etsy. [View larger

image.]

Figure 6. JcDesign, "Keep calm and stow your twitchy palm" Tshirt on Redbubble.

[View larger image.]

[4.10] The alternative consumption objects made and sold on Etsy and Redbubble

have a similar amount of prestige attached to them as to the more traditional,

resistive forms of consumption objects such as fan fic. Unlike fan fic, however, in

which fans express their love of a text, fans are expressing a love of a brand in the

consumption of fanthemed clothing and accessories. This difference accounts for the

differing reactions to pulledtopublish fan fic and fan art sold online. Pulledtopublish

fan fic, unless its origins become part of the metatext surrounding its publication, loses

the identification with fandom that it had as freely available fan fic. This distancing

from the source object causes some of the tension evident within fandom when

authors profit from a formerly free piece of work. It is not—or not simply—the fact that

it had been published for free online that fans take issue with. Nor is it the fact that

the author is profiting from another writer's work. Rather it is the refutation of the

fannish space that comes when fan fic is published as original fic that becomes

problematic. This can be contrasted to the reinforcing of fandom and community that

comes from buying and wearing a piece of clothing or jewelry. In discussing Liverpool

fans, Brendan Richardson (2011) notes that

[4.11] the manner in which goods are used, and the prestige attached to

them, varies in accordance with the need to maintain the sacredness of fan

identity and experience. A clear distance must be established to separate

sacred fan identity from the profane marketplace. In the case of members of

the "Real Reds" Liverpool fan community, coproduction that relies

excessively on consumption of official merchandise is regarded as far less

meaningful than coproduction that utilises alternative consumption objects,

such as home made banners, as part of the process of production.

[4.12] Richardson (2011) suggests that to these fans, the market is seen as

something incapable of delivering unique experience. This sentiment applies equally to

The Writer's Coffee Shop's appropriation of Master of the Universe and its subsequent

publication as the Fifty Shades series: it becomes simply one more erotic novel rather

than an important contribution to Twilight fandom.

[4.13] The market of The Writer's Coffee Shop or the market of the football premiere

league are thus different than the idealized fan marketplaces of Ravelry and Etsy.

Cherry (2011) suggests that these sites exist outside of the industries that see fans as

an exploitable market, but no such space seems to exist for fan fic writers (note 7).

Where does this leave those authors who pull to publish, as well as the fans who see

that as a betrayal? Aja Romano (2012) writes,

[4.14] Fans are extremely divided as to whether publishing fan fic as

original fic is a natural way to capitalize on a welldeserved fan following, or

whether it's a betrayal of the principles of free exchange that keeps fandom

healthy and independent. It's probably somewhere in the middle. Lots of fan

fic authors have converted their fandom audience into a wider audience for

their original writing. And even if they didn't profit directly from a single fic

with the names and settings changed, they still profited immensely from

fandom experience. Fandom gave them writing workshops, networking skills,

critiquing experience, and maybe even professional connections. All of that is

a form of profit. And then there is actual published fan fiction, such as movie

adaptations, branchoff comic universes, and franchise tieins. The truth is

that the line between fan fiction and commercial fiction has been blurry for

centuries, and neither original fiction nor fan fiction are in any danger of

vanishing as a result of the overlap.

[4.15] Romano's final point—that neither pro fic nor fan fic is in danger of

disappearing—although valid, misses the point of fan arguments against pulling to

publish. Twilight fans felt betrayed at James's earning millions of pounds from their

communal input, but they were also concerned at the impact that the publication of a

not very wellwritten work would have on fandom. Many fans were at pains to point

out that good fan fic does exist and that fan fic writers are not lazy, unimaginative, or

unable to come up with their own original fiction.

5. Final thoughts on the self-commodification of fandom

[5.1] The positioning of fans as resistant, which has dominated much of the field of

fan studies, has tended to be interpreted as a form of ideologybased consumer

resistance. As Richardson (2011) outlines, the possibility that the motives for fan

resistance are grounded in the same root causes that inspire fan commitment and

loyalty has not necessarily been fully explored. Nicholas Abercrombie and Brian

Longhurst (1998) have applied the term "petty producers" to those who have moved

from being enthusiasts to becoming fulltime producers, thus placing fans as producers

and fans as consumers at opposing ends of their incorporation/resistance paradigm. I

find this too simplistic. Abercrombie and Longhurst (1998, 140) suggest that as the

enthusiast moves out of enthusiasm toward being a petty producer, "he/she is

returned more to general capitalist social relations; as producers, they are as much at

the mercy of structural forces as the consumers at the other end of the continuum."

Constructing producers and consumers or commodity culture and gift economies in

binary terms, however, is problematic. Garry Crawford (2004) suggests that it is

preferable to view modern fan culture as an adaptable and dynamic social "career,"

arguing that individuals in sports fandom increasingly draw on sports for both identity

construction and opportunities for social performance. As more traditional sources of community identity decline, the sense of community offered by contemporary sports

becomes increasingly important and is increasingly commodified. Richard Barbrook

(2005) argues that "moneycommodity and gift relations are not just in conflict with

each other, but also coexist in symbiosis," even though each model "threaten[s] to

supplant the other." Commodity economies and gift economies are thus already

enmeshed. Paul Booth (2010, 131) refers to this as a digigratis economy and

suggests that it "assumes that both [market and gift] economies are crucial for the

functioning of a complete economic system, and work together, always. Fans create

'gifts' out of the products they purchase in the market economy, and the market

caters to the fan culture by offering free services that fans can interpret as gifts."

[5.2] This analysis is still largely problematic because it means engaging in a

capitalist system, as Cornel Sandvoss (2011) notes,

[5.3] Enthusiasts in any realm of cultural production are thus confronted

with the inescapable logic of the capitalist system: fans whose textual

productivity holds commercial value to third parties, yet wish to opt out of

the system of monetary exchange and preserve their fandom as noncommercial space, inevitably open themselves to the exploitative utilisation of their productivity by others. Only if they subscribe to the principles of

capitalist exchange in the first instance, are fans able to avoid such

exploitation, yet thereby erode the pleasures of the fanobject of fandom

relationship based on control and appropriation of fan texts that operate

outside such principles and that cannot accommodate the material

separation between fan and fan object manifested through monetary

exchanges. (54)

[5.4] This selfcommodification of fan labor is not necessarily a good thing when fan

labor is already exploited. De Kosnik (2009) asserts that the commercialization of fan

practice might actually be empowering for female fan authors, but this suggests that

fan production is only legitimate when viewed through a capitalist lens. Not all fans

wish to become media producers, just as not all fans are working in resistance to

corporations when writing fan fiction.

[5.5] Writing about the Battlestar Galactica Video Maker contest, Will Brooker

suggests that the largely female practice of fan fic remains resolutely separate from

the new dynamic of producercontrolled fan content. He also notes, however, that

[5.6] the fan fiction community now has an urgent choice to make:

whether its separate sphere should tool up and monetize its practice before

someone else does; or stubbornly float free, refusing to engage with

mainstream structures, sticking to its own currency and maintaining an older

notion of "fandom" at a time when the word's meaning may have shifted

beyond its previous definitions. (2014)

[5.7] The rise of pulledtopublish publishing houses, epublishing, and initiatives like

Amazon's Kindle Worlds appears to be forcing some fan fic writers to monetize their

practices, and James's success with Fifty Shades of Grey clearly demonstrates that fan

fic writers can make a lot of money by adapting their works. The difference in attitudes

toward the sale of fan art and the sale of fan fic is still prevalent within fandom,

however, and these new developments are likely to continue the debate. Certainly the

cost of producing fanmade items such as jewelry plays a role in the different attitudes

between the sale of fan art and the sale of fan fic, although the cost of labor in making

scarves, jewelry, and artwork may be equally as unpaid as the cost of producing

fiction. However, a larger difference comes in the transparency offered by the sale of

fan art. Fan fic is published and freely available online; to pull it only to republish it as

original fiction suggests an element of dishonesty on the part of the author. In

contrast, fan art—particularly in the form of jewelry or clothing—is rarely offered for

free elsewhere first. Further, the role that the fannish community plays in the creation

of fan fic is more defined than in the creation of fan art. Although fan artists may post

their pictures and ask for advice or feedback, this is much less common than fan fic

writers posting works in progress or using beta readers to review their work. For one

person to profit from the work of a community, as James did with Fifty Shades, can be

seen far more clearly as exploitation.

[5.8] Finally, I wish to return to the idea of pulledtopublish fan fic being a

refutation of a fannish space; I question whether this raises larger issues than simply

the commodification of fandom. Pulledtopublish fan fic loses the identification with

fandom that it had as freely available fan fic. Fifty Shades of Grey, Sylvain Reynard's

Gabriel's Inferno (2012), Christina Lauren's Beautiful Bastard (2013), and myriad

other pulledtopublish works are no longer tied to the fannish objects that inspired

them. Furthermore, the adoption of pen names and the removal of the text's fannish

history from writers' Web sites increase the divide between the fannish and the

professional writer. If we accept the idea of fandom as a gift economy, as well as the

notion that fandom involves some level of community, the ability for one person to

profit from a potentially multiauthored piece of work is indeed problematic. This has

wider implications for fandom than producers exploiting fan labor.

6. Notes

1. "Pulled to publish" is also referred to in fannish circles as "filing off the serial

numbers."

2. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows remains the topselling UK book of all time in terms of print copies, with over 4 million sales. As of fall 2012, Fifty Shades of Grey

had sold 3.8 million print copies and 1.5 million ebooks in the United Kingdom (Singh

2012). By year's end, over 65 million copies (print and ebook) of the trilogy had been

sold worldwide, and James was named the publishing person of the year by Publishers

Weekly (Deahl 2012). It was an unprecedented honor for a single author to have made

the greatest impact on the publishing industry in a single year.

3. Sporking involves writing and posting mocking and/or critical commentary on a

work which is considered extraordinarily bad. Closely linked to hate reading, in which a

text is read for the express purpose of ridiculing it or indulging the reader's disdain for

the author and/or the content, the term takes its name from the utensil, which is the

right size and shape to dig out an eye.

4. The auction in which James participated was The Fandom Gives Back, which raised

money for Alex's Lemonade Stand Foundation for Childhood Cancer. James wrote an

outtake that sold for over $28,000 (http://teambbbof.blogspot.co.uk/2010/06/teaser

formotuouttakeforfandom.html?zx=7e2ae4fe5dbca010). Reports on James's

attendance at the fan convention are less clear, however, with comments on Jami

Gould's "When Does Fan Fiction Cross an Ethical Line"

(http://jamigold.com/2012/03/whendoesfanfictioncrossanethicalline/)

demonstrating the disagreements that happen within fannish communities. The

importance of community is enforced through both of these activities, however, with

auctions a common element within fandom, particularly in response to disasters like

the 2010 Haiti earthquake. This raises further questions about the ethical nature of

pulling to publish, particularly as James attended ComicCon and the Washington, DC,

conference in her honor, where she had a free vacation, before publishing Fifty Shades

of Grey. How is it ethical for the author to accept these as a fan fic writer but

unacceptable for her to profit from rebranding the fan fic?

5. It is interesting to note, however, that the guidelines also state that anyone posting

pictures of the items they have for sale recognizes that they are also sharing their

ideas, which may inspire other users to recreate their work.

6. For some early analyses of Kindle Worlds, see Caroline Siede, May 22, 2013

(http://www.avclub.com/article/finallyfanscanmakemoneyfromtheiremgossipgi

98106), Rebecca Pahle, May 22, 2013 (http://www.themarysue.com/amazonfanfic

kindlewords/), Gavia BakerWhitelaw, May 22, 2013

(http://www.dailydot.com/business/kindlewordsamazonfanfictionproblems/), and

the Fanlore wiki, n.d. (http://fanlore.org/wiki/Kindle_Worlds).

7. Kindle Worlds' terms and conditions place it within the bounds of the traditional

market rather than the idealized marketplace of Etsy and Redbubble. Among the

information provided in its announcement is the following: "When you submit your

story in a World, you are granting Amazon Publishing an exclusive license to the story

and all the original elements you include in that story. This means that your story and

all the new elements must stay within the applicable World. We will allow Kindle

Worlds authors to build on each other's ideas and elements. We will also give the

World Licensor a license to use your new elements and incorporate them into other

works without further compensation to you"

(http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1001197431).

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Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 15 (2014)

Praxis

The media festival volunteer: Connecting online and on-ground fan

labor

Robert Moses Peaslee, Jessica El-Khoury, and Ashley Liles

Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas, United States

[0.1] Abstract— In this initial attempt to bring volunteering, or what we call onground fan labor, into the ongoing discussion of fan productivity, we examine volunteer motivations as elicited through interview and participant observation data

collected at a 2012 genre film festival, Fantastic Fest, held in Austin, Texas. This

case study is a first step toward integrating the volunteer and fan labor literatures

and interrogating the role of social capital and civic engagement in volunteerism. We

conclude that the media festival (a term intended to encompass such sites as film

festivals and fan conventions) is a site of particular and emergent importance for

those studying the audience's increasing delivery of free labor.

[0.2] Keywords— Media anthropology; Media conduction; Media rituals

Peaslee, Robert Moses, Jessica ElKhoury, and Ashley Liles. 2014. "The Media

Festival Volunteer: Connecting Online and Onground Fan Labor." In "Fandom

and/as Labor," edited by Mel Stanfill and Megan Condis, special issue,

Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 15.

http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2014.0502.

1. Introduction

[1.1] We examine individuals' motivations for participating in fan labor situations as

volunteers (Wilson 2000). We also investigate relationships between volunteering for

fan labor opportunities and social capital gain, and how the accrual of social capital

may lead to civic engagement while, importantly, still creating advantages for

corporate players in the media industries. In considering volunteerism as fan labor, we

suggest that the latter can be either an online or onground experience (Cool 2010).

Online fan labor occurs via interactive media devoted to objects of fan esteem (De

Kosnik 2009; Hellekson 2009), while onground fan labor is best illustrated by the act

of volunteering at a mediarelated festival or event, for example a film festival, a

comic con, or a technology expo. Because such events are increasingly ubiquitous and

consistently underresearched, we emphasize the latter and examine how the festival

or convention serves as a mechanism where such onground fan labor can occur; we

remain mindful, however, of the notion of collocation (Cool 2010), wherein

communities exhibit both online and onground interaction, since the festival

environment also provides opportunities for the building and sharing of texts that

utilize networked media in such a way as to labor for the festival's industrial partners.

[1.2] We approach these goals through qualitative research data gathered at

Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas, in September 2012, including participant observation

and interviews conducted with 18 Fantastic Fest volunteers. Our data suggest that

paying attention to volunteerism—much like paying attention to fan fiction—is crucial

for understanding fandom in the context of an increasingly decentralized and userpowered, though not userowned, media industry, and that consideration of the media festival or fan convention environment is crucial for understanding relationships

between the volunteer impulse, social and cultural capital, and power. We conclude

that volunteering at Fantastic Fest, and by extension at other mediarelated festivals,

is an ambivalent activity: while it promotes the building of social capital and thus aids

a kind of civic engagement, it often simultaneously encourages those communities to

provide unpaid, onground labor to the industries of which volunteers one day hope to

be a part.

[1.3] We engage three overarching dualities as a way of exploring the slash at the

core of this special issue's theme. We feel this slash is important for seeing binaries as

heuristics rather than empirical realities, a feeling underpinned by an extensive

literature in fandom and gender studies and supported, we think, by our data. The first

duality, social capital and/as civic engagement, we examine in order to understand

how each is said to be constituted (particularly in the volunteer literature) and how

each one relates to the other. Secondly, we consider fan labor and/as volunteerism

and review the important distinctions and similarities between them, a consideration,

we would argue, that is overdue. Finally, we come back to the duality of online and/as

onground labor in an attempt to account for the opportunities and complications

presented by the collocation of a networked social space, on the one hand, and a

placed node in a network of media, access, and power, on the other.

2. Duality 1: Social capital and/as civic engagement

[2.1] The existing literature on volunteerism, the bulk of which is quantitative,

examines the definition of a volunteer, effects of participating, and motivations for

involvement. First, volunteerism is frequently defined as a prosocial behavior, meaning

it is a voluntary action that a person commits with the sole intention to benefit others

(Marta and Pozzi 2008; Marta, Pozzi, and Marzana 2010; Omoto and Snyder 1995;

Clary et al. 1998). Several authors discuss the common characteristics of volunteers,

noting correlations between extroverted personalities and high levels of volunteer

participation. Specifically, volunteers tend to have higher levels of emotional stability

and a more positive sense of selfesteem, attitude, and ethics; they also tend to show

more interest in the wellbeing of others (Marta and Pozzi 2008; Smith and Nelson

1975; Allen and Rushton 1983). Unsurprisingly, satisfaction with volunteering tends to

correlate with motivation to continue volunteering; increases in selfesteem, selfacceptance, and selfefficacy also correlate with recurrent volunteer involvement (Degli Antoni 2009; Marta, Pozzi, and Marzana 2010). In terms of motivation, desires

for professional advancement, networking, personal growth and development,

opportunities to socialize, and altruistic feelings are said to promote volunteer behavior

(Marta and Pozzi 2008; Farzalipour et al. 2012; Luping 2011; Ullrich 1972). Finally, in

an interesting tension (given the primary attention given altruism in the volunteer

literature), desire for social capital is also cited as a main reason for volunteer

participation (Degli Antoni 2009; Sherman et al. 2011; Marta and Pozzi 2008). This

tension is emblematic of volunteer encounter, we argue, at many levels: between

altruism and selfinterest, between producer and volunteer, and between social capital

and civic engagement.

[2.2] According to Pierre Bourdieu, social capital is "the aggregate of the actual or

potential resources, which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or

less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance or recognition" (1986, 248).

This definition has two dimensions: first, that there is a distinct quality instilled in the

resources; second, that the social relationship permits people to obtain capital

belonging to organizations. For example, via social capital, festival volunteers can

directly obtain admission to movies—material benefit or economic capital—during film

festivals such as Fantastic Fest. Also, through social capital, individuals can increase

their cultural capital through networking and being affiliated with a particular

organization. For instance, volunteering at a film festival allows people to network with

a multitude of talent, organizers, and other publics. Social capital in these terms thus

benefits the individual most directly, while benefits to the social whole may be present

but largely indirect.

[2.3] Bourdieu (1986) posits that social capital is made up of group membership and

the connectedness developed from the social networks (quoted in Siisiainen 2000). He

further argues that social capital works through the entirety of the relationships among

the different individuals who share the same interests instead of the simple monolithic

power of the group. It is for this reason that groups poor in extrinsic social capital,

such as fan fiction communities, can nonetheless be made up of members more or less

rich in intrinsic social capital: "the creation of social capital through participation in

voluntary associations is not indifferent to the motivations which induce the volunteer

to start his/her unpaid activity…[but] the intrinsic motivations enable people to extend

their social networks by creating relations characterized by a significant degree of

familiarity" (Degli Antoni 2009, 1). Therefore, although people are often assumed to

volunteer because of the individual benefits gained, following Bourdieu we might

consider how the resourceful associations make social capital a communal occurrence, particularly in the embodied context of onground fan labor. In addition, social capital

assumes identification, the mechanism that develops the capacity for symbolic

exchange (Bourdieu 1998); it is in this sense that the symbolic constitutes distinction

between groups or classes and hence becomes operationally significant.

[2.4] Robert David Putnam defines social capital as "features of social life—networks,

norms, and trust—that enable participants to act together more effectively to pursue

shared objectives" (2000, 65). Putnam distinguishes between vertical and horizontal

social networks. A horizontal network "bring[s] together agents of equivalent status

and power" (1993, 173). Two components make up the horizontal network as specified

by Putnam. The first is sociability, which emphasizes the intrinsic elements of social

relations or linking experiences. Simply having others around gives people a sort of

gratification, but there is also an expectation that the relationship involves some kind

of mutual feeling, a shared sense of need for the other. The significance of this type of

relationship is that the people involved are more or less strangers to each other,

because it is through this type of involvement that civic intent and the beginnings of

democratic practices are born (Shah, Rojas, and Cho 2009; Song and Lin 2008;

Wilkinson and Bittman 2002).

[2.5] The second component in the horizontal framework is reciprocity (Putnam

2000). Putnam posits that reciprocity refers to civilized interactions and a willingness

to cooperate fairly with the other. In addition, people engaged in mutual exchange

allow themselves to be submissive to others. While they engage in a type of activity

such as volunteering without immediately wanting something in return, they know that

they will benefit somehow at a later time (Putnam 2000). Thus, reciprocity functions

on the social instead of the individualistic level: one thinks positively of social

interactions with others who share similar interests and are willing to volunteer in the

same event or place. Reciprocity is directly related to trust, in the sense that one is

confident that the other will live up to expectations. According to Putnam, trust is not

unique to intimate relationships; it also exists among strangers who share similar

interests (reciprocity), in what becomes a shared citizenship (quoted in Wilkinson and

Bittman 2002). We can see evidence of this shared citizenship in both online and onground fan labor situations, in which both sociability and reciprocity are needed—the first to desire a relationship and the second to have a shared interest. Between

sociability and reciprocity, trust is formed, and civic engagement may occur.

[2.6] Putnam (1995) proposed that civic engagement can renew a society and can be

achieved through involvement in community organizations; he also focused on the

negative impacts of media use, arguing that increased media usage (for example,

television) results simultaneously in less civic engagement and a decrease in social

capital. Both fan fiction communities and the festival complicate this thesis, since audiences are volunteering their time and building trust in both organizations and each

other. It seems uncontroversial to suggest that media, rather than simply keeping

people atomized in their homes, also provide opportunities for them to intermingle

with people of common interests both online, such as in fan fiction communities, and

in onground spaces such as festivals and fan conventions. Putnam's argument on the

decline of social capital, moreover, focuses on the number of people's civic

organizations instead of the quality of their involvement. This involvement is often

quite deep where fan communities are concerned, and the creation and maintenance

of a contributory impulse within such communities, to the benefit rather than to the

detriment of the corporate producer, is increasingly common.

3. Duality 2: Fan labor and/as volunteerism

[3.1] The literature linking online fan communities to the notion of free labor

(Terranova 2004) is by now well established. Fan fiction forums like LiveJournal are

especially well represented in a discussion that tends to characterize the content at the

center of such communities as gift objects exchanged outside the established

parameters of the commodity structure. As Karen Hellekson points out,

[3.2] Fans insist on a gift economy, not a commercial one, but it goes

beyond selfprotective attempts to fly under the radar of large corporations,

their lawyers, and their ceaseanddesist letters. Online media fandom is a

gift culture in the symbolic realm in which fan gift exchange is performed in

complex, even exclusionary symbolic ways that create a stable nexus of

giving, receiving, and reciprocity. (2009, 114)

[3.3] In such communities, the creation and maintenance of identity discourses

oppositional to the patriarchal, litigious structure of copyright and transaction is quite

common (Hellekson 2009).

[3.4] Over time, numerous corporate players, composed in turn by acquisitive

decision makers at a variety of levels, have taken notice of this activity. This is

unsurprising, of course, but what is more emergent is that this attention has slowly

morphed from being surveillant and penal in nature to being what some commentators

see as a potentially corrosive inclusivity. As Alexis Lothian (2009) suggests,

[3.5] In recent years, media producers have explicitly sought to solicit fan

participation as labor for their profits in the form of usergenerated content

that helps build their brand. Many fans perceive these developments as a

desirable legitimation of fan work, but they can also be understood as an

inversion in the direction of fannish theft. Rather than fans stealing

commodified culture to make works for their own purposes, capital steals

their labor—as, we might consider, it stole ideas from the cultural commons

and fenced them off in the first place—to add to its surplus. (135)

[3.6] Abigail De Kosnik has termed this shift the fan fiction community's Sugarhill

moment (2009, 119), referencing the precedent of hiphop's mainstreaming and

commodification by corporate outsiders rather than the innovators who brought the

form—"a genre fundamentally based on artistic appropriation" (119)—into being. Many

of these appropriative attempts are rather overt, but as Suzanne Scott (2009) points

out, many other corporate practices—what she terms the regifting economy of

ancillary content models—also amount to cooptation. As De Kosnik (n.d.) summarizes

in an essay for Spreadable Media, fan activities "create value for media producers,

distributors, and marketers. And let us not forget that fans are also consumers and

that some of the value they create for media corporations is in the form of their own

spending on media products. Yet…fans are happy to labor for free."

[3.7] Such activity echoes the behavior of volunteers, and volunteerism, not limited

to charity events and fundraisers, often occurs at forprofit events designed to

celebrate a media figure or object. Existing literature asserts that these volunteers

have different motivations for participating than do corollaries in traditional situations.

These motivations are not necessarily tied to altruistic intentions or a desire to achieve

professional advancement (Postigo 2003). Ryan M. Milner states that "many fans are

active, creative, productive participants within the labor system they esteem" (2009,

494). In other words, fan labor is essentially driven by fans' connection to the object

of their fandom. Henry Jenkins (2008) posits that "the media industry is increasingly

dependent on active and committed consumers to spread the word about valued

properties in an overcrowded media marketplace, and in some cases, they are seeking

ways to channel the creative output of media fans to lower production costs" (134).

Milner (2009) suggests that fan laborers see themselves as serving the object of their

fandom, making them eager to participate and not generally expectant of

compensation. In other words, unlike traditional volunteers who help with a nonmediarelated fundraising event because their actions benefit others, these fan laborers are characterized as driven in large part by a kind of hedonistic objectpleasure, a desire for the accumulation of cultural capital, or some amalgam of both.

Part of our interest here is to investigate how the particular interface of mediarelated

persons and practices, on the one hand, and embodied presence within social and

physical space, on the other, produces a powerladen, circulatory reaction within both

online and onground spaces.

4. Duality 3: Online and/as on-ground spaces

[4.1] Fan labor, moreover, can take place in either online or onground spaces.

Jennifer Cool uses the term on ground, rather than offline, to more accurately

describe "the contemporary anthropological subject implicit in the challenges of the

posthuman" (2010, 3), where one finds it increasingly difficult to be truly offline. She

further uses the notion of collocation to describe the empirical lifeworld of the

postmodern subject, one in which both mediated and facetoface relationships

intertwine and complicate the facile division between online and offline subjectivities.

While individuals can participate in fan labor through online fan communities or

forums, there are also designated places where highly involved fan labor activities

occur. Thus such communities are often—though certainly not necessarily—collocated.

Several taxonomies (Abercrombie and Longhurst 1998; Fiske 1992; Sandvoss 2005)

situate visitation and pilgrimage activities toward the most involved end of the fandom

spectrum. The fan often feels and communicates a sense of pilgrimage that creates a

special ritualized event upon visitation (Peaslee 2013, 812) and generates attendant

cultural capital within the community, thus spawning hierarchical relationships within

the fandom (Peaslee and Miles 2012). Event attendance is an intimate experience;

fans enjoy the opportunity to be close, in terms of both physical and emotional

proximity, to a text or object they esteem. Meanwhile, this committed involvement by

fans helps the industry achieve its goals in costefficient ways (Pearce 2006; Postigo

2003; Taylor 2006).

[4.2] Media festivals are prime examples of contexts where fan labor can be

encouraged and maximized. Here volunteers can enjoy pleasurable incursions into

discursively constituted regions of a very special quality, movements across "the

boundaries that emerge when a place is recreated as something special via

mediation…boundaries [which] are reified through the embodied practice of visitors"

(Peaslee 2013, 812). By volunteering, the fan laborer is at least partially backstage,

both spatially and socially nearer to the fandom object than the average fan, even

more so—and this is particularly important—than the fan who pays for entry to the

event. Fan laborers are behind the scenes, engaged in the text, and the festival

provides the opportunity to achieve that higher level of fandom, an opportunity to

engage in practices that Peaslee (2013) suggests reify power structures and flows.

Media conduction, which describes the simultaneously consumptive and productive

practices of the festival attendee, is defined as "the movement of information due to a

difference in level of access (from a region of higher access to a region of lower

access) through a transmission medium (e.g., festivals, conventions, events) that

simultaneously reifies the value of that access" (Peaslee 2013, 811). Fantastic Fest, as

only one example among many, offers graduated incentives depending on the number

of hours the person labors, as well as giving preference of job selection to returning

volunteers over newcomers. These incentives are used as a kind of leverage, since

returning volunteers are well placed to further transcend boundaries and gain greater access to the backstage.

[4.3] Our questions, then, derive from these dualities and attempt to account for the

ambivalent nature of the fan labor/volunteering relationship. Do volunteers at media

festivals build social capital and thereby experience civic engagement? If so, how does

such an outcome—positive from the perspective of democratic ideals—live alongside

the possibility that volunteers at such events are coopted to the benefit of powerful

media interests in the name of the objects, personas, and boundaries they produce?

We have attempted to address these questions with a casestudy, fieldwork approach

influenced by the tenets of constructivist media anthropology (Clark 2004; Peaslee

2009).

5. Participants and procedure

[5.1] Qualitative research methods were used to capture volunteer motivations,

incentives, and experiences. One of the authors attended Fantastic Fest as a firsttime

volunteer while another returned for the third time as a festival attendee. We

conducted participant observations and interviewed 7 female and 11 male volunteers

who ranged from 18 to 45 years of age and came from varied backgrounds and career

paths. There were approximately 150 volunteers at Fantastic Fest, though never that

many at any one time. Some volunteered in the morning or afternoon, others during

the evening and latenight shifts. Since not all of the volunteers were available to

interview during the 4day data collection period, the sample is composed of 12

percent of the total number of volunteers and twothirds of the active volunteers

working at any one time.

[5.2] Fantastic Fest, started in 2005 with a collaboration between Tim League, CEO

of Alamo Drafthouse Cinemas, and Harry Knowles, owner and principal writer of the

renowned fan blog Ain't It Cool News, is the largest genre film festival in North

America. Specializing in a very particular brand of international, niche content

featuring horror, science fiction, martial arts, and fantasy films, Fantastic Fest is held

in the highest esteem by aficionados from around the world and is one of only three

North American festivals granted membership status within the prestigious European

Fantastic Film Festivals Federation (http://melies.org/). While its profile has grown

steadily over the past 7 years—the presence of mainstream films and celebrity guests

serving as a yardstick—Fantastic Fest has maintained a relative intimacy when

compared to other festivals such as Sundance or Toronto. With the exception of a few

screenings scheduled in larger theaters and the many themed parties for which

Fantastic Fest is equally known, the festival is housed entirely in the Alamo Drafthouse

theater on S. Lamar Boulevard in Austin. The characteristics of Fantastic Fest are thus

somewhat unique in that the community surrounding it is highly localized in both a

geographic and psychographic sense: it is very much a product of Austin's selfdescribed weirdness while also serving as an annual, multinational mecca for fans of (mostly) independent genre film (note 1).

6. Findings: Volunteers motivations and fan labor

[6.1] Review of interview transcripts and field notes by each of the three authors

revealed several overarching categories of volunteer motivation. The categories, in

order from most prevalent to least, include the accrual of cultural capital; the

establishment and maintenance of communities; the attainment of social capital in the

form of friendships; overt attempts at professional advancement; achievement of

proximity to ritually significant people and practices; hedonism; and altruism.

[6.2] Volunteering as a means toward accruing cultural capital. By a considerable

margin (44 coded instances), the accrual of cultural capital (experiences and material

artifacts) emerged as the leading motivation for engaging in fan labor in the Fantastic

Fest environment. Responses were coded as examples of an attempt to increase

cultural capital when they included as reasons for volunteering the opportunity to

consume a discrete text (such as an elusive film or a video game) or genre, to

purchase controlledaccess materials (such as limitededition prints of special movie

posters), or to meet and engage a particular actor or director. "There are a lot of

movies here that you couldn't see anywhere else," said Couper, a volunteer and

previous employee of the Drafthouse. "People talk about them a year later and [I say]

'I already fucking saw that,' that's awesome." Couper is interested in the object itself

(the film), the rarity of which in the mainstream film marketplace becomes a marker

for its value. But the act of seeing the film becomes even more valuable because he

sees it earlier than do others in the community. In terms of the collection of festival

relics, while no interviewees expressed an interest in material culture, it is significant

that each morning a line formed outside the Mondo poster shop, connected to the

Alamo Drafthouse, long before it was open for business. The availability of new posters

was publicized through online channels only briefly before the posters became

available, so attaining a poster (and standing in line to do so) became implicit markers

of status within a subset of the festival community. Louis, as an example of the last

tendency in those coded as seekers of cultural capital, has always

[6.3] been interested in the people that work on the movies themselves—

directors, writers, producers and camera operators, all the way down to the

assistant and the actors…I've always been fascinated by all these people who

are responsible for creating something that I like, so this is the opportunity

to actually either say "Hi," or "Thanks…keep up the good work."

[6.4] "Elijah Wood is fantastic. He is always here," said Couper. "I haven't seen him yet, but it will be good to see him again. He actually recognizes me, and we would sit

there and mostly talk about movies and smoke cigarettes." Interestingly, many

volunteers explicitly derided volunteer or attendee motivations related to simple

proximity. "There is this easiness. There aren't people fighting to see celebrities, there

aren't people doing that kind of stuff," said Samantha. Just seeing celebrities, which is

of course dependent on the onground, physical proximity afforded by the festival

environment, is not enough. "We are here," Samantha summarizes, speaking for her

community, "because we appreciate film, and I think that is part of the reason why

Fantastic Fest is so great." One of the ways this community identifies itself is through

its low propensity toward being starstruck, and rank celebrity worship was seen by

many core Fantastic Fest constituents as inauthentic behavior.

[6.5] Volunteering as a means toward establishing ritual communities. In 27

instances, responses were coded as examples of volunteerism related to feelings of

group affinity. These interviewee comments referred to the value obtained through

volunteerism as it related to the community of volunteers, likeminded audiences,

Alamo Drafthouse devotees, or Austin residents. Moreover, such responses often saw

the sustenance of these communities as the ultimate end for volunteering. Many

volunteers anticipate reuniting with the same people year after year. "You meet a lot

of cool people," said Couper. "I have friends that I have made through this festival

that don't live in town, and when they come in they call me." Cool people, it becomes

clear, are those that share an affinity for the genres, filmmakers, and practices that

populate the Fantastic Fest environment. This affinity is related, of course, to the

aforementioned attitudes toward outsiders or newcomers who see the festival space as

one where access or proximity to celebrity is the paramount value of attendance or

volunteerism. When volunteers express a motivation related to the maintenance of the

community, they name not a particular film, practitioner, or genre specifically, but

rather the social space of the festival as a kind of ritual center, one where the normally

deviant practices of avid appreciation of violence, cosplay, or rabid overconsumption of

film material are seen as quite normal. John states, "I moved here 5 years ago from

Athens, Georgia and in my search for trying to find a place to belong here in Austin,

volunteering kind of create[d] a safe space to meet new people and, you know, find

commonalities and kindred spirits in a large metropolitan city." While it is beyond the

reach of this article to explore systematically the degree to which this motivation for

volunteering is akin to the feelings many fan fiction writers have expressed regarding

their respective communities (Busker 2008; Ross 2008), we would suggest

provisionally that a similarly supportive, reassuring structure is in play here.

[6.6] Volunteering as a means toward establishing friendships. Nearly as many (26)

responses referred clearly to the act of connection as a means toward establishing or

maintaining bonds or friendships. While the previous category is limited to those

responses displaying a kind of pleasure in simply being affiliated with or surrounded by

other brand loyalists, in this case what is celebrated by respondents is the opportunity

afford by Fantastic Fest to meet new people or reconnect with old friends, a

reconnection that often happens only at annual intervals at Fantastic Fest. In these

cases, friendship and fellowship are ends unto themselves. According to Samantha, for

example, "What is so great about the festival circuit in Austin is you see a lot of

familiar faces. So I work with the same people at other festivals [as well as] Fantastic

Fest." Many volunteers enjoy volunteering at several different events together.

Bethany, a lead volunteer, adds that, as volunteers, "we say we are going to hangout

during the year, which we never get around to, so around Fantastic Fest, it is almost

like a highschool reunion. We've been volunteering 3, 4, 5 years together, and it is a

great time to spend with those people again every year." Fantastic Fest leaves a

strong impression on volunteers, and participants will tell their friends about their

experiences there. Several firsttime volunteers reported intentions of encouraging

their friends to join them next year when they return.

[6.7] Volunteering as a means toward achieving professional advancement.

Conversely, responses were coded as emblematic of a desire for professional

advancement when they expressly illustrated the utility of the Fantastic Fest physical

and social space for furthering their careers. Some volunteers aspire to attain

recognition: "I'm shooting other [material], and just going to submit everything I get,"

said John. "Hopefully [Fantastic Fest] will throw some of the stuff I shoot on the blog."

Other volunteers said they wanted to gather film clips for a video they were working

on. John said, "I'm on the audio visual [group]…trying to get archival footage for the

Alamo to use in the future." Murph, an aspiring movie maker said, "All I want to do is

make movies. My dream is that I want my movie to be in the next Fantastic Fest."

[6.8] For the slightly less ambitious (or perhaps slightly more realistic), the festival is

seen to provide a source of business and networking opportunities. Marcus, a fourthyear returning volunteer, said he returns because he can meet people in the field and create relationships. Marcus said he and a few friends moved to Austin a few years ago

to network and start film careers. At Fantastic Fest they've "networked with so many

[screenwriters and directors] who have been willing to look at our work and actually

talk shop with us," said Marcus. "That alone has been worth coming here every single

year." Another aspiring filmmaker, Janet, hopes to submit a film for next year's film

festival. "I'm working on a feature right now. I have a script that I want to produce,"

said Janet. "I'm hoping it will make it next year here, maybe." Festivals also provide

opportunities to observe or participate in the daily functions of hosting events beyond

the film industry. University of Texas event planner L.T. said that part of her

motivation to volunteer at the festival was to "get a chance to learn more about the

event planning side, because that is what I do professionally. So, I get to see the real professionals do it, and no one does it better than the Alamo Drafthouse does."

[6.9] Volunteering as a means toward establishing spatial proximity. Proximity as a

generator of value from the perspective of the volunteer respondent refers to those

responses that mention the aura and positioning of media persons present in the

festival space. Says volunteer John, "Fantastic Fest seems like it's got a lot of…you

know, you meet a lot of wonderful people…like I just shot Tim Burton with my camera

and he walked right past me and stuff. And last year…what's his name, from Lord of

the Rings? I forget the actor's name, but it was fun shooting him." The name, for John, is not important, or at least not as important as the celebrity status behind the name.

The list of Fantastic Fest talent mentioned in our interview transcripts includes Burton,

Wynona Ryder, Elijah Wood ("what's his name, from Lord of the Rings"), Kevin Sorbo, Joseph Gordon Levitt, Doug Benson, and Ron Perlman, among others. It is clear that

for many volunteers the opportunity to encounter such people—to collect such

encounters as other fans might collect comic books, indicating their similarity as forms

of cultural capital—is paramount. "My favorite part is famous people. I love famous

people," said Nick. "I want to be around them. I got to see Tim Burton, Winona Ryder

and Doug Benson. That made my day. So that's why I'm here."

[6.10] Hedonism. A few respondents summed up their motivations with reference to

rather simple notions of fun that seemed to be positioned on a spectrum between, on

the one hand, enjoying an exciting environment to, on the other, partying hard and

taking advantage of sensory stimuli. "The staff and volunteers want to keep it fun and

unstuffy as possible, which I really appreciate," said Nicole. "It just complements the

Austin atmosphere in general." Fantastic Fest volunteers—many of whom work other

events in the city like SouthbySouthwest—believe the festival lacks the traditionally

high tensions of those experiences.

[6.11] Being a volunteer has many tangible rewards as well. Not only do volunteers

get free admission to the event, a value between $200 and $300, but Fantastic Fest

volunteers also receive a limited number of movie and dinner vouchers that they can

use any time after the event, and the volunteer coordinator hosts a party for the

volunteers. Volunteers are also welcomed into the same parties and special events as

are badge holders and VIPs, provided there is room. "The closing night parties are

fucking awesome, like free booze, free food," said Couper. Marcus added, "There is

hard work, but [if you] party fifty times harder you will not see the likes of these

parties at any other festival, period."

[6.12] Altruism. Responses were coded as altruism when they exhibited a desire to

do good for others free from attendant motivations unrelated to altruism. A key finding

in our data is that only one instance of altruism occurred in the interview transcripts.

Nicole, when asked if she would like to snap any pictures of celebrities while she's volunteering, replies, "No, I would never do that…I just like being helpful and knowing

that I've got people in positions that if they need a lot of back up, I can be helpful." In

this sole instance, a desire to help others was found unattached, meaning within the

same conversation turn, to one of the other response categories listed above. To be

sure, in several other cases, expressions such as "I like to help" or "it feels good to help" were found in the transcripts, but their connection to other motivations through

linguistic linkages within single conversation turns ruled them out as truly altruistic.

This of course begs a much longer analysis of how we define altruism more generally;

we have simply chosen to operationalize it in this way in order to more clearly define

the degree to which volunteerism is self or other directed in this context.

7. Conclusion

[7.1] Pierre Bourdieu claims that social capital is the "aggregate of the actual or

potential resources, which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or

less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition—or in other

words, to membership in a group—which provides each of its members with the

backing of the collectivityowned capital, a 'credential,' which entitles them to credit,

in the various senses of the word" (1986, 190). James S. Coleman (1998) suggests

that social capital depends on relationships beyond the individual. Instead, it depends

on group interactions. The relationship of the group members is bounded by two main

principles: trust and common values.

[7.2] Several of the volunteers felt that volunteering at the Fantastic Fest allowed

them to be part of a group or community indicative of strong social capital. Austin's

festivals appear generally to encourage volunteerism and engagement in public

activities (note 2), a strategy underpinning civic engagement in the relevant state,

municipal, and taste communities. That people volunteer is reassurance for the greater

community that people want to help out, supporting their society both at the personal

level and, indirectly, at the economic level. "I think that being a participant here," said John, "being a stakeholder here and trying to make something better each year than it

was before [creates] a positive vibe, it's an upward spiral." In addition, the festival not

only builds a community among its participants, but also adds to the value of the

greater Austin community and culture. Hence, volunteering appears to support civic

engagement, in the sense that communities are being built and sustained through the

labor of enthusiastic participants.

[7.3] Volunteering, or onground labor, has traditionally been characterized as

prosocial behavior exhibiting the potential to "reduce destructive levels of selfabsorption" (Oman, Thoreson, and McMahon 1999, 303). People who volunteer assist

others, which can be considered a "selfvalidating experience" (Krause, Herzog, and Baker 1992, 300). Likewise, volunteering can increase individuals' selfefficacy, their

belief that they can make a difference in their communities, which past research

indicates can protect against depression (Mirowsky and Ross 1989). Previous studies

have indicated that an increase in selfconfidence due to volunteering has the potential

to boost satisfaction in life (Harlow and Cantor 1996). There are many advantages to

volunteering, whether direct (through admission to a premiering movie) or indirect

(boost of selfefficacy). Online fan labor, meanwhile, as shown by several scholars

(BaconSmith 1992; Jenkins 1992; Jensen 1992), far from a hermetic pathology, has

provided opportunities for the creation of communities wherein (mostly female)

participants can "reach out and be heard" (BaconSmith 1992, 6).

[7.4] Despite these similar outcomes, previous literature has suggested a substantive

difference between the motivations of the traditional volunteer and those of the fan

laborer. Volunteerism is frequently defined as a prosocial behavior, meaning it is a

voluntary, altruistic action a person commits with the sole intention to benefit others

(Marta and Pozzi 2008; Marta, Pozzi, and Marzana 2010; Omoto and Snyder 1995;

Clary et al. 1998). But the literature also suggests that this altruism is tempered by

desires for professional advancement, the accrual of social capital, and other tangible

benefits. Our research suggests that festival volunteer motivations are not so different

from those of traditional volunteers. Fan laborers also act out of a limited sense of

altruism most often connected to rather more pragmatic benefits such as meeting new

people, networking, personal growth, and the accumulation of social capital. Although

the cultural capital attained through particular modes of consuming the object of their

fandom was shown to be the primary reason for their volunteering, Fantastic Fest

volunteers appear to encounter further advantages beyond the replication of cultural

capital hierarchies and the sale of merchandise.

[7.5] At the same time, however, the data also suggest that the onground context

of Fantastic Fest, like the fan labor undertaken in online spaces devoted to the

circulation of fan works, is a kind of generator for productive activity on the part of

audiences activated by their roles as volunteers. Volunteers occupy a border position

between the festival insiders and outsiders, a position described by Peaslee (2013) as

an attending rather than a media or absent public, which is particularly well situated

for and particularly encouraged toward conductive activity such as word of mouth,

blogging, Tweeting, and other forms of online and onground value creation. Like the

journalists, badge holders and ticket buyers who attend the festival, volunteers

generate considerable value through these activities, activities made to seem like play

rather than labor via the incorporation of the community (festival) identity into that of

the volunteer (fan) self: Fantastic Fest, to those involved in its successful presentation,

becomes a reflection of who they are. Hellekson (2009) posits that there are three

components that define a gift community: the giving, the receiving, and the

reciprocation. Like the fan laborer, volunteers give their time and efforts, they receive

incentives, such as access to movies, stars, parties, theater passes, and they gain (or

at least they perceive the attainment of) a reciprocal, authentic relationship with

Fantastic Fest and Alamo Drafthouse. We would argue that this distinction between the

perceived and actual accrual of status visàvis the media publics is a key dimension of

understanding the onground fan labor of volunteering (and, for that matter, paying)

members of the attending publics, and further research on this dimension of fan or

audience culture is overdue. A critical approach remains crucial in exploring the degree

to which power holders are utilizing the fan event to maximize the perception of status

while managing carefully, if not minimizing, its actual attainment; moreover, we

should remain observant of the degree to which onground fan labor is either

consciously or effectively disruptive of this effort. That volunteers' activity is at once

valuable to them, crucial to the success of the festival and, by extension, supportive to

the entertainment industry (as a corporate structure, an amalgamation of practices,

and a network of individuals), and potentially, given the above results, to civic

engagement, emphasizes the ambivalent nature of the volunteer impulse as a

dimension of fan labor.

8. Notes

1. Fantastic Arcade, a simultaneous gaming festival and convention devoted to

promoting independent game design, began running concurrently in an adjacent space

in 2010.

2. SouthbySouthwest Film, celebrating its 20th year in 2013, designed all of its

prescreening bumper films as tributes to their volunteer pool.

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Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 15 (2014)

Praxis

Chuck versus the ratings: Savvy fans and "save our show" campaigns

Christina Savage

University of Texas, Austin, Texas, United States

[0.1] Abstract— Fans rarely have the opportunity to affect the production of their favorite television shows, but sometimes they can save them. "Save our show" campaigns provide an example of fan labor that can influence the decision to renew or cancel a show. These campaigns have previously appeared as fans wrote to the networks en masse and sent in paraphernalia related to the show. The "Finale and a Footlong" "save our show" campaign for NBC's Chuck (2007–12) demonstrates a change in the way that fans understand their role in television consumption and production. By examining this campaign and situating it within a history of these types of campaigns, we can see how the "save our show" campaign for Chuck emphasizes the role of fan as both television viewer and advertisement consumer in a way that privileges the power of the fan as never before.

[0.2] Keywords— Fan community; Fan labor; Television

Savage, Christina. 2014 " Chuck versus the Ratings: Savvy Fans and 'Save Our Show' Campaigns." In "Fandom and/as Labor," edited by Mel Stanfill and Megan Condis, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no.

15. http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2014.0497.

1. Introduction

[1.1] The relationship between fans and the television they love is often complicated—even more so when dealing with a potential cancellation of their favorite show. The literature on fan culture is rich with examples of fans claiming ownership over their favorite media texts. The production of fanmade paratexts surrounding these media products further suggests the idea of fans' perceived ownership, which becomes particularly complicated when the fans' favorite television shows are rumored to be canceled. Often in this situation, fans attempt to persuade network executives to keep airing the show in a "save our show" campaign.

[1.2] In examining fanrun "save our show" campaigns, we can arrive at a better understanding of the power relationships existing between fans and network executives as television audiences continue to become more fragmented. "Save our show" campaigns have had a long evolution as fans adapt their practices when what may have worked previously fails. These campaigns, which have moved from writing letters to sending in items connected to the show, emphasize fan fervor as a way of indicating the size of the audience. At the heart of these campaigns lies fan labor, which continues to change along with the differing types of campaigns.

The "save our show" campaign for NBC's Chuck (2007–12) established a new style of campaign that focused its attention outside the network. By placing this "save our show" attempt within the history of these types of campaigns, we can better understand the changing power relationship between fans and executives.

2. Chuck versus the Nielsen ratings: Questions of labor in fan viewership and

support

[2.1] There have been many fan campaigns to save a failing show throughout television history. Some failed as a result of their inability to organize cohesively; some did not show a network that there was enough support for a show; some that succeeded only managed to bring a show back for a few episodes. These campaigns typically stem from a place of fans wanting their favorite show to continue, and as more

information about the industry and the way it operates becomes available to these groups, fans can improve their strategies for "save our show" campaigns. In the US broadcasting industry, networks develop programming that will serve as a way to attract a certain type of audience so that advertisers can market their

products to that audience. A better understanding of "save our show" campaigns comes from not only an understanding of the mutually beneficial structures in place between networks and advertisers in support of television programming but also from an understanding of television as having three legs of support: the networks, the advertisers, and the audience.

[2.2] Marxist political economic thought is useful to understand this approach to studying television structures. Sut Jhally (1987) looks at watching television as a form of labor not unlike the labor performed in a factory. The ability to perform labor is highly valued within this model. With regard to television, television audiences sell their watching powers to advertisers in the same way that laborers sell their ability to work to capitalist organizations. In Jhally's model, television programming exists as a mediator between advertisers and audiences. Television shows provide space for advertisers to reach a particular audience, but the programming itself needs to be attractive to the specific audience desired. This model helps to explain why

"save our show" campaigns work at all. If audiences are not attracted to the programming provided, networks are unable to obtain advertisers to finance the shows and thus fail as a mediator between production and consumption. The evolution of "save our show" campaigns has led to negotiations between audiences and advertisers for television content as a result of the fans' increased understanding of their power as television viewer and consumers. If fans recognize their power and desirability as an audience, their ability to negotiate as active consumers can often provide them with a stronger voice and a more reliable method of persuasion in obtaining the renewal of their favorite show.

[2.3] Fan campaigns to "save the show" position fan labor within this Marxist construct as the ability to consume the products advertised. Their labor then is twofold: the labor of television viewing itself and the labor of selling the size and desirability of the audience in exchange for desirable programming content. Fans are selling their viewing and consuming powers to the networks through their efforts to convince them that there is an audience for the show and that the audience is demographically desirable. This is necessary when the size of the audience is less than ideal. As campaigns evolved, the fans moved beyond demographics to sell their labor to advertisers as a more effective way to negotiate for desired content. In their campaigning, fans are working to sell their viewing and buying power to the television networks as a way to leverage their desired programming.

3. Chuck versus the past: Previous "save our show" campaigns

[3.1] "Save our show" campaigns are a fairly common practice for muchbeloved shows with small audiences. These campaigns have taken different forms as fans have learned various methods to successfully persuade the networks to save their shows. One of the earliest "save our show" campaigns was for the cult television show Star Trek in 1968. In its second season, the ratings began to decline, and fans began to hear rumors that the show would be canceled. They wrote letters to the producers and NBC to assure them that there was a desirable audience watching the show. The network ultimately received over 115,000 letters from fans to save the show, and the show was successfully renewed for a third season ( Broadcasting 1968; Beck 1968a, 1968b).

[3.2] Although fans wrote in multitudes to save Star Trek, the "save our show" campaign may have been entirely unnecessary. The show had reasonable ratings in its time slot, and TV critics at the time wrote that NBC had other shows that were more at risk of cancellation ( Broadcasting 1967; Lowry 1968). Moreover, NBC

needed no persuasion to believe that the audience was desirable; they already knew that the show attracted an appropriate demographic: young, well educated, and passionate (Pearson 2011). Show creator Gene

Roddenberry also continued to promote the desirability of the viewers by positioning them as a quality audience, suggesting that despite its small size, the demographics were more appealing than those of other, larger shows (Kmet 2012). For the third season, the show was moved to a more difficult time slot and ratings fell, leading to the cancellation of the show (Gowran 1969). Despite the desirable audience, the show did not have the audience size to justify renewal.

[3.3] In working to save Cagney & Lacey (1981–88), fan labor was able to make the show more visible and attract a larger audience. The "save our show" campaign in 1983 resulted in the construction of the Viewers for Quality Television (VQT), a group that worked to save various television productions that they deemed were of high quality (Swanson 2000). Cagney & Lacey, which was based on a popular 1981 TV movie, was initially canceled after its first season until the producers convinced the executives to attempt a second season that replaced star Meg Foster (TV Guide News 2002). The second season, even with the replacement, Sharon Gless, did not fare better in ratings or critical reception, and the show was canceled again in May 1983

(Swanson 2000). It was after the second cancellation that the campaign to save Cagney & Lacey began. Fans like Dorothy Collins Swanson wrote letters to various members of the production team to find out what they could do to encourage renewal and were told to write letters to the president of CBS, Bud Grant (Swanson 2000). Swanson, the founder of the VQT, wrote over 500 letters that summer, under various names, to persuade the executives that many people were watching the show (Swanson 2000). She also recruited

friends and family to help write letters, and they in turn recruited others. The campaign was published by the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization of Women, who urged their members to write (D'Acci 1994).

The letterwriting campaign, as well as the response from television critics, helped increase public awareness of the show, and ratings for the summer episodes of Cagney & Lacey started to improve (Swanson 2000;

O'Connor 1984). When the show was eventually renewed in late September, Bud Grant and other CBS

executives credited the letters they received as part of the reason they were renewing the show (Swanson 2000). By persuading the network that the show had an audience and increasing the show's visibility, the fans of Cagney & Lacey, through their letterwriting efforts, saved the show for another season. The show continued to perform well in the ratings and ran for five more seasons. Swanson went on to work to replicate the success of the campaign for other quality shows with the VQT.

[3.4] Julie D'Acci (1994), in her discussion of the Cagney & Lacey "save our show" campaign, emphasizes the role that producers of the show played in orchestrating the show's renewal. While not ignoring the impact that the letter campaign had, D'Acci suggests that the producers ultimately organized the fan labor force while also working to increase advertising for the show. The campaign occurred along with increased marketing to build the audience. Although fan labor was influential in showing the network that there was support for the show, the higher ratings may have been as a result of increased advertising between March and April 1983.

[3.5] In examining the letters written by Cagney & Lacey fans working to get their show renewed, D'Acci (1994, 94) uncovered that the women writing these letters understood "how they fit into the economic operations of the TV industry and how they functioned as an 'audience' in the network's definition of the term"

even though these writers often "mocked the network's notion of audience and bemoaned the fact that, coupled with a devoted adherence to ratings, it resulted in such series as The Dukes of Hazzard" (1979–85), a show that was seen as typical TV fare and not quality television. Despite their frustration with the network's perceptions about audiences, the women who were trying to save Cagney & Lacey worked to make themselves seen as a desirable audience as a way to capitalize on their viewing power. Writing letters ultimately worked for the Cagney & Lacey campaign because they could leverage the letter writers' power as an audience to be both viewers and recruiters for the show. They effectively sold their viewing power to the network and were rewarded with the programming they desired. The fan labor, coupled with the publicity surrounding their campaign and the increased advertising, helped enlarge the audience for the show and ensure that the show would be saved.

[3.6] The campaigns for Twin Peaks (1990–91) and Jericho (2006–8) are examples of what fans moved to after letters proved ineffective. After the initial cancellation of Twin Peaks in the middle of the second season ( Entertainment Weekly 1991), fans sent in 10,000 letters, a log, a plastic hand, several boxes of doughnuts, and chess pieces, items that signified to the network the fans' attention to detail and devotion to the show (Boone, n.d.). ABC chose to air the remaining six episodes of the second season as a result of the fan campaign, but they canceled the show after continued low ratings. After Twin Peaks' early example of fans sending objects to the network to convince the executives to save the show, the fans of Jericho made that strategy the centerpiece of their own campaign. The show, which premiered in 2006, had lackluster ratings and was canceled in May 2007 (Adalian 2007). Utilizing online message boards, fans of the show grouped

together and decided to send peanuts to the network to protest the cancellation. Ultimately, over 20 tons of peanuts were shipped to CBS executives (Elber 2007; Filgate 2007; Hyman 2010). In June, in response to fan efforts, Carol Barbee, executive producer of Jericho, announced that the show would return for eight episodes in midseason with the hope that ratings would rise and the network could pick up additional episodes of the show (Fernandez 2007). However, when the show returned to the air, the ratings did not improve, and despite fan effort, the show was canceled (CBS News 2009). Fans fought for a third season and sought responses from other channels, hoping they would pick up the show, but their continued efforts were unsuccessful, and the second season was also the final season. For both shows, fans labored to save their show through not only writing letters to assure the network that an audience existed but also showing their devotion to the show by sending in objects referencing the show. The acts demonstrated the fans' close attention to detail, positioning them as an engaged audience.

[3.7] The campaign for Farscape taught fans that they did not have to rely only on the network to save the show. Observing that writing letters and sending items to networks to demonstrate audience size and intensity was no longer working as effectively, fans began to focus on appealing to different needs of the industry.

Farscape (1999–2003), an international joint production by the Jim Henson Company in the United States and Nine Films and Television in Australia, was a science fiction show that was canceled by cable channel SciFi (now SyFy) in 2003 as a result of a declining audience and high licensing fees (Hughes 1999; Wright 2004).

Fans, with some guidance from the show's producers, started to work to bring the show back, focusing on what they could do to sell their viewing power as an audience (Ross 2008). In her analysis of the campaign, Maureen Ryan (2004) comments that fans "essentially acted as an advertising street team for the show, in an effort to make it a more attractive property to anyone who wanted to invest in it." Fans collected demographic information on the income and education of the audience and worked to persuade other channels to pick up the show for the desirable audience. They also targeted sponsors and advertisers with this information, and purchased products and mailed copies of the receipts to these sponsors and advertisers, convincing UPS, Kia, and KFC to express interest in advertising on the show if it returned (Ryan 2003). The campaign attracted the attention of some European financiers, who provided the backing for a miniseries to wrap up the show (Ryan 2004). By focusing their efforts outside of the scifi genre, fans worked as advertisers for their power as an audience, selling their consumer power by eating at KFC and touting their collective income and education levels. However, their efforts were only capable of attracting support for a miniseries and not an additional season, thanks to the high production costs of the show (Hughes 1999).

[3.8] Star Trek, Cagney & Lacey, Twin Peaks, Jericho, and Farscape all had campaigns that were successful to some degree, thus demonstrating important trends in faninspired show renewal. Star Trek had a campaign that showed what the network already knew: the audience was young and educated, and therefore desirable.

The show was renewed for a third season, but factors such as the difficult time slot led to lower ratings and ultimately cancellation. Cagney & Lacey had fan labor that was organized by the producers and that was accompanied by increased advertising in the supposed final months of the show. It was most likely the result of the increased awareness of the show, likely achieved through a combination of these two efforts, that the ratings began to grow during the summer months, leading to the show's renewal. Although writing letters and sending in objects such as logs and peanuts informed the networks of the size and devotion of the audiences for Twin Peaks and Jericho, the inadequate size of the audience was the reason for cancellation. Fan labor was enough to garner attention and hope that maybe the audience size would grow; however, when ratings did not improve for these shows, they were quickly canceled again. With Farscape, fans started a new focus outside the channel in order to emphasize the potential for profit if a new channel picked up the show or for advertisers who supported the show's return. For all five of these shows, fanrun "save our show" campaigns were able to persuade the network to air more episodes, but only Cagney & Lacey had increased viewership and was renewed for more seasons. Fan labor can bring a show back from cancellation, but letters and showrelated items that suggest there is an engaged audience for the show are simply not enough to keep the show from being canceled. These campaigns provided the networks with knowledge of the engaged audience that existed for these shows, but on the basis of the evidence from these campaigns, the campaign needed to result in a far more extensive audience to justify keeping the show on air.

4. Chuck versus the 2000s: Television in the age of DVRs

[4.1] Changes in technology allowed for fragmented audiences, forcing "save our show" campaigns to rethink their strategies in selling audience size. The 2000s were a time of transition for television as new home video technologies allowed viewers to consume television in nontraditional ways. By 2007, over 85 percent of US

households subscribed to distribution services such as cable or satellite, and over 55 percent had access to over 100 channels (Lotz 2007). By 2005, broadcast channels were only drawing about 46 percent of the total television audience (Lotz 2007). Digital video recorders (DVRs), popularized by TiVo Inc., provided a way to record television digitally and were first introduced in 1999. By 2007, up to 17 percent of American households were using this technology (Bourgeault 2007). DVRs allowed television viewers to record shows as they aired and watch them at their leisure. DVR owners tended to be within the ideal television audience for advertisers because they were mostly people with high levels of education and household income; however, in using their DVRs, these viewers were less likely to watch the show during its scheduled airing, and they were less likely to watch the advertising (Digital TV Weblog 2006).

[4.2] Recording television for later, timeshifted viewing was not the only new technology to arise during this time that would change how audiences watched television. Various channels started to offer their episodes online the day after airing. Hulu, an online streaming service created by the networks, was introduced in 2007.

Online streaming of video was on the rise during Chuck's run on NBC (Jones 2009). NBC also offered the pilot episode of Chuck for free online from Amazon and iTunes before airing it on television—a new approach to attracting viewers in this transitional time period (Schiller 2007). During the regular season, episodes would start streaming on Hulu and NBC.com the day after their initial airing on television. Throughout this period of television history, the networks were in a time of transition as viewership patterns began changing as a result of new technologies.

[4.3] With multiple means of viewing episodes after they aired, audiences moved toward nontraditional television viewing patterns. Although the Nielsen ratings started accounting for DVR numbers for later viewing in 2006, advertisers would not accept these numbers because it was less likely that audiences watched the ads. Networks thus did not initially include later viewings in their ad rates (Levin 2006). This would slowly change throughout the latter half of the 2000s; however, advertisers remained less interested in DVR viewers, who were more likely to fastforward through commercials (Herrman 2011). Additionally, viewers watching episodes online using Hulu or NBC's Web site were left unrepresented in Nielsen ratings because they were not watching the same advertisements as the live viewers (Herrman 2011). As television viewing fragmented as a result of the new technologies, audiences not watching episodes live were less likely to be counted in the ratings numbers used to determine whether a show would be canceled.

5. Chuck versus the network pickup: Cancellation and the campaign

[5.1] In 2009, NBC's Chuck was in need of a "save our show" campaign. Chuck was a show about geeks and nerds, specifically the Buy More Nerd Herd, Chuck's equivalent of the Best Buy Geek Squad, members of which worked out of a bigbox electronics store to fix various devices. As a nerd turned superspy, title character Chuck would use his geekspecific skills to save the world, with each episode featuring a "Chuck Versus" title.

The show was full of jokes and references to action movies, scifi movies, and geek culture in general, and it featured cameos by various actors and actresses from cult film and television. The first season of Chuck ran during fall 2007; during the first 13 episodes, it was picked up for a full season of 22 episodes. Because of the 2007–8 Writers Guild of America strike, the first season was shortened, and the last nine episodes of the commissioned 22 were never constructed (Sepinwall 2007). Ratings for the first season were unsatisfactory, but the show was given a second season thanks to the strike. The last episode of season 1 aired in January 2008, after which fans received no new episodes until the end of September 2008. NBC clearly supported the show, as it committed to a full 22episode second season after seeing only six episodes and before any of the season aired in the United States, despite the weak ratings of the first season (Adelian 2008). Ratings overall for this season were not very strong and did not improve upon the ratings from the first season, save for an

episode that aired after a huge advertising push during the Super Bowl (Sepinwall 2008). It appeared that the show was headed for cancellation.

[5.2] During its second season, Chuck had to battle a very difficult time slot. That time slot in fall 2008 was home to ABC's Dancing with the Stars (2005–present), one of the most popular shows on air that season;

Fox's Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (2008–9), which did not do as well but still performed better than Chuck; and the CBS comedy block of The Big Bang Theory (2007–present) and How I Met Your Mother (2005–14), which were both in the top 50 shows of the year (Wikipedia 2013). In the winter, that slot became even more perilous for attracting new viewers as Dancing with the Stars was traded out for the very successful The Bachelor (2002–present) in midseason and then returned for the spring, and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles was replaced by the more popular House M.D. (2004–12). The show also aired during the football season and had to compete with Monday Night Football. NBC was regularly fourth for this hour, and Chuck simply could not compete with the other networks' programming.

[5.3] Further complicating Chuck's renewal was NBC's plan to give the 10 PM time slot to Jay Leno. Conan O'Brien was slotted to take over for Jay Leno on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno (1992–2014) starting in 2009, and Leno was looking to move on to a new show. In attempt to not lose Leno to a competitor, NBC

worked to make a new space for him on the network. This resulted in a new show created specifically for Leno that would air five nights a week at 10 PM (Carter 2008). This cut the hours available for both scripted and reality programming from 22 to only 17. This limited the space NBC had for shows that were not successful and put Chuck closer to cancellation.

[5.4] In April 2009, with only a few episodes of season 2 of Chuck left to air, critics started to write to their viewers to persuade them not only to watch Chuck, but to watch it live to try to help improve the ratings. For the networks, the time for making renewal decisions was fast approaching, and viewers had few opportunities to prove they were watching certain shows that were on the bubble. Dan Fienberg, of HitFix.com, wrote on April 6, 2009, "It's always a good night to watch Chuck, but this Monday's episode is a particularly opportune time," before suggesting that the rest of the spring might turn into a "save our show" campaign. Kath Skerry of Give Me My Remote declared that week "Give Me My Chuck" week, with daily posts of show reviews, Chuck news, and videos (Skerry 2009). Alan Sepinwall, a TV critic for the New Jersey StarLedger and blogging at What's Alan Watching, joined in the fervor to attempt to persuade readers to watch the show (Sepinwall 2009a). It was through posts like these that online fans began to realize that they might need to work to save their favorite show, not simply watch.

[5.5] Hints of what the campaign would be are found in these particular blog posts. Skerry (2009) suggested that the only real way to get the network's attention would be to get people watching the show on Monday nights at 8 PM, even as she recognized the difficulty of the time slot with the various other popular programs competing for viewer attention. Fienberg offered a little more optimism, believing that the show would probably be renewed as a result of its younger audience and its performance on nontraditional viewing platforms. He also suggested that continued product placement might be the way to go regarding ways to help fund the show and that NBC executive Ben Silverman "likes shows that allow him to spread costs around and bring in money through alternative streams, so why would he jettison a series where the characters all love their iPhones, where they're eager to play any new video game on the market and where a Subway $5

Footlong is considered acceptable bachelor party grub" (Fienberg 2009). The creative team behind Chuck had already worked to embrace these types of product placement; viewers would most likely be comfortable with more.

[5.6] Fearing cancellation, these critics used their platforms to appeal to the executives to renew the show.

Sepinwall (2009b) wrote an open letter to NBC executives Ben Silverman, Marc Graboff, and Angela Bromstad with the reasons why, despite the low ratings, the network should keep airing the show. In an interview with the New York Times, Josh Schwartz, cocreator of the show, emphasized to the fans that "save our show"

campaigns, by showing that their particular show had a strong, committed audience, could be influential in saving a show (Itzkoff 2009). He proposed that the fans send in Nerds candy to the network. Nestlé

Confections and Snacks, owners of Wonka, the makers of Nerds, also believed the show should be saved; they sent NBC 1,000 Nerds and a novelty box, and advised fans to do the same (Pitch Engine 2009).

[5.7] The fan campaign took off through various fanrun Web sites like ChuckTV.net (http://chucktv.net/) and We Give a Chuck (http://www.wegiveachuck.com/), which provided places where fans could come

together to talk about the show. These sites featured discussion boards where fans could analyze and critique the show, as well as blog posts assembled by the site's moderators. Fans on these sites advocated for the watch/buy/share method of getting the show renewed: watching the show when it was on, buying the first season DVD and preordering the second season, and sharing their love of the show with their friends (ChuckTV.net, n.d.). This aligned with previous methods of showing fan support through monetary means and attempting to encourage more viewers to watch to increase ratings. The forums were full of ideas and recommendations for how to write letters to the executives and what to include in them. Fans suggested that these letters should be personal; that they should write about their own connection to the show; that they should provide some demographic information about themselves; and that they should tell the network how they watch the show especially if they watched in a nontraditional way. Above all, they should be respectful (ChuckTV.net 2009). They understood that the networks would be looking for data on who made up the

audience, rather than simply knowing that people liked the show.

[5.8] It was in these forums that fans began to discuss the idea of not just trying to appeal to the network but also attempting to persuade the sponsors to work to get the show renewed. Initially, fans simply worked to encourage more people to write letters to both the NBC executives and some of Chuck's sponsors, but it evolved into something that would affect the understanding of what "save our show" campaigns were. In the season 2 episode "Chuck versus the First Kill," Morgan Grimes attempts to persuade his boss to share some information on another employee by bribing him with a Subway sandwich (YouTube 2009a). However, this was not just any Subway sandwich; it was a Chicken Teriyaki $5 Footlong, and it was treated on the show as if it were the greatest sandwich ever created, complete with slowmotion shots and swelling classical music. After what was essentially an ad within the show, more overt than mere product placement, audiences proceeded to purchase Subway sandwiches (Steinberg 2009). This inshow ad, airing during one of the last episodes of Chuck's second season, and others like it gave fans an idea.

[5.9] A campaign that became known as "Finale and a Footlong" was conceived by fan Wendy Farrington. On April 8, 2009, she posted in the Television Without Pity forums that she wanted to "give NBC/Universal a legitimate business justification for keeping their quality programming on the air. It's more likely that the network and sponsors will hear our pleas for a Chuck renewal if we speak their language … $$$," suggesting that utilizing the fans' power as consumers might be the best way to get the network's attention

(http://forums.televisionwithoutpity.com/index.php?showtopic=3184274). The plan would be for Chuck fans to go to Subway on the night of the finale, order a $5 footlong, and drop off a comment card to Subway, letting them know that the footlong was purchased in support of Chuck. Then fans would watch the season finale live to try to boost the ratings. This was to be accompanied by the fans writing letters to the executives of NBC

and the chief marketing executive of Subway in support of the show and telling them about the campaign.

Farrington got her message out by posting on numerous fan forums for the show and sending the message to various critics who had supported the renewal attempts. The idea was simple: demonstrate to both the network and the sponsor that there was not only an audience for the show but also an audience that was paying attention to the advertising for the show and supporting those sponsors. This would leverage the power of the audience: in addition to fan viewers, the sponsors would also work to persuade the network to renew the show on the fans' behalf. By focusing on Chuck as a business transaction, fans used their knowledge of the television industry to garner support for their goals.

[5.10] Fans spread the word of the campaign across various Web sites in an effort to both inform other fans of the campaign and to encourage nonfans to watch the show. Subway supported the campaign, with Tony Pace, the chief marketing executive for the Subway Franchisee Advertising Fund Trust, saying that Subway could not start this campaign, "but if the behavior is already out there, you can encourage it without being too heavyhanded. And that's what we've tried to do" (York 2009). As a brand supporting the show, Subway

wanted to emphasize their support for the show without seeming to be running the campaign; they wanted to avoid being seen as manipulating fans into buying their product. Zachary Levi, the star of the show, took over 600 Chuck fans in the United Kingdom to Subway to support the show, even helping make some sandwiches for fans (YouTube 2009b). James Poniewozik (2009) wrote in Time that this particular style of campaign might actually work because "plead as lyrically as you want; you ultimately keep a show on the air by assuring the network it will make money. And it does that by assuring its advertisers that they will make money." Between the support from the fans, support from the critics, and pressure from the advertisers, NBC and Warner Bros., the production company for the show, made a deal to bring back Chuck for a 13episode third season (albeit one with a reduced budget) (Sepinwall 2009c). In an interview with Sepinwall, cochairman of NBC Ben Silverman said that this campaign was one of the most creative he had seen, and as a result, Subway would increase its presence within the show (Sepinwall 2009d). At the cost of increased product integration, fans would get more of their favorite show.

6. Chuck versus the tempting fates: Five seasons and a bunch of finales

[6.1] Chuck ran for five seasons and a total of 91 episodes, 56 of them airing after the "save our show"

campaign. Yet the ratings for the show never improved, and viewership tapered off throughout the remaining run of the show. Ratings were low enough for the creators to be concerned about not providing their audience with an ending with some degree of closure. Many of the midseason finales and season finales were written to provide a coherent ending for the show if the show were to be canceled (Sepinwall 2012). So why did the show last beyond a third season? Previous "save our show" campaigns demonstrated that if a show's fans managed to get the network to renew the show for a season, the only way to ensure more seasons for the show was to improve ratings through increased viewership. Both Twin Peaks and Jericho were canceled shortly after renewal because the audience for these shows did not grow, although Twin Peaks was only brought back to air the remaining six episodes of season 2 and not renewed for a third season. However, the majority of Chuck aired after the campaign to save it and aired with a smaller audience, so something else must have been occurring to convince the network to keep renewing the show.

[6.2] Part of the need to renew the show came from the failure of NBC to produce many successful new shows while Chuck was on air. There was speculation in fall 2009 that NBC might bring the show back earlier than planned because many of the shows for their 2009–10 season were not performing well (Ausiello 2009).

Shortly after, NBC announced that Chuck would indeed get an additional six episodes (Adalian 2008, 2009) and would be coming back earlier than planned (Sepinwall 2009e). In the spring, after new episodes started airing, The Jay Leno Show (2009–10) was canceled, opening up five more hours a week for programming (Levin 2010). Although NBC needed reliable programming, season 3 of Chuck did not rapidly improve its ratings, and many feared that the show might again need saving (Hyman 2010). Despite its low ratings, Chuck was renewed for a 13episode fourth season (ChuckTV.net 2010). Throughout the 2010–11 television season, NBC would continue to have many lowrated scripted television shows; this would result in Chuck getting an order for 11 additional episodes, bringing the season 4 episode count to 24 (Ausiello 2010). In May 2011, Chuck received its final renewal, when it was determined that a 13episode final season would air in the 2011–

12 television season (Hibberd 2011). In this final season, the show was moved from its Monday night 8 PM

time slot to Friday at 8 PM in what is commonly referred to as the Fridaynight death slot.

[6.3] Throughout most of Chuck's run, it battled the same series of shows in that Monday night time slot, making it difficult for the ratings to improve. NBC, during this time period, besides not producing television shows that would become hits, was in turmoil as the network was being sold to Comcast. The Comcast deal was agreed to in December 2009, with 51 percent of the company sold to Comcast and the remaining 49

percent still controlled by General Electric (Arango 2009). The merger was approved by the Federal

Communications Commission in January 2011, at which point the executives were replaced with new Comcastapproved executives (Hamill 2011). All of this suggests that it was a wise idea for the network to hold on to certain shows despite low ratings, but it does not quite explain why Chuck was one of those shows.

[6.4] The "Finale and a Footlong" campaign to save Chuck after season 2 did more than just prove to the network that the show had fans. Although the campaign may have been only one part of the ultimate decision to renew Chuck for a third season, by showing support for the sponsors as well as petitioning the network, it increased the audiences' negotiating power. This told the network that while the audience for the show may be small, it was loyal to both the show and the advertisers. Advertiser loyalty was key, as product placement became a more effective way to advertise in television to avoid viewers who were fastforwarding through commercials or viewers watching in nontraditional methods. Sponsorship accompanied by fan loyalty could create a mutually beneficial relationship, providing desirable content to viewers, business for advertisers, and more outside funding and support for network programming.

[6.5] The show became known for its stable audience; Fienberg (2010) referred to it as "one of the network's most consistent and dedicated audiences, producing nearly identical weekly ratings regardless of its competition." Sepinwall (2011) argued that even when Chuck's ratings were slipping, it was "still a known quantity," noting, "It's never going to be a hit, but its audience is its audience (even if it's been smaller this spring than it was in the fall), and NBC can put it on the schedule and not worry about having to promote it at all." Sepinwall uses the phrase "a known quantity" to suggest that while the show may have had a small audience, it was loyal, and renewing the show may have been less of a risk than having a new show be a flop.

Because Chuck was a known quantity that delivered stable ratings, NBC had an understanding of how well it would perform and could focus its marketing efforts elsewhere. The campaign helped establish Chuck's audience and its value to the network, and it proved the fans' loyalty to the show and its sponsors. When it came time for NBC to pick up shows for a full season or to renew shows for the new season, the lowrated Chuck was a safe bet thanks to that viewer loyalty. NBC could air it and guarantee that it would have a small but dedicated audience—something it could not necessarily guarantee for their other shows. NBC could then better market the loyal audience to advertisers as desirable viewers because more attentive viewers (such as fans) were more likely to watch the advertisements (Ryan 2003). In a time where broadcast channels were collectively losing audiences to cable channels, altered viewing patterns, and nontraditional consumption methods, an engaged audience was valued, often over the potential for an unknown extensive potential audience.

7. Chuck versus the future: Savvy fans and future "save our show" campaigns

[7.1] Unlike previous "save our show" campaigns, Chuck managed to be continually renewed despite a lack of increase in the size of the audience thanks to the change in labor featured in the "Finale and a Footlong"

campaign. Chuck fans had a difficult battle when attempting to leverage their viewing power and market desirability. They were fortunate because their numbers were made up of desirable viewers in the

demographic of 18 to 49yearolds, but fans understood the difficulties of the time slot and the importance of watching the show live on television. Chuck was a show that performed well on "all of the various offnetwork viewing platforms"; however, those viewing platforms did not affect the Nielsen ratings, the only measurement that the networks and advertisers were interested in (Fienberg 2009). The Chuck "save our show" campaign leveraged not only its viewing power as an audience but its buying power as a consumer audience by speaking directly to the sponsors of the show. With support from the sponsors, the network ultimately faced less risk in show renewal, and the fans received more of their desired programming. This campaign utilized fan labor as buying and viewing power in a way that had never been done before and would change how future "save our show" campaigns would be run.

[7.2] The "Finale and a Footlong" campaign had its roots in part of the campaign to save Farscape, as both fan bases used industry logics within their campaigns. As part of their work advertising the show and its valuable audience, Farscape fans appealed to advertisers who sponsored the show. Many fans would eat KFC

while watching new episodes and mail the receipts to the company, thanking them for their support of the show. They also made cards that said, "I supported your business today because you are one of Farscape's sponsors" and left them behind for sponsors (Freek 2013). Although this was only part of the campaign strategy, it was international financing that ultimately brought back the show for a final miniseries. This

showed fans that they could appeal to sponsors to gain financial support and therefore stronger negotiating power for their show. The success of both campaigns relied on the cost of the show. The financial deal between NBC, Warner Bros., and Subway to renew Chuck for a third season included a reduced budget for the show. Because Farscape was the most expensive show airing on a cable network at the time, fans could only attract enough money to support a fourepisode miniseries (Hughes 1999). Fans spoke using industry logic to argue for their value as an audience, focusing on the desirability of their ability to act as consumers.

[7.3] The evolution of fan campaigns taught fans that audience attention would often not be enough. Fan labor only mattered if it also was accompanied by financial support for the network. "Save our show"

campaigns that appealed to advertisers were a valuable method for fan labor to bring about financial support.

Even the "save our show" campaign for Chuck continued after the show's renewal with a Twitter campaign called #NotANielsenFamily. Each week, while watching the episode live, fans would tweet to sponsors based on advertisements that aired during the episode (We Give a Chuck, n.d.). These tweets involved thanking the sponsor for their support of the show and included the hashtag #NotANielsenFamily. There was also a photo campaign that involved fans tweeting pictures of themselves with the sponsored product and the hashtag. This campaign was developed as fans realized how many of these products they were either willing to purchase or already purchased on a regular basis. The effort recognized the sponsors as supporters of the show, thanked them for their continued support, and showed both the sponsors and the network that there was an audience that may not be accurately represented by the Nielsen rating system.

[7.4] This style of campaign was picked up by the fans of Fox's Fringe (2008–13), who modified their Twitter usage to attempt to save their show. Each week on the Web site More Than One of Everything, a new hashtag would be given out that would be used to discuss the show (http://morethanoneofeverything.net/?p=1955).

One hour before the episode, the fans would tweet a thankyou to one of the sponsors of the show. Then during the episode, the fans would tweet Fringerelated items and episoderelated tweets to attempt to get the new hashtag trending worldwide for the duration of the episode. The fans who run this particular site have worked out the best way to get their hashtag trending on Twitter and have worked with other fans to ensure that many people were talking about the show on Twitter. This effort continued to recognize the sponsors for their advertisements and product placements and thanked them for their support of the show. It also worked to show the network and the advertisers that there were people talking about the show while it aired who may not be counted in the ratings. Fringe was another show that was perennially on the cancellation bubble and had an active fan base that showed support for the show, and the sponsors certainly helped encourage renewal.

8. Chuck versus the end: Fan power, fan audiences, and where we go from here

[8.1] Television requires an audience in order to be produced; it is funded through advertising and corporate sponsors. With the assumption that there will always be an audience for television, the power of the audience is deemphasized in the minds of networks and sponsors. It is in "save our show" campaigns where the power of the viewers and the effects of fan labor for their favorite shows are at last recognized. Campaigns like the one for Cagney & Lacey recognized that there was an audience that was desirable to the network, and they worked to increase the size of that audience, thus allowing the show to have seven complete seasons. The

"save our show" campaign for Jericho showed that fans were not only passionate about their favorite shows but that they would also spend money to support them. Farscape fans worked to advertise their value as an audience to sponsors and networks who might help pick up the show. Chuck's campaign continued the idea of what a "save our show" campaign could look like by appealing directly to the sponsors to persuade the networks on their behalf. Through their power as consumers, fans' labor influenced the decisions of the networks regarding their favorite shows.

[8.2] This particular type of power—the power of audience as consumer—is problematic because it requires the viewers to actively participate in the desired capitalistic system already in place. This becomes even more complicated as "save our show" campaigns move toward fans using their power to consume to appeal to the advertisers. The audience has limited control over what network their show is shown on or which companies

are advertisers for the show, which can lead to problems if the viewer does not agree with the sponsor's policy but wants to support the show. However, this current strategy offers the most agency and voice to the viewers; having an active role in the renewal process is something that was previously considered to be inaccessible to fans.

[8.3] Despite the problems inherent in this new attempt at wielding fan power, it is still a step forward for fan culture. Fans had previously been considered fringe TV viewers. Fans are improving ways to navigate the existing systems of power in order to negotiate more control and opportunity to influence network

programming. Engaged audiences of fans, although often small, through their dedication and labor ultimately have the opportunity to have more power in the televisionadvertiserconsumer relationship. As television increasingly relies on niche audiences, television shows are going to lend themselves more to fan culture and will be recognized as fan commodities. Recognizing that fans can have a voice regarding renewal of their shows, even if it is a problematic voice, is important, and the "save our show" campaign for Chuck helped make that voice heard by those in power.

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Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 15 (2014)

Praxis

Modding a free and open source software video game: "Play testing is

hard work"

Giacomo Poderi and David J. Hakken

University of Trento, Trento, Italy, and Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, United States

[0.1] Abstract— Video game modding is a form of fan productivity in contemporary

participatory culture. We see modding as an important way in which modders

experience and conceptualize their work. By focusing on modding in a free and open

source software video game, we analyze the practice of modding and the way it

changes modders' relationship with their object of interest. The modders'

involvement is not always associated with fun and creativity. Indeed, activities such

as play testing often undermine these dimensions of modding. We present a case

study of modding that is based on ethnographic research done for The Battle for

Wesnoth, a free and open source software strategy video game entirely developed

by a community of volunteers.

[0.2] Keywords— Addons; The Battle for Wesnoth; Fan productivity; Gaming

Poderi, Giacomo, and David J. Hakken. 2014. "Modding a Free and Open Source

Software Video Game: 'Play testing is hard work.'" In "Fandom and/as Labor,"

edited by Mel Stanfill and Megan Condis, special issue, Transformative Works and

Cultures, no. 15. http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2014.0493.

1. Introduction

[1.1] By conceiving of video game modding as a form of fan productivity and by

focusing on free and open source software (FOSS) modders, this article investigates a

phenomenon that is heavily underresearched (Sotamaa 2010a): the meanings that

modders attach to their practices and the way that modding influences their

relationship with the object of fandom, the video game. In computer games, the word

mods (modifications) refers to playermade alterations and additions to preexisting

video games. Mod makers, or modders, are typically passionate and skilled players

who usually form online teams and cooperate with one another or with game

companies to create such mods (Sotamaa 2007; Postigo 2007). Recently, modding

practice and modders' creative work have been more commodified by the video game

industry. This makes understanding how this form of fan productivity blurs traditional

dichotomies between players and game designers, and between play and work

(Ducheneaut et al. 2006), more important.

[1.2] Early studies of modding used a conflict model to analyze it, framing modding as, for example, a form of resistance from the bottom against the restrictiveness of

corporate game design (Huhtamo 1999; Schleiner 1999), or as a form of exploitation

and unwaged work (Terranova 2000; Postigo 2003). More recent studies started

framing it in symbiotic terms, stressing corporate attempts to sustain and promote the

practice (Sotamaa 2007) as well as the mutual benefits that gamers and game

companies can receive from it (Postigo 2007). In our view, two crucial topics common

to fan studies and video game studies—the meanings that actors (modders)

themselves attach to modding in their everyday activities (Sotamaa 2010a) and how

their modding changes their play—are generally ignored in this debate. Here, we

investigate the question: How does the practice of modding change modders'

relationship with the object of their fandom?

[1.3] Thus, the original contribution of this work to fan studies is evidence that

serious modding can radically change the modder's relationship to the game. Modders

commonly lose the desire to play the video game, have fewer chances to play it, or

even develop a conflicted, lovehate relationship toward modding, an endeavor usually

portrayed as both engaging and creative. If these findings are demonstrated to be

general, they will be relevant to the study of other important phenomena, such as

gamification (Deterding et al. 2011) and playbor (Kücklich 2005). Indeed, this would

further suggest that using gamedesign elements to make nongaming activities (e.g.,

work or education) more fun or more engaging, and trying to extract labor from

playful activities, should be approached more cautiously than is the case now.

[1.4] Play testing is a method of quality control that can take place at many points

during the video game design and development process: "It is the design equivalent of

bug fixing, though it is considerably less cut and dried. When playtesters look at the

game, they try to see if the game is any fun and try to find faults in the game

mechanics" (Rouse 2004, 484). In the case of The Battle for Wesnoth, investigated

here, the specific activity of play testing video game mods revealed the changes in

modders' relationship to the game, and it will be at the center of our arguments below.

[1.5] Our work proceeds as follows: Section 2 defines modding as a form of fans'

explicit and expressive productivity. The third section examines the emergence of

video game modding and its relationship with FOSS development. Section 4 explains

the ethnographic methodology used for the research and describes why The Battle for

Wesnoth was chosen as the case to be investigated. The fifth and sixth sections, which

are empirical, report modders' statements about how modding changed their

relationship to the game, leading them to endure activities that they came to consider

anything but fun. The discussion and conclusion sections summarize the most

important findings and point toward directions for further inquiry.

2. Video game modding as explicitly expressive productivity

[2.1] Fandoms are now understood to be much more than passive aggregates of

passionate fans who merely gather around their favorite TV shows, comics, or video

games. Rather, they are now seen as performing active roles in the reconfiguration,

appropriation, and expansion of their objects. Theorists such as Jenkins (1992) and

Abercrombie and Longhurst (1998) have suggested various ways to frame these more

active roles, but Fiske's (1992) tripartite model of semiotic, enunciative, and textual

productivity has received the widest attention in fan studies. Fiske's categories serve

to classify things that fans produce while consuming their object of fandom; meanings

and interpretations of those objects, conversations about them; and written artifacts

that expand and are integrated into them.

[2.2] However, analytic applications of Fiske's model to fan productivity in video

games have proven to be problematic. First, video games are a participatory medium:

they require gamers to play, and playing is widely acknowledged to be both a

performative and a productive practice (Wirman 2007). It has been difficult, however,

for analysts to distinguish between players' productivity in game and out of game (i.e.,

where does one locate video game fans' semiotic productivity?). Second, like many

current types of usergenerated content, modding is manifest mainly online.

Therefore, the use of Fiske's model may reinforce an analysis problem identified by

Hills (2013). Although, according to Fiske, any fan productive action may well span all

three categories, contemporary inquiries into online participatory culture generally use

them as if they were mutually exclusive. Further, nearly every online interaction is

associated with a (digital) text. Perhaps for this reason, semiotic and enunciative

productivity have been neglected, while textual productivity has become the allembracing label for all types of fan productivity (Hills 2013). For instance, Crawford (2012, 120) labels many aspects of gamers' production as fan textual productivity,

including "the production of websites, mods and hacks, private servers, game guides,

walkthroughs and FAQs, fan fiction and forms of fan art." However, these three types

of productive output require very different skills and commitments on the fans' side.

Analysis of fan productivity must demonstrate the specific ways in which each type has

different implications for the fangame relationship.

[2.3] To avoid flattening video game fans' productivity under one allembracing label,

it is useful to define such productivity along two axes. The first distinguishes implicit

from explicit productivity. This dimension reflects how most participatory cultures

(Jenkins 2006) demand of fans a relatively high degree of commitment, awareness,

and mobilization of skills. Consequently, producers often explicitly claim their

productions, in a way that demonstrates their selfconsciousness. In contrast, in many

popular Web 2.0 applications and Web sites, users' participatory productivity is

generally only implicit, and is rarely demonstrably selfconscious (Schafer 2011). The second axis distinguishes between instrumental and expressive productivity. The first

extreme reflects artifacts that gamers produce to advance more effectively in the

game (e.g., documentation, walkthroughs, or tools). The second relates to gamespecific outputs that extend, enrich, and reconfigure the video game (e.g., customized player models, skins, game levels) (Wirman 2007).

[2.4] Because modders are video game fans who consciously commit their time and

mobilize their skills to create digital artifacts that enrich their object of fandom, we

suggest that video game modding be analyzed as a form of explicit, expressive fan

productivity. Broadly speaking, a shared feeling of belonging and affiliation with the

object of fandom, and enjoyment of the expressive affordances that this object

provides, are at the basis of game fans' engagement practices (Jenkins 2006). More

specifically, Sotamaa (2010a) suggests that playing, hacking, researching, artistic

expression, and cooperation are key motivations for modders. Modders play because

they desire to extract as much as possible from the game. They see modding as a

manifestation of a hacker legacy. They research because they need to investigate not

only the details of the source code, but also the background and contextual

information that impinge on and even define the mod. The game is a medium of

expression, and modding can be aesthetically (and also politically) motivated. Finally,

for some people, modding is a primary way to cooperate and connect with likeminded

people.

[2.5] It is safe to say that modifying games through modding has been a recognized

part of game industry practice and mainstream gaming cultures at least since the early

1980s. Castle Smurfestein (1983), a total conversion of the video game Castle

Wolfenstein (1981), is usually considered the first mod ever created (Kücklich 2005).

At that time, video games were relatively unsophisticated software artifacts with

simple design and mechanics. They were mainly a niche product, within the reach of

only technically skilled computer geeks and hackers. However, even in these early

days, a few software companies provided development tools or construction kits to

help players customize game characters and levels. An example is The Shoot 'Em Up

Construction Kit (SEUCK) available for Commodore 64 video games (Sihvonen 2009).

[2.6] The modding phenomenon received a mid1990s boost with the arrival of firstperson shooters mods, initiated by the public release of the source code for Id Software's Doom. This release was so successful in fostering an emerging modding

community that Id Software released a Doom Editor Utility to help gamers produce

levels, and did the same for its subsequent successful games, Quake and Quake II.

Several mods emerging from these firstperson shooters (e.g., HalfLife and Urban

Terror) brought new life to the original video games while providing career

opportunities to the authors of successful mods. This was particularly visible in the success of CounterStrike (1999), which was originally circulated as a mod of HalfLife (which, in turn, was a mod of Quake II). Later, as a result of its unexpected success,

CounterStrike was reproduced and sold as a standalone video game (Kücklich 2005).

[2.7] Nowadays, video game modding has been consolidated into a game resource

that is highly appreciated by gamers and game companies. Video game mods feature

several levels of design and implementation complexity and integrate with the video

game at different software levels. They can affect the physics of the game's virtual

world, modify play, and introduce new story lines and game types. Typically, mods

introduce new characters, maps, or levels into the game (Postigo 2007), but they can

also provide improved interface components or address shortcomings in game design

(Nardi 2010). Furthermore, because modders are not constrained by budget plans and

market revenues and are therefore much more free to take creative and innovative

risks (Postigo 2007), attempts by the game industry to take advantage of modding

should not surprise us. These attempts include nurturing modder communities through

sponsored events, such as modding contests (Sotamaa 2007), and integrating

modding directly into the design of games, making it a concrete part of game play

(note 1).

3. Video game modding and FOSS

[3.1] Contemporary modding clearly converges and partially overlaps (e.g., Doom)

with FOSS, either as cultural practice or as a form of software engineering. First, as

highlighted by Sihvonen (2009) and Sotamaa (2010a), video game modding displays a

hacker legacy of tinkering and engaging deeply with technology production for the

sake of selfexpression, learning, and harnessing. This legacy is also at the basis of

much FOSSing (i.e., tinkering and engaging with the practices of FOSS development

and culture) (Coleman 2012). Second, FOSS has always manifested a highly modular

and customizable approach to software design. Recently, modding and software

extensions have emerged as effective software development methods in FOSS

(Scacchi 2011). Third, although FOSS video games occupy a small niche compared to

the domination of the market by corporate (proprietary) video games, they represent

an increasingly relevant portion of FOSS products. For instance, in one of the most

used FOSS development portals, SourceForge.net, "Games" has recently come to

constitute the second biggest category of FOSS projects. It is therefore reasonable to

contend both that the creation of FOSS games and of related game development tools

is a central element in the cultural world of computer games, and that gaming is

central to FOSS (Scacchi 2011).

[3.2] As acknowledged by Scacchi (2004), FOSS game development includes all the

fundamentals of the FOSS paradigm; that is, it is a transparent, iterative,

collaborative, and Internetmediated development model (Weber 2004). Thanks to

specific software licenses, the availability of the software source code, and an

infrastructure of shared tools, FOSS programs can be and are developed by

communities of volunteer developers and skilled users who commit their skills and

efforts to the betterment of the software, "to scratch their own itches" (Raymond

1999, 23) or "just for fun" (Torvalds and Diamond 2001). Two aspects set modding in

FOSS apart from modding in typical corporate, mainstream video games. First, FOSS

permissive licenses and the availability of the source code allow modders to work on

their mods without having to reverse engineer code or enter a legal gray area.

Second, because FOSS modding is open and collaborative, it takes place in a space

where participatory practices (e.g., reporting and fixing bugs, and providing

translations and feedback) are welcome, encouraged, and supported (Scacchi 2004).

Indeed, FOSS endusers are allowed, expected, and even urged to take part in

projects, and they are often provided with the means (e.g., documentation, tutorials,

mentors, tools) to do so. After some time making only marginal contributions, users

often find themselves involved in more central development activities (Ducheneaut

2005).

[3.3] Certainly, FOSS core developers maintain more power and control over the

source code than do codevelopers or participant end users, but development happens

in less formal, less clearcut, and more transparent ways than in the case of

proprietary, closed source software. In this latter case the boundaries between

companies' development efforts and the gamer community's enthusiasm are much

clearer and more impermeable (Nardi 2010). Ultimately, because participating in FOSS

means socialization, learning, and career development, we suggest that modding in

FOSS can be considered an institutionalized practice for fan involvement.

4. An ethnographic approach to modding in The Battle for

Wesnoth

[4.1] But what are the patterns typical of fan modding involvement in FOSS games?

To investigate these patterns as they are experienced and performed by modders in

daily activities, and to go beneath a surface reading of the digital traces left by their

interactions, we developed an ethnographic study (Hammersley and Atkinson 2007) of

a FOSS video game project: The Battle for Wesnoth. As our primary means of

gathering data, we did 14 months (December 2010 to April 2012) of participant

observation, including Internetmediated interviews as the primary methodology for

gathering data (Garcia et al. 2009; Kivits 2005).

[4.2] As the existing literature stresses, the online traces generated by social

formation—project Web sites, instant messages, emails, and forum messages—supply

only a partial picture of FOSS modding. For this reason, our empirical research

required deeper and longer engagement than unobtrusive or automated data

gathering techniques would have (Demazière, Horn, and Zune 2011; Hakken 1999).

Of course, the benefits of focusing on a single case and using these methodologies

come at the cost of results that are easily generalized.

[4.3] The empirical research was conducted overtly. We announced our presence and

intentions through a few public messages. No complaints were raised in response. The

fieldwork involved long periods of observation, participation in the collective

infrastructure (e.g., reading forum discussions about the creation of addons and

discussing, via IRC or email, improvements to addons and The Battle for Wesnoth),

game play (e.g., multiplayer and competitive matches), and offline interactions (e.g.,

a couple of facetoface interviews and attendance at a FOSS conference).

[4.4] We conducted 29 Internetmediated interviews (note 2). To put informants at ease and to create an egalitarian research setting that would promote trust,

interviewees were able to choose their preferred interview medium. The majority

opted for asynchronous communication media (either email or the private messaging

system built into the Battle for Wesnoth forum), with five choosing a synchronous

medium (IRC). As already documented in the literature, asynchrony promotes a more

intimate and reflexive process of knowledge construction than does synchrony, but it

has the drawback of lengthier and more cumbersome management work (Kivits 2005;

Wirman 2012). All interviews began after informants had read, understood, and

agreed to explicit procedures regarding interview management, data handling, privacy,

and confidentiality. Informants are referred to by aliases.

[4.5] The Battle for Wesnoth is an original "turnbased tactical strategy game with a

fantasy theme" (http://www.wesnoth.org/) inspired by the classic turnbased games

Warsong (Nippon Computer System 1991) and Master of Monsters (System Soft

1991). The strategic dimension of the game involves fighting on a favorable terrain, at

a favorable time of day, and matching one's forces against weaker or disadvantaged

enemies. In game, players build up armies by gathering resources and recruiting new

units and then use them to meet the objectives set for campaign scenarios or to

challenge other players over the Internet. Two game modes are available: single

player and multiplayer. The former provides 16 official campaigns, each one with its

specific plot, characters, and number of connected scenarios. The latter provides 54

multiplayer scenarios with different game forms (1 vs. 1, 2 vs. 2, 4 vs. 4, free for all,

collaborative). Video 1 is a promotional trailer for the video game that shows different

combat situations and the basic game layout.

[4.6] Launched in 2003 as a prototype, The Battle for Wesnoth slowly gained success in the niche area of strategy games and reached version 1.10.5 in November 2012.

Currently, only a couple dozen developers are actively working on the project, but 60

have contributed to it over the years. About 200 people are officially credited with

making helpful contributions. The official Internet forum, which is the primary support

channel for gamers, modders, and project participants, has 24,500 registered

members, with an average continuous presence of 35 visitors.

The Battle for Wesnoth - Of cial Trailer

Video 1. A presentation trailer for The Battle for Wesnoth (v.1.8). The trailer provides a basic introduction to the game play and game content availability while showing

different battle situations.

[4.7] The possibility of creating addons for The Battle for Wesnoth is widely

advertised and encouraged through the project infrastructure. The Internet forum is

used primarily to support modders' work, and vast documentation for addon creation

exists, in the forms of technical guides, howtos, and coded examples. Technically, all

addons are coded in a special markup language, Wesnoth Markup Language (WML),

which is developed and maintained by Battle for Wesnoth developers. The addon

distribution and installation system is highly integrated into the video game, and the

starting interface allows players to connect to servers able to download existing addons or upload new ones. Figure 1 shows the interface for downloading addons.

Figure 1. Interface for downloading addons. Available content is sorted by number of

downloads. The interface shows each addon's name, version, authors, number of

downloads, and file size. [View larger image.]

[4.8] Currently, the addon servers for the two most recent versions of The Battle for

Wesnoth include 400 and 100 addons respectively (note 3). The most common add

ons are the mods of singleplayer campaigns, multiplayer scenarios, and factions (i.e.,

collections of battle units). Less common ones concern map packs, soundtracks, and

authoring tools. This additional content represents a valuable and highly appreciated

Battle for Wesnoth gamer resource: it extends the longevity of the video game and

expands strategic gameplay. The two most recent Battle for Wesnoth versions

introduced only one new official campaign, although developers had formerly provided

gamers with more content elements. These addons provide players not only with

more content to play but also, more interestingly, with new strategyrelated

mechanics. For instance, addons for nonlinear campaigns exist, in which the results of

the battles directly influence the story lines that may unfold in the campaign.

Nontraditional scenarios also exist, in which the composition of the map terrains and of

the customized unit factions drive players to radically change their playing strategies.

Finally, a few highly appreciated addons emerged recently that blend the pure turnbased strategy design elements of The Battle for Wesnoth with elements oriented more toward roleplaying games (RPGs).

5. Passionate gamers converge toward modding; busy modders

diverge from gaming

[5.1] When we discussed how they had moved from being gamers to becoming

involved in Battle for Wesnoth development activities, particularly creating addons, all

informants acknowledged that they were initially spurred on by passion for the game,

either in general or for specific aspects of its design. They all expressed enthusiasm for

The Battle for Wesnoth. Modders were more than just players; they started as fervent

supporters of the game.

[5.2] I was first exposed to Wesnoth about 4 years ago, when a friend of

mine told me about this awesome fantasy game he had downloaded. When I

got home, I downloaded it for myself. I played the tutorial, and found myself

completely hooked. I went on to complete Heir to the Throne and Sceptre of

Fire. I have been playing/involved with Wesnoth more or less continuously

ever since then. (Krellis interview, May 31, 2011)

[5.3] I was instantly drawn to the small download size of the game, and (of

course!) the fact that it was free. I downloaded it and was instantly sucked

into simple mechanics and game play that led to a wealth of strategies and

replay value. Today I am still in awe of not only how Wesnoth manages to

produce such fun and at times complex game play and strategies using very

simple mechanics and rules, but also how moddable Wesnoth is and how

sophisticated the engine has become. To be honest, I really find it hard to

say anything negative about Wesnoth, simply because there is very little

negative about the game, in my experience. (Cylanna interview, June 1,

2011)

[5.4] Furthermore, as shown in the two following excerpts, addon creators

confirmed that they find modding fun:

[5.5] I would say that the point where I moved from being a player to a

member of the community was when I joined the forums in hopes of getting

help in writing WML and creating a campaign…There I found extensive, userfriendly documentation, and a forum full of helpful, friendly people. The forum community was extremely welcoming, and gave me a good first

impression. It was then that the solitary learning process ended and I began

"really" learning and having fun with WML. (Krellis interview, May 31, 2011)

[5.6] I just wanted to make a role playing game [addon]; onescenario

quests aren't interesting enough, character development needs to be infinite

(still haven't figured out how best to handle that ;) ) and actions should

have consequences…For me, part of the fun is that the game engine is not

meant for this. ;) I like that I'm twisting something to a completely new

purpose…So far, I haven't found anything that I absolutely needed that I

was not able to do with WML and LuaWML. As far as I can remember.

There's so much that I want to do and *can* do that I try not to spend time

worrying about the things that I *can't* do. (Erlornas interview, June 29,

2011)

[5.7] These two addon authors' claims are very similar to those of others. Indeed,

all informants said that they enjoyed modding for one or more of the following

reasons: (1) WML is flexible, allowing them to experiment with innovative addons, (2) the infrastructure supports modding, offering documentation and tools for authoring

and collaboration, and (3) the environment is supportive and welcoming, with a

community of friendly and experienced peers who can be relied on for help.

[5.8] However, when modders were asked about their current relationship with the

game, a slightly different picture emerged: modders were spending more time creating

addons for the game than on playing it and, when they did play, they did so for

testing purposes.

[5.9] You can create your own addons such as maps, units and even

entire campaigns. Before I started making my own content, I had been

studying the game, its mechanisms and potential. I used to play regularly…

Now I play this game occasionally. Maybe this is because I prefer creating to

playing. (Kalenz interview, May 14, 2011)

[5.10] I'm one of those people that's more interested in creating than

playing, so it doesn't really bother me if I spend more time working on this

campaign than I do playing other campaigns. Granted, it does sometimes

feel like I made too much work for myself, but I still enjoy actually working

on the project. (Owaec interview, August 19, 2011)

[5.11] The amount of time I spend actually playing the game (aside from

play testing my own campaign) has gone down considerably since I started

contributing. (Elurin interview, June 30, 2011)

[5.12] Over time, the incompatibility of playing and modding emerged. This is not

surprising, as both activities are timeconsuming. With limited time to spend, modders

make decisions about which activity to favor, choosing the one they describe as more

fun. However, as shown in the next section, this "fun" is problematic, because

modding also includes activities that are considered anything but fun, play testing

above all.

6. "Play testing is hard work"

[6.1] In most video games, game content must be balanced in order for players to

enjoy an intriguing experience. Because the strategic dimension of The Battle for

Wesnoth's design is largely regulated by the relationship among the variables defined

for each content type or element (e.g., the sizes of maps, the composition of different

terrains, the characteristics of factions and units), it is important for each element of

playable content (both official ones and those provided by addons) to integrate

smoothly with the others. Players, modders, and developers all stress balance as one

of the key points of the game. In general, they praise, support, and call for efforts to improve balance. And play testing is fundamental to achieving it. It is also hard work,

as most modders point out.

[6.2] Play testing is a relatively collaborative activity. It is usually differentiated into

selftesting, play testing with confidants, play testing with strangers, and play testing

with the target audience (Fullerton, Sawain, and Hoffman 2004). However, as this

section shows, play testing The Battle for Wesnoth is more complex. Indeed, although

Battle for Wesnoth modders are in theory able to play test directly with their target

audience, and although such testing is critical for the game mods to be broadly

accepted, they still often find themselves play testing with very few confidants or,

more likely, alone. Practically, play testing an addon involves the repetitive tasks of

(1) playing the addon to discover how well it balances with other game elements, as

well as how enjoyable it is, (2) tweaking it to improve balance and the playing

experience, (3) playing it again to check the effect of the changes, and (4) repeating

the sequence again when necessary.

[6.3] Play testing may reveal that map resources have been misplaced, allowing one

player to go ahead to the detriment of another. Play testing a faction addon may

make clear that the faction has an unfavorable ratio of cost to skills that will make it

unappealing. Modders tweak mods to improve these aspects, but they consider this

process boring and repetitive, the least attractive activity in the whole process, the

one that can lead them to abandon addon projects.

[6.4] I agree with those others that "developing" [addons] doesn't leave

much time for "playing," and that play testing is very repetitive and not

much fun. It's not really an exaggeration to say I haven't "played" Wesnoth

in years. (Arne interview, May 16, 2011)

[6.5] I'm surprised that people would contribute to the game when they

were not enjoying it. I certainly wouldn't! I have never felt *obligated* to

contribute. (I suppose I could feel obligated to fix a bug, but I haven't yet.).

I have gotten pretty bored with play testing before, and when I did, I did

something else for quite a while. (Nym interview, February 3, 2012)

[6.6] Largely, play testing produces only approximate results. As there is no

certainty of achieving balance (and thus of being effective), play testing cannot be

done well individually; it requires collaboration.

[6.7] In The Battle for Wesnoth, play testing is a trial and error process in pursuit of

an undefined goal: balance. It is not the same as debugging, as most bugs are

evident, and fixes either work or they don't. During a public conference, a leading

Battle for Wesnoth developer described balance as undefined, a subjective goal pursued repeatedly:

[6.8] Balance is mainly a feeling in your community. People say a game is

not balanced when it's "not fair," when it's not challenging, but if it's too

easy [it] is not balanced either, probably even when [it] is not fun…Balance

is a moving target. We have been doing this for years and we are still doing

it, because whenever we change something it has also a ripple effect

throughout the game. So your game is never balanced, your game is about

[i.e., approximately] balanced…It's not a science, you have to try stuff: if

you see something doesn't work in release X, then you change it and you

see what happens in release X+1. Did it work? Did it make things worse? Did

it have side effects you didn't want? You can try it. (Deoran, talk given at

FOSS conference, February 5, 2012)

[6.9] Resources can be reduced when they are too numerous or increased when they

are too few. Similarly, an unbalanced cost/skills ratio among faction units can be

adjusted by changing a unit's cost, or redefining another unit's skills. Nonetheless,

changes create a new equilibrium that is not necessarily better balanced. A map

overflowing with resources may upset strategy play more than a map on which

misplacement of resources puts one player at a clear advantage over others.

Therefore, modders play test an addon to identify balance problems, change some

variables, play test it again, change some variables again, and so on, until the addon

seems to be relatively wellbalanced. Modders and other players are tightly bonded by

their shared perceptions of how well mods are balanced. Indeed, as Deoran claims,

"balance is a feeling dispersed in the gamers' community." There is no algorithm to

evaluate or achieve balance; gamers and modders collectively construct it.

[6.10] The Battle for Wesnoth modders have good practices for designing and

developing balanced addons and thus lessening the need for play testing, but these

are not enough to avoid it completely. They use the design and the code of existing

game content to guide that of their own addons. They often examine official game

elements and wellconsidered addons and keep them in mind when creating their

own, and documentation offers tips and tricks for creating balanced content.

Furthermore, game elements are only balanced in relation to official and default

specifications, so modders can ignore balance concerns among addons and don't have

to play test them. However, although modders keep balance in mind throughout the

process of designing and implementing addons, play testing remains a necessary step

in their creation and enhancement. This is because players are the ones who

collectively decide whether addons are balanced or not. This puts modders in a catch22:

[6.11] The main obstacles we faced developing [the addon] was getting

art and getting playtesters. I did a lot of the art myself, but I couldn't do

the play testing myself, and though the Era had tens of thousands of

downloads on the addon server, we rarely got feedback on balancing, so it

was difficult to improve anything or get the balancing up to mainline quality

—which was pretty frustrating, since the main reason the "serious" MP

[multiplayer] players didn't try out [the addon] was that they considered it

poorly balanced, and thus not as fun to play. (Cleodil interview, June 13,

2011)

[6.12] Involving serious players in the play testing phase and integrating their

feedback has become fundamental to The Battle for Wesnoth modding. The most

established procedure by which modders gather feedback is to open forum threads

calling for it. This is a standard practice, usually covering the whole addon

development process. Modders often use generalpurpose threads with titles such as

"Feedback thread for [addon X]," where players can provide bug reports, positive and

negative comments, and suggestions for further improvements. However, for the play

testing phase, modders start specific threads (typically named "Balancing [addon X]")

that are used exclusively for balance issues (note 4). Using forum threads to gather

feedback not only requires players to find the addon among the many others and

decide to play it, but also, having played it, to report balance issues. As the quotation

above suggests, finding play testers is not easy: good players want good content to

play with and in general avoid unbalanced addons, while new, inexperienced players

cannot provide reliable feedback.

[6.13] Modders seem to start play testing when their addons become playable and

attract a few first players. Answering a question about the precise moment one can

talk about balance, Deoran replied,

[6.14] I would say: at the point where your game start[s] to be really

playable. It doesn't have to be good, but it should not be a prototype. Once

you start having players who come and play the game, at this point you

should start thinking about balance. (Deoran, talk given at FOSS conference,

February 5, 2012)

[6.15] However, although a large user base makes attracting play testers for the

official content easy, it is more difficult to find them for addons. Addons must stand

out from hundreds of others to gain renown and be consistently played by gamers. As

a consequence, modders often find themselves doing something alone that should be

done collaboratively. At the same time, they may receive occasional feedback from

random play testers that calls into question some alreadycompleted aspect of play

testing.

7. Discussion

[7.1] The arguments presented above suggest that where fans' expressive

productivity (modding) is institutionalized (as it can be in FOSS development), what

was once experienced as mostly fun can get loaded with expectations (e.g., pursuing

balance), responsibilities (e.g., reacting to gamers' feedback), and dependencies (e.g.,

relying on play testers). For these reasons, the practice of modding becomes a more

serious form of work. Far from being cheerful hobbyists, modders become more similar

to smallscale game designers. However, unlike such designers, modders remain

committed to the idea that modding should be fun.

[7.2] Describing the tenets of game design and development, Rouse (2004) depicts

play testing as

[7.3] one of the most exhilarating parts of the game development cycle. It

is then that you take the project you have been working on for months or

years, during which time only the development team has played the game,

and show it to people outside the team…Playtesting is not just a minor

steppingstone to getting the game shipped to the duplicators or uploaded to

the Internet. Instead playtesting is a key time during which you can

transform your game from average to excellent, from something that shows

promise to a game that is truly great. Few games ever came out of the

developer's hands in absolutely perfect shape. Ideally, it is the playtesting

cycle that gives your game the extra push to be the best it possibly can.

(483–84)

[7.4] Our fieldwork showed that, although it is crucial, play testing is anything but

exhilarating. Its repetitiveness, together with the difficulty of gauging its effectiveness,

make this part of the work quite different from the initial designing or the actual

coding of the addons, which modders still find pleasant and creative. For some

modders, play testing is so boring that they may stop developing the addon

altogether, even though the broader effort is usually fun. For others, it spoils the very

activity of playing: even though it involves playing the game, play testing is a

completely different way of experiencing play.

[7.5] For gamers who became modders, the video game is no longer an artifact to be

played. Rather, it is a platform with participatory affordances. However, even though

they enjoy most of the creativity involved in modding, they also face more challenging

and less fun phases. In this light, the sociotechnical context in which gaming take

place emerges as crucial. This means that authoring and collaborative tools, support

channels, and extensive documentation and tutorials, together with a supportive and

friendly environment, are necessary to reinforce and support the enjoyment of

modding, so that the tedious bits can be better endured.

[7.6] Since I joined the developers I don't play much anymore. Testing the

stuff I am responsible for is just enough and I don't even enjoy it anymore.

Play testing is hard work. (Drogan interview, May 12, 2011)

8. Conclusions

[8.1] Contemporary participatory cultures increase the significance of fan production.

If our conclusions here can be shown to be generally applicable, they will underline the

value of attending to FOSS modding. By conceiving video game modding as a form of

fans' explicit and expressive productivity, and by focusing on the way FOSS modders

experience and reflect upon their work in practice, we suggest the following critical

conclusions: (1) modding can seriously alter fans' traditional way of relating to their

object of fandom, (2) even though modding involves designing elements of the game,

these design activities are quite different from how they are formally described in

research literatures, and (3) modding is a complex endeavor that includes several

phases. Although some of these phases promote enjoyment and creativity, others do

not and can even trigger estrangement.

[8.2] Altogether, these results may bear important implications for phenomena other

than fandom that are similarly transformed by contemporary participatory culture,

such as gamification, playbor, and professional gaming. Rooted in game practices and

culture, these phenomena are reconfigured in ways that the traditional separation

between play and work no longer captures. These refigurings call into question, for

example, the extent to which making nongaming activities like work or education more

engaging by using gamedesign elements, or extracting workforce and labor value

from playful activities by designing them in a worklike fashion, may be efficient and

sustainable over the medium and long term.

[8.3] In implicit or instrumental productivity, fans' value expresses itself either

unconsciously or as the result of the overcoming of concrete needs. In contrast,

explicit and expressive productivity implies a higher degree of awareness and

expectation on the fans' side. Indeed, the case of modding in FOSS that we examined

here shows how explicit and expressive forms of productivity can benefit the object of

fandom by enriching and extending it. However, we also showed that the more fans'

productive output is valued and integrated into the object, the more fans' efforts are

accompanied by expectations and responsibilities toward the collectivity. In this case,

their efforts may cease to be creative and fun.

[8.4] Finally, we note a few directions for further inquiry. First, sociotechnical

contexts that sustain fans' productivity but also may lead to their detachment should

be better investigated. Understanding this would illuminate what makes fans'

involvement either endure or wane over time. Secondly, we need to know whether

(and, if so, to what extent) implicit and instrumental forms of fan productivity also

promote change in the relationship between fans and their object of fandom. Finally,

we need to study modding in corporate, proprietary video games, where fans'

productive practices are more marginal to the creation of the objects of fandom, and

compare those studies to this one. Such a comparison may provide valuable insight

into divergent participatory trajectories.

9. Acknowledgments

[9.1] We thank Stefano De Paoli, Lorenzo Polidori, and Diego Fornarelli for their

advice and comments.

10. Notes

1. For example, in Little Big Planet by Media Molecule and Mod Nation Racers by United Front Games, a core part of play consists of creating additional levels and

original characters that can be shared with, showed to, and played by other players.

Thus modding in the contemporary game industry functions both as a game design

novelty and as a form of outsourced work (Sotamaa 2010b).

2. The interviewees comprised eight developers (three retired), whom we treated as

privileged informants, and 21 participant users involved in noncore development

activities (three of whom were newcomers with less than 6 months' involvement).

3. Because addons are unlikely to be compatible across different versions of the

game, there is one dedicated server for each of the major versions. As a result of

software changes in the video game engine, addons need to be validated (and edited

if necessary) to ensure compatibility with each new version.

4. For play testing purposes, modders and players typically put saved game files of

actual matches in the feedback threads. These files can be loaded and played back,

like recorded sporting events.

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Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 15 (2014)

Praxis

Sherlockology and Galactica.tv: Fan sites as gifts or exploited labor?

Bertha Chin

London, United Kingdom

[0.1] Abstract— Current scholarship on fandom has been preoccupied with

examining the changing relationship between media industry professionals and fans.

Media producers, celebrities, and industry insiders are increasingly establishing

contact with fans, bypassing traditional media entertainment outlets to provide them

with information directly. This contact is facilitated by social media networks. Fans

serve as grassroots campaigners, promoters, and sometimes even public relations

officers, acting as liaisons between media producers, celebrities, or industry insiders

and fandom in general. In doing so, they take on roles traditionally fulfilled by

professional PR and marketing personnel, and they do it for free, resulting in

accusations that they are being exploited for their labor. However, fans do not

necessarily view themselves as being exploited. We need to consider the possibility

that they may regard their contributions as a service—or gift—to fandom. In

examining the roles played by two popular fan sites, Sherlockology and Galactica.tv,

I propose to examine how fan labor may be considered an act of gift giving in

fandom.

[0.2] Keywords—Battlestar Galactica; Fan labor; Gift culture; Sherlock; TV

Chin, Bertha. 2014. "Sherlockology and Galactica.tv: Fan Sites as Gifts or Exploited

Labor?" In "Fandom and/as Labor," edited by Mel Stanfill and Megan Condis, special

issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 15.

http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2014.0513.

1. Introduction

[1.1] When fans blog about or discuss their favorite media texts, they are performing

labor, generating wordofmouth promotion for TV shows, films, books, celebrities,

musicians, and bands. More than that, fans also manage Web sites, Facebook pages,

Tumblrs, and Twitter accounts, sometimes collaborating with celebrities and their

management team to provide news and information to their fandoms. These practices

have raised concerns that fans, in their roles as promoters and publicists, can be

exploited. In consuming and producing media content, fans are performing labor that

benefits the media industry in some way, whether by delivering audience numbers or

by utilizing their contacts in fandom to promote a text; and they are providing this

labor without any form of compensation from the media industry. Banks and

Humphreys talk of the "need to move beyond commentary that frames usercreated

content that becomes commercially valuable as a marker of exploited labour" (2008, 402). They argue that this content is often messier, and that its creation is driven by a

different set of motivations, than is normally assumed, and they emphasize the need

to take into account fan voices and fans' motivations. On that note, I want to consider

the gift economy framework as an alternative viewpoint from which to explore the

notion of fan labor.

[1.2] Fan studies scholars have, in recent years, started to engage with the theory of

the gift economy (Hyde 1999; Mauss 1954). This provides an alternative approach to

seeing fans as poachers, a concept that Henry Jenkins (1992) used to describe how

fans appropriate characters and universes, inserting their own meanings into TV

shows, films, literature, comics, and other texts as a way of resisting the multinational

corporations that own the copyright on these texts. Within the context of fandom's gift

economy, these creative fan cultural productions—artefacts that include not just fan

fiction and fan art, but also essays, fan Web sites, and wikis that serve as repositories

of knowledge for the fandom—are exchanged and circulated as gifts among fans and

within fan communities. Lewis Hyde maintains that "when gifts circulate within a

group, their commerce leaves a series of interconnected relationships in its wake"

(1999, xiv). In fandom, the "gift economy [certainly] builds social bonds" (Booth 2010,

24).

[1.3] The gifts exchanged in fandom earn status and reputation both for the

individual and for the community—or the fan site—the individual is associated with.

The worth of a gift is determined by its quality, by fans' expertise in both the

technology used to create it (such as the software used to create Web sites) and the

cultural text(s) it references, and by the reading of the text(s) agreed upon by

members of the fan community (such as specific shipper groups). Offering gifts

enables fan creators, such as authors, vidders, gamers, Web site owners, and so on,

to build on and elevate their status in their respective fan communities.

[1.4] Some of these fans who have attained skills and a good reputation within

fandom occasionally go on to collaborate with media producers, participating in (and

sometimes even organizing) grassroots marketing campaigns or assisting in the

production of extra fan materials, such as contributions to official wikis and the

production of extra DVD or Bluray specials (note 1). Derek Johnson (2007), however,

reminds us not to "uncritically accept this shift as evidence of growing audience power"

(73), as the proximity that arises from these collaborations often produces conflicts.

Johnson also warns that the supposed empowerment of fans is ambiguous, a point

that Henry Jenkins (2006) concedes when he comments on the perfunctory mixed

signals sent out by a media industry that is unable to decide what kind of relationship

it wants to have with its audience. In the eyes of the industry, Johnson warns, fans are more like "domestic help, invited in so as to perform labour" (2007, 78), than guests.

[1.5] But are these forms of fan labor exploitative? Fans who participate in these

collaborations or run the fan sites may consider their work not exploitative but a

service to fandom. Their Web sites provide a repository for knowledge and

information, sometimes gathered firsthand from their relationships with the media

producers or other industry insiders. The importance of fan voices in examining the

complexities of fan labor is crucial here. Baym and Burnett note how little we know

about "how fans perceive their own contributions or how they reconcile this tension

between empowerment and exploitation in their own lives" (2009, 435). Here I will

look at fan labor by examining the roles played by the fan Web sites Sherlockology

(http://www.sherlockology.com/), dedicated to BBC's Sherlock (2010–present), and Galactica.tv (http://www.galactica.tv/), dedicated to the original (1978–79) and

reimagined (2004–9) series of Battlestar Galactica. I propose to examine how fan

labor, although seen by some scholars as potentially exploitative, may be considered

an act of gift giving by those involved in the fandom, serving not only to build social

relationships but also to enable the fans giving these gifts to acquire status and build a

reputation within their fandoms.

2. Methodology

[2.1] As a fan of both BBC's Sherlock and the reimagined Battlestar Galactica, I also consider myself a consumer of both fan sites. I have interacted with Sherlockology on

various social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, and have tirelessly read

the indepth convention reports and interviews posted and conducted by Galactica.tv

over the years. In the course of preparing this paper, I contacted Sherlockology,

asking for permission to speak to its owners and maintainers about their successful

Web site. An email interview was organized and conducted in October 2012. My

questions focused on the site and on how things have changed for the four team

members—Leif, Emma, Jules, and David—who run the site from the time

Sherlockology was first launched to its current popularity and the reputation it has

garnered within Sherlock fandom. One of the questions specifically asked the members

about their views of labor in fandom, and whether they consider it exploitative.

Additionally, as part of my PhD dissertation research, mutual acquaintances put me in

touch with Marcel Damen, the cocreator of Galactica.tv, in December 2008. In emails

between December 2008 and March 2009 we discussed both his work on the Web site

and Battlestar Galactica fandom in general. While the term fan labor did not come up in our conversations, Damen touched on the work and effort that went into creating

the fan site, explaining how he and his Web site partner had carefully built and

maintained relationships with various cast and crew members who worked on the

show in the course of Battlestar Galactica's long broadcast history.

[2.2] I chose these two Web sites to study because of their unique positions within

their respective fandoms. Neither Sherlockology nor Galactica.tv are official Web sites,

especially since the latter show ended its television run in 2009. Yet the owners of

both Web sites maintain connections to the media producers and actors of both

franchises, despite remaining independent. Unlike Supernatural fandom's popular

resource, the Supernatural Wiki (http://www.supernaturalwiki.com), which invites fans to contribute to the site and collectively amass information, both Sherlockology and

Galactica.tv are run and managed by a set group of fans. Therefore, contact with the

industry remains within the core group, and their labor appears more intensive, even

as these fans maintain close contact with their respective fandoms (Sherlockology via

various social media networks, and Galactica.tv via direct interaction with fans during

conventions). This allows us a more complex view of fan labor; these groups of fans

are not being coopted into collaborating with media producers, but are themselves

attaining connections with the producers and building a reputation as a result of their

hard work and dedication.

3. Fandom's gift economy, capitalization, and exploitation

[3.1] Marcel Mauss, an anthropologist whose book The Gift forms the foundation of

all subsequent work on the gift economy, argues that gifts contain power: "the

material purposes of the contracts, the things exchanged in them,…possess a special

intrinsic power, which causes them to be given and above all to be reciprocated"

(1954, 49). The basic tenets of a gift economy are to give, to receive, and to

reciprocate; when these are completed, a social relationship between the giftgiver

and receiver is established (Cheal 1988; Booth 2010). Lewis Hyde extrapolates that

"gift exchange tends to be an economy of small groups, of extended families, small

villages, closeknit communities, brotherhoods and, of course, of tribes" (1999, xvi)

parallels that can be extended to fan communities (note 2).

[3.2] In the context of fandom, gifts appear in the form of artworks, fan fiction,

podcasts, and videos, as well as fan fiction archives, picture galleries, Web sites, wikis,

forums, Tumblrs, and Facebook pages, created and maintained on a voluntary basis.

Rachael Sabotini (1999) declares them to be the "centerpiece of the fandom," taking

skill, dedication, and effort to create. "The gift economy articulates the establishment

of relationships among its participants, the formation of a community" (Booth 2010,

130). Hellekson (2009) argues that the adoption of the gift economy within fandom

can also be seen as a form of legal and social protection. Because fans are often

making use of copyrighted material, remixing content from various intellectual

properties, defining fan cultural exchange as a gift economy protects fans from media conglomerates' often triggerhappy legal departments.

[3.3] Tanya Cochran, for example, observed how Universal Pictures capitalized on

the enthusiasm of fan of Joss Whedon's Firefly (2002–3) in the months leading up to

the 2005 release of the movie tiein Serenity. Universal Pictures constructed a

"membersonly online community that awarded points and eventually products

(tshirts, hats, movie tickets, etc.) to those able to recruit more members" (Cochran

2008, 246). Members of the online community were encouraged to promote the film

via word of mouth as well as to create merchandise, such as bumper stickers, to

accompany the DVD release of the film and series. Simone Murray argues that

incorporating fans into marketing strategies is beneficial to film studios and TV

networks by enabling them to "capitalise on elaborate extant fan networks to

distribute project publicity more rapidly and cost effectively than could conceivably be

achieved through traditional film marketing channels" (2004, 8). However, soon after

the DVD release of Serenity, Universal Pictures sent out ceaseanddesist letters to the

Firefly fan communities, demanding retroactive licensing fees for fans' use of

copyrighted materials and licensed images, leaving many fans who had participated in

the viral marketing campaign feeling exploited by the studio. Baym and Burnett point

out that "the concept of exploitation implies that there is a cost to its victims" (2009, 442). In this case, Firefly fans were courted by the studio to generate wordofmouth

promotions for the film, and the cost of this was the legal threats and demands for

fees.

[3.4] Murray sees this as a worrying trend as media companies "conflate highly

conditional granting of fan access to media properties with a legally enforceable right

to comment creatively" (2004, 21). Scholars such as Henry Jenkins (2007), Abigail De

Kosnik (2009), and Karen Hellekson (2009) have also commented on the ways in

which commercial culture has encroached into fan culture, bringing the risk that fans

will be exploited for their (creative) labor. All three scholars referenced FanLib, which

was established in 2007 and closed down a year later in 2008, as an example of this

attempt at monetizing fan cultural production, particularly fan fiction. In the case of

FanLib (which failed), fan fiction authors were sought and encouraged to upload their

written fiction to the site with the promise of compensation in the form of prizes, ebook publication, and the opportunity to collaborate with participating media producers (such as those of The L Word [2004–9]). Various fan communities across different

fandoms and platforms were quick to denounce the site, seeing the actions of its

creators as attempts to profit from the fruits of fans' labor, which fans considered to

be produced out of love or as gifts for fellow community members. As Hellekson

summarizes, the "FanLib debacle illustrates that attempts to encroach on the meaning

of the gift and to perform a new kind of (commercebased) transaction with fancreated items will not be tolerated" (2009, 117) (note 3).

[3.5] Fans' reluctance to participate in FanLib recalls Hellekson's earlier point about

social protection. If adopting the gift economy in fandom is a form of social protection,

it can also be seen as a form of protection from exploitation. Further, it can also

function as a form of exclusion, as a way for fan communities to preserve their "own

autonomy while simultaneously solidifying the group" (Hellekson 2009, 117). In

viewing fandom this way, however, we overlook the complexity of fan labor and risk

positioning fans within the strict dichotomy of resistance and complicity. We are still

left with the assumption that all the various fan communities, with their varied

interpretations of the text and their support for various characters and relationships,

present a united front against a perceived external threat: that of commercial culture.

This renders null and void hierarchies within fan communities and between fandoms,

where fans' positions and roles depend on the status they have accumulated from

creating, for example, an exemplary work of fiction or art, or a popular Web site. As

Jenkins, Ford, and Green propose, we need to consider the complexity of fans' labor as

it "may be exploited for the profit of the 'owners,' even as fans also benefit from what

they create. Such is the nature of collaboration in the belly of the beast" (2013, 175).

[3.6] Furthermore, Hellekson also concedes that "social cohesion may not be the only

goal" (2009, 116) in the gift economy of fandom. Sabotini argues that "all participants

vie for status" in the process of the gift exchange. This is similar to Claude Lévi

Strauss's argument on the "besting" of reciprocity in the cycle of gift giving, where the motives behind the act are not always conscious:

[3.7] Goods are not only economic commodities but vehicles and

instruments for realities of another order: influence, power, sympathy,

status, emotion; and the skilful game of exchange consists of a complex

totality of manoeuvres, conscious or unconscious, in order to gain security

and to fortify one's self against risks incurred through alliances and rivalry.

(1996, 19)

[3.8] In other words, fans are constantly, perhaps even unconsciously, vying for

status within their fandoms. Fan fiction, artworks, and videos reflect on the skills and

talents of their creators, so the more shares, reblogs, recommendations, feedback,

and likes the work receives, the higher the status of the creator. Similarly, a

professionallooking fan Web site whose creator has garnered a reputation for

reporting accurate information or having access to a media producer, celebrity, or

industry insider and thus being able to provide exclusive interviews and information

will be deemed authentic and granted higher status in fandom. This relative

positioning results from the various forms of labor fans perform. As media producers

and celebrities become more able to reach out directly to their fans (reducing fans'

dependence on fan sites for such access), and as fans become more public about

playing the role of promoter, public relations officer, or sometimes even financier,

questions about exploitation rise into prominence: Are fans being exploited by the

media industry, providing free labor when they should be compensated? Or is access

the reward for fans who have labored diligently and built a solid reputation in their

fannish community?

[3.9] Suzanne Scott remains cynical of this development, particularly since the media

industry has started to make use of the shared symbolic technological space to invite

fans into collaborating on viral marketing and promotional campaigns (note 4). Scott

(2009) argues that the media industry has a narrowly defined and contained version of

fandom. The industry carefully cultivates a parallel fan space that exists alongside

grassroots fandom, selling it to the unsuspecting general audience, coopting them

into commercialization with the promise of participation: "Media producers, primarily

through the lure of 'gifted' ancillary content aimed at fans through official Web sites,

are rapidly perfecting a mixed economy that obscures its commercial imperatives

through a calculated adoption of fandom's gift economy, its sense of community, and

the promise of participation" (Scott 2009, ¶1.5). The desire to collaborate puts fans in

a vulnerable position, where they might be exploited by the media industry into

performing labor for free (note 5).

[3.10] However, Baym and Burnett also remind us that "fans articulate a complex

system of costs, rewards and relational interpretations that motivate their continued

engagement in voluntary practices that provide economic value for others" (2009,

445). In other words, we need to take into account notions of fan agency, or fan

choice in participating or providing labor, even if we remain skeptical about the media

industry's stakes in fandom. We must not disregard the possibility that fans might

even be aware of the rhetoric on fan exploitation, but disagree with it, choosing to

continue providing the service or the labor anyway. Might we not be able to consider

that fan sites like Sherlockology and Galactica.tv are created not merely out of love for

the source texts but also as a service—a gift—to the fandoms of Sherlock and

Battlestar Galactica, especially for fans who are seeking the specific types of

information provided by these sites?

4. Fans as knowledge workers

[4.1] Tiziana Terranova (2003) argues that "free labor is not necessarily exploited

labor," because compensation is often "willingly conceded in exchange for the

pleasures of communication and exchange." Jenkins, Ford, and Green speak of the

morally complex nature of collaboration, arguing that it is "crucial to move beyond

seeing the relations between producers and their audiences as a zerosum game"

(2013, 174). Indeed, in my email interview, the four friends who run and maintain

the Sherlockology Web site explained to me,

[4.2] At the end of the day, no one asked us to do this, and certainly no

one pays us to so we can stop whenever we want. It is true Sherlockology

has grown far larger than any of us dreamt was possible when we began it,

and the time and financial commitment is enormous, but we continue of our

own accord because we enjoy it and do not have the limitations imposed on

us that we do in our daily jobs. (email, 2012)

[4.3] Ryan Milner (2009) argues similarly, noting that work on fan labor is missing an

important criterion: that of fans' own perception of their labor contribution or

collaboration with the media producers, the celebrities, and the media industry. As the

statement above indicates, fans derive pleasure from the labors they perform in

building Web sites, just as fans do from writing fan fiction or creating fan art or fan

videos. Similarly, Marcel Damen, who coruns the Galactica.tv Web site, enjoys the

stories that actors and crew members share with him, and it was this enjoyment that

prompted him to archive those stories digitally, a move that signaled the beginnings of

Galactica.tv. It can also be argued that the creators of both Sherlockology and

Galactica.tv created the Web sites because they saw a lack in their respective fandoms

and thus wanted to provide a service for fans. As Damen clarifies, his idea for

Galactica.tv was born out of discontent with fans of the original series:

[4.4] Many original series fans…order people around…because they've been

a fan for three decades and feel people should respect them because of it.

They're sitting high upon their thrones, but don't do anything. Galactica.tv

was born out of discontent for this group of fans who deleted the new series

part of their forum because they feel the new BSG is GINO (Galactica In

Name Only). They feel better than this new group of fans and now made

rules in their original series fan group that the new series can't be discussed.

If you do, you get warned and then banned. (email, 2008)

[4.5] The Sherlockology team, on the other hand, discovered that they could not find

much information on BBC's Sherlock, nor was there a central hub for information on

the show that the official BBC Web site did not provide, particularly about the show's

filming sites. Londoners themselves, they wanted to visit filming locations but

discovered that no information on them was provided to the show's fans. Therefore,

they told me, by "following media reports, fan sightings and the use of Google Maps…

[they] decided to create a 'small website' to document the locations [they] found" (email, 2012).

Figure 1. Sherlockology screenshot. [View larger image .]

[4.6] Milner identifies fans as "knowledge workers" and calls for the use of a new

paradigm to explore produceraudience interaction in the current technological age. He

makes use of the concept of the New Organization, which "emphasizes the specialized

labor of selfmotivated 'knowledge workers'" (Milner 2009, 492); Damen and the

Sherlockology team had specific motivations for building their fan sites. In this New

Organization, fans have the potential to be "developer, publicrelations specialist,

focus group, technical support, journalist, and consultant all in one" (Milner 2009,

497). For instance, Damen talks of how he established the reputation of Galactica.tv

by approaching not only the main cast of both the original and reimagined series for

interviews, but also guest actors and crew members:

[4.7] No one ever thought of talking to them, so they all were honoured

and agreed to doing interviews the minute we contacted them. The number

of interviews we did later got us the reputation [as] a serious interview site

and…[the] main cast (especially their agents) were impressed by that…Our

reputation and number of interviews was noticed by [convention] organisers

who asked us…to get them certain actors that they themselves were not in

contact with…Sometimes agents email us since they think their client will

benefit from an interview on our website. (email, 2008)

Figure 2. Galactica.tv screenshot. [View larger image.]

[4.8] The discontent that urged Damen to create Galactica.tv and the motivation to

create a fan site that emphasizes indepth interviews with both major and minor cast

and crew members of all versions of Battlestar Galactica have earned him a high

status in fandom, particularly among those who regularly visit his Web site and those

who attend Battlestar Galactica conventions. Damen recalls the pleasure of attending

conventions as a representative of the site, there to report on the event as well as to

interview the guests: "At this point," he explains, "it's just about seeing friends again (who happened to be actors I admired at first but became friends through meeting

them all the time)" (email, 2008).

[4.9] Although the Sherlockology team cites the long hours and significant personal

expenses as drawbacks to running the site, they maintain that the perks far outweigh

the disadvantages. The reputation that Sherlockology has gained has allowed them to

"apply for press passes to some events" (email, 2012). The members had met the

creators of Sherlock when the site first launched and had begun building a relationship

with the production company as well as the BBC. Despite running an unofficial fan site,

they are endorsed by the producers, who have used it to clarify rumors about BBC air

dates and relay information to fans about London location shooting for season 3. Still,

its members insist that

[4.10] Sherlockology is an independent website, neither run nor financed

by the makers of Sherlock. [We] do work closely with them to ensure all

information on our website is accurate. Therefore the wardrobe, jewellery

[ sic] and accessory information has been supplied to us by Sherlock

Costume Designer Sarah Arthur, similarly the props listed are from the

Production Designer Arwel Wyn Jones. Although we could contact the

locations manager, we do in fact source all the filming locations ourselves,

wishing to bother the crew as little as possible. (email, 2012)

[4.11] This insistence complicates the notion that fans are vulnerable to exploitation

as soon as they start performing labor for media producers. Fans also use their

relationships with industry insiders to their advantage, obtaining information and

disseminating it to the fandom. As Baym and Burnett contend,

[4.12] To argue this is exploitation, one must assume that the rewards that

fans attain are less valuable than those they deserve, and that the fans'

perceptions of their practices are evidence that they have been seduced by

the power dynamic that exploits them…To claim that these people are

exploited is to ignore how much these other forms of capital matter…and to

deny the capacity of these individuals to stop doing what they do. (2009,

446)

[4.13] Furthermore, it is also important to note that they must remain professional and maintain the quality of their coverage to preserve their relationships with the

media producers. Elsewhere, I have argued that while fan sites like XFilesNews.com—

which came into existence in 2008, in the postseries fandom of The XFiles (1993–

2002)—frequently collaborate with the show's former producers, cast, and crew

members, they occupy an inbetween position; the fans who run these sites similarly

maintain close ties to the fandom but must also demonstrate the professionalism

required and expected by the media industry in order to sustain their connection to the

producers, cast, and crew members. Their contact with the media industry, particularly

the producers and cast of The XFiles, also means that other fans view them as

intermediaries between fandom and the industry. The team at Sherlockology reveals

that they constantly receive inquiries from fans about "filming schedules and locations,

and contact details for the casting director…cast fanmail, twitter accounts and

appearances" (email, 2012). Similarly, Damen says that Galactica.tv receives many

emails asking for help getting in touch with the actors. Acting as gatekeepers

controlling access to the producers and celebrities, these fan collaborators "obtain a

certain status in their fan communities" (Chin 2013, 97), a status that derives from

their roles in running and maintaining popular fan Web sites that have caught the

attention and trust of media producers (note 6).

[4.14] Therefore, rather than merely performing labor for the industry, these fans

are also acting as intermediaries for other fans who wish to gain access to producers,

or who want to know filming locations. In other words, the labor is continual and

intensive, but that does not necessarily mean that it is exploitative, or that these fans

consider it so. Milner reminds us that media producers maintain interest in fans

because fans work for the text rather than the (media) industry at large, and all forms

of productivity, no matter how unofficial, build the brand of the text.

[4.15] While it might be slightly utopian to claim that fan labor always

comes from or results in fan pleasure (Terranova herself points out that it

does not), creative consumption very naturally leads to a degree of

production, and the goals of this production (implicit ownership, status,

esteem, community, social capital, etc.) are often outside the realm of

monetary gain. (Milner 2009, 494)

5. Fan sites as products of free labor

[5.1] Milner's research into fans of the video game Fallout (Interplay Entertainment,

1997) leads him to conclude that fans' allegiance is to an ideal of what the text can be

and what it can achieve. It is not to the corporations that own their favorite texts.

Damen's extensive interviews with actors on his Web site, for instance, often

concentrate on the craft of acting and on how each actor approaches his or her role, suggesting that it is important for fans to know that these actors are building on the

quality of the text. In performing the labor of creating the fan sites, these fans see

themselves as providing a service to their fandoms by offering information. More

importantly, they are also providing a service that is traditionally fulfilled by thirdparty institutions of the entertainment media that, unlike fans, may not be interested in franchises that are no longer on the air, or, worse, may be more interested in idle

gossip, which will not benefit the brand. However, coverage, whether by word of

mouth or otherwise, by those who are motivated by love and integrity will benefit it.

As Will Brooker declares, "fandom is built around love" (2002, 52).

[5.2] Thus it can be argued that, although maintaining these sites can be seen as

preserving the integrity of the brand, it can also be interpreted as a gift from fans like

Damen and the team at Sherlockology to their respective fandoms. As Booth suggests,

"instead of reciprocity, what the gift in the digital age requires for 'membership' into

the fan community, is merely an obligation to reply" (2010, 134). Thus, in building a

fan site that aims to include fans from all generations of a franchise or in building a

central hub where episode guides and information about filming locations and props

can be accessed, fans like Damen and the Sherlockology members are offering a gift

to their fandoms, where reciprocity means interacting with these fans on social media

or via email, thus making their labor for the fandom (and for the text) worthwhile.

6. Conclusion

[6.1] My intention has been to explore the concept of fan labor through the context

of the gift economy, in the process complicating the notion of exploitation that is often

assumed. I argue that rather than merely assuming that fans are exploited by the

media industry when collaborating with media producers, it is important to

acknowledge their voice in this collaboration, and that there may be other motivations

at play. As Baym and Burnett note, "rewards are undervalued in the rhetoric of

exploitation and labour" (2009, 444), but as we take into account fans' own

explanations of why they perform labor, we must also concede that other rewards,

such as status and recognition, are also important to fans.

[6.2] Milner's criticism of the lack of fan voices is essential. Not only is it relevant in

the context of fan labor, it also helps us understand how fans view their cultural

production and their concept of gifts to the community. In thinking of fan labor, we

should also remember that fans are allegiant to the text rather than to the industry;

remembering this may help us take seriously the notion of pleasure, which is so often

absent in fan studies. The notion of fan voice within the context of fan labor is clearly

exemplified in the two case studies here, where the fans, while noting their sacrifices

in time and money, stress that they choose to create and maintain their fan sites.

Their voices caution us not to assume that fans performing labor are always being

exploited by the media industry. It is vital that we acknowledge that fans often

perform labor because there is something beyond monetary gain to be achieved:

something like status and access to the media industry.

7. Acknowledgments

[7.1] I am grateful to Leif, Emma, Jules, and David of Sherlockology and to Marcel

Damen of Galactica.tv, who generously consented to be interviewed via email. A

version of this essay was presented at the Internet Research 13 conference organized

by the Association of Internet Researchers held at the University of Salford, United

Kingdom, October 18–21, 2012.

8. Notes

1. For example, in the Bluray edition of Christopher Nolan's 2010 film Inception, there is a special documentary on dreams produced collaboratively by actor Joseph Gordon

Levitt's production company, HitRecord, and his fans. GordonLevitt frequently

collaborates with his supporters through HitRecord, producing short films, animation,

music, and other creative works. Artists are compensated if their materials are used in

these productions.

2. While the permeation of fandom by blogs and social media networks has, as Busse

and Hellekson declare, made it "harder to get a comprehensive sense of a fandom and

harder still to build a truly inclusive sense of community" (2006, 15), it is also

important not to rule out fan spaces such as forums and LiveJournal communities.

While Tumblr may seem to be the most common choice in fandom today, there is still

a sense that interaction between fans occurs among a core group of people whose

relationship may have been established elsewhere or who have moved beyond Tumblr

to other social media networks such as Twitter and Facebook.

3. In June 2013, Amazon launched a publishing venture called Kindle Worlds

(https://kindleworlds.amazon.com/), which looks to be another attempt at monetizing fan fiction. Fan fiction writers are invited to submit their stories, and the authors of the

original work will earn royalties on sales of the fan fiction for it. Amazon Publishing

began by establishing licensing deals with three popular television series belonging to

Warner Bros. Television's Alloy Entertainment: Gossip Girl (2007–12), The Vampire

Diaries (2009–present), and Pretty Little Liars (2010–present), which have since been joined by other properties. It remains to be seen whether Kindle Worlds will be

successful or will suffer the same fate as FanLib.

4. See, for example, Tanya Cochran's (2008) work on Firefly fans and the promotion of the followup film Serenity.

5. The concern about fan exploitation is particularly poignant after the success of the

Kickstarter campaign in March 2013 to create a film sequel to the TV show Veronica

Mars (2004–7). The campaign met its $2 million target in less than 24 hours, and it

went on to raise $5.7 million from fans. The film is slated for release in 2014.

6. Sometimes this reputation extends beyond fandom to the mainstream as well.

Sherlockology won the Shorty Award for best fan site in 2012 and 2013.

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http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/technocapitalism/voluntary.

Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 15 (2014)

Praxis

Promoting fan labor and "all things Web": A case study of Tosh.0

Rose Helens-Hart

University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, United States

[0.1] Abstract— Television programs are increasingly paired with interactive media

platforms in attempts to reach fragmented audiences though a medium where

millions are now seeking entertainment—the Internet. Programs' online presences

are cultivated and promoted by paid staffers and unpaid fan laborers. Producers

monetize fan activity by guiding its form on their sites. Utilizing the concepts of

sticky and spreadable media, an analysis of the Comedy Central show Tosh.0 Web

site demonstrates how producers can promote particular types of interactivity

through the content and architecture of a multimodal Web site. By designing a site

that centralizes the use of popular social media, the producers of Tosh.0 concentrate

fans and benefit from their creative labor. Furthermore, this study serves as a test

for the scope and usefulness of the concepts of sticky and spreadable media in

revealing strategic Web site design that encourages specific types of user

participation.

[0.2] Keywords— Audience participation; Multimodal Web site; Spreadable media;

Sticky media

HelensHart, Rose. 2014. "Promoting Fan Labor and 'All Things Web': A Case Study

of Tosh.0. " In "Fandom and/as Labor," edited by Mel Stanfill and Megan Condis, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 15.

http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2014.0491.

[0.3] The only thing the Internet didn't ruin was my career. I jumped on

that train and rode it all the way to verified status on Twitter.

—Daniel Tosh, Tosh.0. , season 3, episode 14

1. Introduction

[1.1] Rapid convergence of Internet and televisual technologies has altered audience

viewing habits and behaviors. Television programming has evolved, attempting to

reach increasingly fragmented and Internetbased audiences with the addition of new

media platforms to their brands. Gillan (2011) explains these efforts as part of the

"MustClick TV" model, describing "new mediainfluenced network programming,

marketing, broadcasting, and distribution strategies and audience reception practices"

(1). This model relies on Web 2.0 infrastructure and fan involvement and highlights an

interactive relationship between program producers and fans. The interaction can be described as a feedback loop where the means of media production have expanded

into the hands of the fans, and fan practices are imported and translated back into the

industry (Watson 2010). This translation links the concept of fan labor to the

maintenance of emerging multimodal brand Web sites. In other words, fan labor such

as summarizing, editorializing, and modifying texts is monetized through a new

technological and economic regime that has been developing over the past two

decades (Gillan 2011; Milner 2009).

[1.2] The extraction of economic value from usergenerated content is, as Banks and

Humphreys (2008) suggest, "a dynamic and emergent process which transforms the

practices of businesses and capital" (2). Sites may structurally position content to

"spread" and navigation to "stick" users to the site (Jenkins, Ford, and Green 2013).

The concepts of sticky and spreadable media are becoming increasingly popularized

and are positioned as rivals to the dominant viral metaphor for content that spreads

quickly. Jenkins, Ford, and Green (2013) have discussed a series of examples to

conceptualize stickiness and spreadability, but the concepts must be further applied in

research to determine the degree to which they are useful for studying new media and

fan phenomena.

[1.3] This article examines how the Tosh.0 Web site employs social media and

interactive platforms to engage fans in creative labor to benefit the brand. Through a

design that centralizes the use of popular social media, the Tosh.0 site concentrates

fans and supports particular types of creative labor that contribute to and benefit the

Tosh.0 brand. This study serves as a test for the scope and usefulness of the concepts

of sticky and spreadable media for revealing strategic Web site design that encourages

specific types of valuable fan labor. Toward this end, research was guided by the

following questions: What aspects of the Tosh.0 Web site design support fans working

for the brand? How do the concepts of sticky and spreadable media clarify the

strategic form and function of the Tosh.0 Web site? In the following sections I will first

discuss Tosh.0's intermedia context and the organizing principles of sticky and

spreadable media. Next, I explicate the method employed for data collection and

analysis. After a presentation of findings, I assess the presence of sticky media and

spreadable media strategies on the Web site. Finally, I discuss how the recognition of

these strategies is useful for understanding the form and content of the Web site and

how fan labor is guided and used.

2. Tosh.0's Intermedia Context

[2.1] Tosh.0 selfdeclares that it is "cable TV's most trusted source for exhibitionist weirdoes, injurious idiots and all things Web" ( Tosh.0 2012). The show stars standup

comedian Daniel Tosh and features an array of video clips collected from the Internet and produced by both the show and fans. As the clips are played, Tosh engages the

videos by commenting on them in a sardonic comedic style that Tosh euphemistically

described in one interview as "honest and unguarded" (Parker 2009). Videos are also

edited and parodied, and select "celwebrities" (the people in particularly embarrassing,

bizarre, or unbelievable clips) are interviewed and given a chance to "redeem"

themselves to viewers in segments that the show calls "Web Redemptions".

[2.2] The Tosh.0 Web site includes a blog, videos, images, and Twitter and Facebook

comments from viewers. Tosh's comedy is crude, deliberately offensive, and sarcastic.

A similar style of comedy is encouraged in fansubmitted comments on videos and

photos and through specific calls for themed video submissions. Fansubmitted content

adds value to the brand as an essential supplement to the site. If this content were

removed today, the Web site would only host content from aired Tosh.0 episodes and

what limited amount of material is gathered by the two staff bloggers. Fansubmitted

content regularly updates the site for the benefit of fans who want to be entertained

and for Tosh.0 whose producers want people to stay on the site longer in order to

consume and contribute.

[2.3] This participation is the essence of fan labor when fans are what Milner (2009)

describes as "active, creative, productive participants within the labor system

surrounding the text they esteem. Simply put, fans work for the text" (494). He

argues that activities are labor when they "build the brand" of the media text. Fans

engage in valueenhancing labor by taking on part of the work of updating a text and

making it interesting for themselves as well as providing feedback on content to

producers (Andrejevic 2008). In addition, the more fans stick to a site, the more likely

they may be to engage in activity that produces value for the brand such as sharing

their own or others' videos to the site, clicking on ads, watching commercials that

precede video clips, spreading videos that are branded with the Tosh.0 logo and

contain ads, and buying Tosh.0 merchandise or tour tickets.

[2.4] Many television shows have Web sites that provide opportunities for audiences

to "talk back" to each other and producers through comments, email, and, in the case

of competitive reality shows, voting for their favorite contestants (Andrejevic 2008;

Gillan 2011; Jenkins 2006). Shows such as E!'s Talk Soup and ABC's America's

Funniest Home Videos predated Tosh.0 and utilized a comedian host, clips from other programs, and audience members. MTV's Ridiculousness (premiered in 2011) and G4's

Web Soup (premiering just days after Tosh.0) also highlight rapidly spreading content while hosts provide comedic commentary, but their Web sites offered limited

opportunities for fan interaction. The Tosh.0 Web site is a better representation of the

Web 2.0 model and was selected for study because of its unique design and heavy

reliance on rapidly spreading material and user videos as main sources of content.

[2.5] Descriptions of Web 2.0 vary because the concept does not have hard

definitional boundaries but a "gravitational core" (O'Reilly 2005, 1). The core consists

of a set of principles and practices such as strategically positioning the Web as a

platform for promoting, distributing, and redefining products where users control their

own data (O'Reilly 2005). Jenkins, Ford, and Green (2013, 297) describe Web 2.0 as a

business model through which "commercial platforms seek to court and capture the

participatory energies of desired markets and harness them toward their own ends."

Pauwels and Hellriegel (2009, 52) define it as "Web development and Web design

supporting interactive information sharing and collaboration on the World Wide Web."

User participation is a hallmark of Web 2.0 and as social networking applications

proliferate, users online are in a perpetual negotiation to determine where and how

they will spend their time. Web sites that are designed to tempt users to stay longer

and pay more attention to one place take on a quality that Jenkins, Ford, and Green

(2013) describe as sticky. Content can also be positioned to spread among Web sites

and users and acquire a spreadable quality.

[2.6] Audiences desire interactive entertainment where as users they can "navigate,

explore, create and construct" (McRae 2006, 6). The results of a 2011 longitudinal

study on the influence of computers, the Internet, and related technologies on families

and society reported that 46 percent of users visited social networking and videosharing sites weekly, and the importance of the Internet to maintaining social relationships was at an alltime high (Lebo 2011). This demonstrates users' desires for

socialization and interaction with others and arguably their interest in amateur content

on videosharing sites. Tosh.0 capitalizes on these desires and has crafted a site where

fans are encouraged to work for the brand by gathering and creating content for the

site, communicating with others about site content, and spreading content marked

with the Tosh.0 brand to other sites, fans, and Internet users.

3. Spreadable and sticky strategies

[3.1] Jenkins, Ford, and Green (2013) describe sticky strategies as techniques to

centralize audience presence in particular online locations. Web sites operating under

sticky philosophies attempt to grab and hold the attention of audiences, which is

important for advertising revenue and sales. Traced back to the term's popularization

in Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point (2000), stickiness broadly refers to "the need to create content that attracts audience attention and engagement" (Jenkins, Ford,

and Green 2013, 4). Stickiness models attempt to concentrate audience attention to a

particular location by putting material in centralized places. Similar to an allinclusive

resort, stickiness attempts to provide the user with a homogenous experience and all the content needed to keep users on the site. Prestructured activities for visitors assist

in creating a homogenous experience and holding the interest of individuals. For

example, sites may post games, quizzes, and contests to hook a user into interacting

with the site. Users and audiences are often treated as passive individuals that can be

controlled.

[3.2] Spreadability emphasizes the dispersion of content across multiple sites and to

users so that they do not have to visit the content's original site in order to interact

with it. Spreadability serves a heterogeneous environment where users can circulate

media texts for different purposes, and social connections communally shape their

experiences with material. In other words, it embraces the practices of "textual

poaching" where fans "appropriate popular texts and reread them in a fashion that

serves different interests" (Jenkins 1992, 23). Participation is open ended and

audiences can utilize content in unrestricted ways. Spreadability values audiences

being active participants in "spreading the word" about brands and assumes that

"anything worth hearing will circulate through any and all available channels" (Jenkins,

Ford, and Green 2013, 7). The roles of producers, marketers, and audience members

are blurred.

[3.3] The conditions for sticking audiences to a site and promoting the spread of

content may seem to be at odds with one another, but it is possible to promote certain

aspects of stickiness and spreadability simultaneously (Jenkins, Ford, and Green

2013). This creates a sticky site with spreadable content. Fans stick to the site while

spreading its content. The right combination of stickiness and spreadability may

maximize corporate gain while satisfying users' need for control, interactivity, and

community. Participation on the Tosh.0 Web site suggests that producers may have

found such a combination that presently serves their needs as well as that of their

fans. An assessment of the site is necessary to reveal strategies that encourage fan

activity and community. Toward this end, I again highlight the research questions

guiding this study: What aspects of the Tosh.0 Web site design support fans working

for the brand? How do the concepts of sticky and spreadable media clarify the

strategic form and function of the Tosh.0 Web site? In the next section, I explain how

data were collected and how the concepts of stickiness and spreadability were used to

guide the qualitative coding process.

4. Methodological justification

[4.1] Up until its midseason break, season 4 of Tosh.0 consisted of ten 22minute

episodes that aired weekly from January 31, 2012, to April 3, 2012. These episodes

(4.01–4.10) and the corresponding Tosh.0 Web site activities were targeted for data

collection. This selection of texts was appropriate for analysis for two reasons. First, the episodes made a logical grouping because they included the array of recurring

segments such as Web Redemptions, Video Breakdowns, and calls for fans to submit

videos to the Web site. Since the focus of this study is on the design of the Web site

rather than the meaning of its content, viewing ten episodes was sufficient to

determine the form of regular segments. The episodes were reviewed and detailed

notes were taken on the structure of the show to reveal segment patterns. Segments

were then watched again from the Web site along with other content from past

episodes not in the targeted season in order to verify patterns.

[4.2] Data collection on the Web site focused on two areas of "web internal analysis"

for data collection: structure (hierarchy and flow of elements), and links to other

sources (expressions of affiliation) (Pauwels 2005; Pauwels and Hellriegel 2009). The

first step in data collection was to investigate the structure of the site to determine the

hierarchy and flow of elements through common architectural design principles such as

emphasis, subordination, hierarchy, and dominance (Kimball 2013). I began by taking

an inventory of content on each of the main pages. I indicated in notes when content

and titles repeated and where they were placed on the pages. Eyetracking

visualizations studies assisted in understanding elements of structure. Studies reveal

that users typically read Web sites in a roughly Fshaped pattern: two horizontal

stripes at the top of the page followed by a vertical stripe down the left hand side

(Lorigo et al. 2008). Content placed in this pattern should theoretically be viewed

more regularly and thus may be potentially more dominant to users of the site than

other content.

[4.3] The second phase of data collection focused on links within the site. I

systematically clicked on links present in the site's main pages to experience and

record how users might move through and off of the site. Two types of links were

focused on in this phase. The first type of link was internal and sent the user to

content and pages within the site. For example, one might be directed to the Tosh.0

blog page from a number of other main pages. The second type of link was external

and sent the user to other pages such as Facebook, Tosh's Twitter account, or other

Comedy Central show sites.

[4.4] Screen shots and detailed descriptive notes on structure and function served as

the raw data for coding. Spreadability and stickiness were the major concepts that

drove initial code development. Spreadability codes focused on movement of content

off and to the site. Examples of these codes are spread, collect, and create. With these

basic codes in mind, data were opened up and codes became more specific such as

spread to other site, spread to other user, spread to other SNS, request for collection,

and request for creation. Stickiness codes focused on attempts to draw the user into

the site and keep them occupied. Examples of these codes are creative investment,

internal redirection, and continuous feed. These codes were also later diversified into

more specific codes such as creative commentary, creative contest, redirect to home,

and redirect to blog. Some data were ambiguous or served dual purposes to stick fans

and spread content such as video play lists which ran continuously to draw users in yet

allowed them to easily spread content off the site.

[4.5] Although coding was initially directed by preformed categories, it was not

completely restricted. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate how sticky and

spreadability concepts may be useful to the study of fan labor, but it became apparent

that advertisements and other information such as user agreements were not clearly

sticky or spreadable. While clicking on advertisements may open new pages and

generate value, they did not necessarily direct users to push or pull content to the site

or engage in creative activities. This type of content was still important in determining

where user activity led to value for the brand (advertising is a revenue source), but it

could not be discussed in terms of stickiness or spreadability. In these cases codes

often reflected movement and purpose such as "external link to advertisement" or

"internal link legal user information."

5. Tosh.0 Web site features

[5.1] The Tosh.0 Web site contains a basic structure of navigational options and

design strategies to assist users in accessing thousands of videos. The main entry

point is the home page (figure 1) where at the top there are six main tabs available:

Home, Blog, Video, Submit a Video, Shop, and About. The Home, Blog, Video, and

Submit a Video pages all immediately offer visitors the most recent or most viewed

videos or content. These items are placed prominently at the top of the pages. Next to

these options are Facebook and Twitter icons and feeds of the most recent posts and

tweets from Tosh's Twitter and Facebook pages. Above the tabs is a basic search

function for the site.

Figure 1. Screenshot of Tosh.0 home page, 2012. [View larger image .]

[5.2] The Video tab exclusively features clips from the television show while the

Submit a Video tab contains over 160,590 viewergenerated or gathered videos which

can be sorted by most recent, viewed, shared, and top rated. This creates a clear

separation between official content produced by Tosh.0 and usersubmitted content

(figure 2). The blog features videos, pictures, and the latest Twitter and Facebook

comments about Tosh.0 gathered by two regular Tosh.0 bloggers (figure 3). Users

may comment on but not post content to the blog area. The blog also contains calls for

users to "Rename This Video" and participate in photo Caption Challenges. The blog

also displays Tosh.0 clips that have become Fan Favorites. Running along the right

side of the blog is the Blogroll, a list of 34 other blogs and content aggregators such as

Boing Boing, College Humor, Digg Comedy, Fark, and Reddit Funny. At the top of the blog page are highlighted categories so that users do not have to scroll through the

blog to access Fan Favorites and Caption Challenges. Sandwiched between these two

boxes are commercialoriented links for Tosh Twenty Twelve Tour dates and tickets

and the Shop that sells Tosh.0 apparel, CDs, and DVDs. Users are given navigation

options to see merchandise for other Comedy Central shows.

Figure 2. Screenshot of Tosh.0 viewer videos, 2012. [View larger image .]

Figure 3. Screenshot of Tosh.0 blog, 2012. [View larger image .]

[5.3] This same set of four boxes also appears on the Home Page, but they are

positioned underneath the box for Featured Videos from the show. The Home Page

attempts to include a little of every section. A What's Hot box includes three tables for

recent clips, blog posts, and clip playlists. The blog is featured to the right of this box

and below it is the What's Happening box, which contains Twitter and Facebook feeds.

Below the blog box is a featured Twitter or Facebook comment about the show and a

picture that has been recently posted to the blog. During the week, ten blog posts are

usually submitted each day by blog staffers. These same posts are also usually posted

to the Tosh.0 Facebook page. After reviewing Tosh's Twitter account, which is linked to

the main site, I determined that Tosh tweets about 50–60 times on days when an

episode airs. Most of those tweets are responses to fan tweets during the show.

[5.4] At the bottom of each page is a bank of numerous Tosh.0 links that offer

alternative navigation to featured content as well as other Comedy Central Shows. The

bank also consists of Friends of Comedy Central links as well as Viacom legal and

business links for job postings, copyright compliance information, and terms and

conditions. Repetition of content and links is a design strategy for the site and Home

Page in particular. Excluding the original set of navigational links, content that is

contained in the blog was featured separately six times on the Home Page. Videos of

the show were featured three times and the Shop was featured twice. This may make

the site seem as if it has more content and viewing options than it really does and may

lead fans to view particular content more regularly.

[5.5] Once episodes are released for online replay, the segments are posted

individually on the Web site so that audiences can select specific segments to view. In

fact, one cannot even see an episode in its 22minute form. The use of short segments

on the Web site may be a deliberate choice to increase the likelihood of browsing

archived content, viewing ads, and spreading clips to other users and Web sites.

Singular clips are short and easy to share and once one has finished playing, another

will automatically begin, ushering the user into a rabbit hole of video viewing. The Web

site acts as an aggregator and distributor of the bizarre, shocking, and grotesque

material that users may seek online. Fans are encouraged to share content to

Facebook, Twitter, and digg.com (a social news Web site) by the placement of a social

media button set located on each content submission. The site is designed to

accumulate videos and photos for the blog and to allow for content to spread.

6. Discerning the sticky and the spreadable

[6.1] The Tosh.0 Web site utilizes both sticky and spreadable strategies to engage

fans in forms of labor such as watching and commenting on videos or submitting

videos of their own. It is a place where content is centralized into areas to concentrate

and capture attention through prestructured interactivity. Yet it also encourages the flow of ideas and content through userdriven social interaction. The Web site utilizes

stickiness by centralizing content in one location. With repetition of content on each

tab, most navigational tools will take the user to similar content areas. Facebook and

Twitter are also frequently linked to so that users do not have to leave the Web site in

order to see Tosh.0 social media activity or to share content to their own social media

profiles.

[6.2] Spreadability is also supported by easily allowing content to disperse across

multiple sites. The Web site is a repository for collected materials, meaning that it is a

destination for content that has been spread. While this can also be interpreted as a

sticky feature, the site's easytouse uploading mechanism supports spreadability

through encouraging the quick spread of content from other sites. Content is packaged

into easytoshare formats. In fact, many videos have a YouTube marker on them and

give the user the option to watch them there. If a user wants to share a video or a

picture on Facebook or Twitter, share options are available to them on the Web site,

but the Tosh.0 name and Comedy Central markers travel with the content in order to

spread the brand. The blog page directs fans to spread content with a list of other

popular content aggregators and blogs.

[6.3] The structural design of the Tosh.0 Web site demonstrates stickiness because it

provides a relatively homogenous experience to fans. The site is not a social

networking site (SNS) since users do not become members or make profiles which can

be linked to one another, but Facebook and Twitter are popularized on the site. The

site can be interpreted as more spreadable when it is engaged through those SNSs

and when fans comment and contribute to the site thus making their usage more

personalized. By voting for favorites (captions, videos, titles) and by passing content

to and from the site, users are shaping the Tosh.0 community and brand.

[6.4] The Tosh.0 Web site blends spreadability and sticky strategies through its

efforts to guide audience participation and interaction. Voting on videos to make them

fan favorites and submitting titles and captions to photo and video challenges are the

most structured activities on the site. Yet each requires users to engage creatively

with content, meaning that activities are also open ended. When fans create videos in

response to calls from Tosh on the show, they are also participating in partially openended activities. Perhaps the most openended activities available are video submissions not associated with specific calls, tweeting to and about Tosh and Tosh.0,

and making other unsolicited comments on posted content. While these activities seem

very open ended, they still exist within a constrained environment. Fans can only post

videos to the site because the designers have decided they should have the ability to

do so. These activities have been deemed to benefit the show and the brand and can

be laborious and time consuming for fans.

[6.5] The site's style of comedy suggests that the Internet offers a place to create a

carnivalesque space to share and ridicule embarrassing, graphic, and extraordinary

content. This is emphasized through spreadable strategies because they increase the

visibility and prominence of such content. Users are provided with convenient

collections gathered by fans and Tosh.0 staff, which they can easily share. The sticky

strategies encourage them to stay interacting with content for longer periods of time,

which may limit their exposure to other types of content.

7. Feedback loops

[7.1] The Tosh.0 Web site's use of sticky and spreadable strategies assists in the

aggregation of particular types of content for the show and Web site. Tosh's politically

incorrect and offensive humor is positioned as ideal humor for the site, and fans are

encouraged through contests and potential recognition to find videos and make

comments that complement his style. To affirm what ideal content is, user videos and

comments are cherrypicked to be highlighted on the show and Web site. The site

cultivates activity through offering rewards of celwebrity status and exposure of fans'

submitted material.

[7.2] Tosh and his staff find rapidly spreading content (commonly referred to as viral

videos) and use it for the show or post it to the Web site blog. These videos may be

original creations such as home videos, original short movies, and music (O'Brien and

Fitzgerald 2006). Obscene material, however, is a staple for the show and Web site.

Although some images or words may be edited when the show airs on Comedy

Central, the Tosh.0 Web site hosts unedited content. In the clip "Teabag a Mousetrap"

(4.02), a man's scrotum placed in a mousetrap was blurred on Comedy Central, but

producers deemed the uncensored clip acceptable for the Web site; this practice

emphasizes it as a carnivalesque space.

[7.3] In a 2010 interview, Tosh outlined the checklist for videos he uses for the show

where the first criterion was that it should feature "someone really getting hurt" but in practice, not all videos feature injuries (Stelter 2010). Perhaps a better stipulation is

that videos should feature content that will make audience members uncomfortable or

shock them in some way. For example, episode 4.02 featured a video titled "Legless

Ninja" showing an amputee performing martial arts. The man, missing his body from

the waist down, was targeted by Tosh with jokes emphasizing his handicap. Similar to

the longest running comedic realityclip show, America's Funniest Home Videos, now

called America's Funniest Videos or just AFV, Tosh.0 capitalizes on injury as well as

embarrassing and tragic moments put online or created by viewers for the show.

These celwebrities are "converted into monetary value through their capacity to

perform their misery" (Terranova 2000, 52). The difference between the two shows

was articulated in a fan's tweet to Tosh's twitter account that said, "AFV is for

watching someone fall down. Tosh.o [ sic] is for watching that same person break their

leg when they fall. Then throw up."

[7.4] Viewer videos are spread from other Internet sites for a general video

submission or may be gathered or created by fans for a particular purpose, such as to

nominate a video for a Web Redemption or respond to a call for audience members

filming themselves engaged in a particular activity, such as impromptu trust falls or

parkour. Typically, Tosh will introduce activities in segments on several shows spaced

throughout a season and make a call for fans to submit videos of themselves

performing the activity. In episode 4.07, Tosh featured a Web Redemption for a

woman videoed injuring herself while performing parkour, which is an activity where

people vault, roll, run, climb, or jump to overcome obstacles in their environments. At

the end of the Redemption segment and after Parkour Girl successfully navigated an

obstacleladen area, Tosh called for viewers to submit videos of themselves doing

parkour. Two episodes later and with 120 videos submitted to the Web site, Tosh

featured a mashup of viewer submissions in episode 4.09. The mashup, along with all

of the submitted videos, are available to be viewed on the Tosh.0 Web site.

[7.5] Tosh also uses collected videos to produce Video Breakdowns and 20 Seconds

on the Clock. Video Breakdowns start with showing the entirety of a clip. Then Tosh

will replay the clip in shorter intervals, making jokes about its content. Similar to the

Video Breakdown, 20 Seconds on the Clock is a segment where Tosh puts 20 seconds

on the clock to see how many jokes he can make about a video while it is played in

real time. The short, rapid jokes mirror the style of comments one might find attached

to the videos on other SNSs, and fan comments on these videos mirror Tosh's oneliner biting comedy style.

8. Fan labor

[8.1] Online entertainment communities sponsored by prominent media brands (such

as NBC, CBS and Comedy Central) are an increasingly powerful presence online (Gillan

2011). David Nieborg argues that many corporate practices are cleverly combining

"capitalintensive, profitoriented industrial production with laborintensive, nonprofitoriented peer production" (quoted in Jenkins, Ford, and Green 2013, 49). The Tosh.0

program and Web site are an example of this type of combination.

[8.2] When fans spread content to the site, the show receives clips eligible for use on future episodes though Tosh has no obligation to feature submitted content. This

extraneous content is valuable, however, as it assists in building the video collection,

which is a staple of the site. Tosh.0 demonstrates that there is value in this type of

content and humor because the show is economically viable and popular. The Web site

already employs two bloggers that post to the blog during the week, but fans are

posting content every day, at all hours. The profit motive for the Tosh.0 site is further

demonstrated through its prominent commercial elements such as the frequent push

to sell Tosh Tour tickets and show merchandise and advertisements that are placed

along content and at the beginning of videos.

[8.3] In order for fan activities to be profitable, the site must attempt to guide them

into producing texts that are considered valuable. Activities such as video challenges

and video playlists may stick users to the site longer, requiring them to view more

ads. Comments and video submissions keep content in flux with new things to see and

read every day. This allows producers to maintain the novelty of site content with

potentially little effort. The practice of continuously updating and adding or creating

new content to sites has been described by Terranova (2003) as essential for Web

sites to "fight off obsolescence." Additionally she argues that most of the Internet's

updaters are unpaid. Researchers have questioned and attempted to address whether

or not fans are "duped" into performing acts of labor that are unpaid and unequally

benefit brands (Banks and Humphreys 2008; Terranova 2000). It seems that fans are

not united on the benefits and drawbacks of providing free labor but that there are

nonmonetary rewards to be gained. Fans may produce for the texts they love for

personal enjoyment, as a way to give back to a fan community, gain social capital or

notoriety, or develop and publicize their skills. In studies on fan fiction, fan subbing,

and game modding, some individuals were found to have used skills developed in fan

activities to break into industries and develop careers (Coppa 2008; Mittell 2009;

Postigo 2007; Yang 2009). In the context of Tosh.0, it would appear that fans are

producing texts for personal enjoyment and a chance for brief fame if their content is

used or highlighted on the show or Web site.

[8.4] According to Tosh.0's User Content Submission Agreement (Viacom Media

Networks 2010),

[8.5] Comedy Central acquires no title or ownership rights in or to any User

Content you submit and nothing in this Submission Agreement conveys to us

any ownership rights in your User Content. Comedy Central is acting only as

a host, bulletin board or conduit for submitted User Content, with all of the

specific rights granted by you hereunder. Although by your submission of

any User Content you are requesting and directing us and any of the Parent

Companies or the Affiliates with whom we have made arrangements, to take

advantage of and exploit all of the rights and privileges granted hereunder

(including, without limitation, the right to display and post the User Content

on the Platforms), neither we, nor any of the Parent Companies or the

Affiliates have any obligation to do any of these things.

[8.6] Although Comedy Central will not own user content, users should expect that it

can be used without further permission. During the coding process, a review of fan

tweets to Tosh indicated that a number of users want their content to be used in so far

as they desire recognition for it from Tosh or other users. For example, fans' tweets

may have explicit requests for acknowledgment by asking Tosh to tweet them back. In

the parkour user video mashup, one star of a submission is asked "what are you

doing?" after he tumbles off a porch and he responds, "getting on Tosh.0. " In this case, the fan who filmed himself engaged in labor for the show. In exchange for his

time (and possible injury) he hoped for and received the chance to have his video

used.

[8.7] The dangerous and potentially unethical nature of user video requests is that

fans may be willing to jeopardize their safety and social standing offline in service of

the show and their reputations as fans. In addition to putting themselves in physical

danger performing parkour or impromptu trust falls, Tosh has also asked users to send

in videos that break social norms. For example, one call asks fans to film themselves

approaching women from behind and reaching around to touch their stomachs. Fans

may have a better chance of getting on Tosh.0 the more extreme their behavior is and

have a shot at becoming a celwebrity if they comply with official Comedy Central

agreements, terms and conditions and post their videos to the site. Further analysis of

the type or subject matter of content spread to and from the site would clarify danger

as perhaps an element of content that motivates people to spread it.

9. Conclusion

[9.1] Television industries are strategically embracing convergence with Internet

technologies and social media platforms. Online brand presence is not cutting edge,

but sticky and spreadable strategies recently conceptualized by Jenkins, Ford, and

Green (2013) to rival the dominant viral media metaphor illuminate ways in which

Web sites attempt to engage audiences and fans. Sites operating under sticky

philosophies are attempting to structure user experiences and concentrate them on

their sites to keep eyes on sanctioned content and advertisements. Spreadability

strategies encourage users to personalize their engagement and easily spread content

and the brand to a number of sites. Although theorized through a number of

examples, sticky and spreadable concepts deserved further consideration to test their

scope and usefulness to design analysis. In this study, they proved to be useful for determining the strategic design of the Tosh.0 Web site.

[9.2] The Tosh.0 Web site was targeted for such a test because of its unique focus

(even when compared to shows with a similar format) on online videos and fangenerated content as an inspiration for original and creative work. The Web site demonstrates characteristics of stickiness and spreadability and these concepts were

useful in identifying how the site provides opportunities for fans to engage in openended activities that benefit the brand. Since the show is predicated on the usage of social media and amateur video, audience engagement and participation is essential to

its popularity. I examined the navigational structures and site design that promoted

the push and pull of content to and from the Tosh.0 Web site. The site depends on

fans to participate in the circulation of content and hooks them in with the promise of

a potential carnivalesque spectacle and brief celwebrity status. The show's online and

broadcast success may indicate that relinquishing some control over content and

supporting user autonomy can facilitate the growth of a fan base and community.

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Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 15 (2014)

Praxis

The cultural economics of performance space: Negotiating fan, labor,

and marketing practice in Glee's transmedia geography

Matthias Stork

University of California, Los Angeles, California, United States

[0.1] Abstract— The Fox television show Glee (2009–present) constitutes a cultural phenomenon of the digital age. Through its multiplatform marketing of musical and

theatrical performance, the show has attracted a substantial fan base and created a

selfsustaining economy of cultural expression. As a serialized narrative with a focus

on the underdog's struggle for fame, it constructs a populist forum for fans to live

their dream of becoming a star vicariously and learn how to realize it in real life—

how to make it. Glee's marketing approach postulates performance as the essential

element in forming an intimate relationship between the show and its core fans, the

Gleeks. Performances are distributed across several spaces, including a multitude of

video and audio channels, to satisfy Gleeks' desire for maximum content. The show's

cast and crew further offer to discuss these performances and grant special insights

into their creation. Glee's promotional discourse overtly characterizes fans as equals,

positioning its programming as a gift to them. The overarching message of this

marketing methodology is that Glee rewards its fans for their investment and loyalty

by offering up content and interaction in a variety of performative spaces—a

transmedia geography—that transcend television. By using an interdisciplinary

framework of political economy, cultural geography, and transmedia

communications, Glee may be examined in relation to its diegetic and nondiegetic

conceptualization and commodification of performance space. Doing this illuminates

how the show negotiates—indeed exploits—the concepts of fan and labor practice in

contemporary media industries.

[0.2] Keywords— Fan community; TV

Stork, Matthias. 2014. "The Cultural Economics of Performance Space: Negotiating

Fan, Labor, and Marketing Practice in Glee's Transmedia Geography." In "Fandom

and/as Labor," edited by Mel Stanfill and Megan Condis, special issue,

Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 15.

http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2014.0490.

1. Introduction

[1.1] With a show like Glee that starts with a cult following, you have your

hardcore fans who we love very much [ … ], it's important to have the fans

feel like they have an inside look into who we are along with our characters.

It's really important to be attached to your fans [ … ] and to share things

with them.

—Jenna Ushkowitz (Tina on Glee)

[1.2] Everything we put online gets a push right away. We see people

sending it to their friends and commenting on it. We've had this amazing

thing happen on YouTube where people are actually using the music from

the show in the background and then they sing their version.

—Laurel Bernard, senior vice president for Fox Marketing

[1.3] I think it's a show that the fans made. They found it, they loved it,

they bought the music, they turned it into a phenomenon, they bought the

tickets for those concert tours, they created the ability to do multiplatforms,

they had a really strong proprietary grasp on it.

—Ryan Murphy, Glee show creator, executive producer, writer

[1.4] The Fox network's musical show Glee (2009–present) has established itself as

one of the leading pop culture sensations in the television landscape of the 21st

century. Currently in its fifth season, Glee's legacy includes live appearances at the

White House and the World Series, a tiedin casting show, a comprehensive set list of

cover and original songs, consistently high ratings with competitive market shares,

and a unique merchandising profitability, with 30+ million digital downloads and 15+

million CD albums sold worldwide to date. Through its multiplatform marketing of

musical and theatrical performance, the show has attracted a substantial fan base and

created a selfsustaining economy of cultural expression, meaning its product

consistently inspires fan engagement on multiple levels.

[1.5] The official spaces of Glee's transmedia geography (figure 1) include the Fox

Web site, a Facebook page, a Columbia Records Web site, Twitter accounts, a YouTube

channel, a Tumblr page, a MySpace site, a ComicCon presence, digital distribution

channels, and livetour performances. Unofficial spaces include fan practice across all

of these channels as well as, to a lesser extent because not visually oriented, fan

fiction Web sites.

Figure 1. Glee's transmedia geography map. [View larger image.]

[1.6] As such, Glee has positioned itself as a space for American Idol (2002–present) acolytes, teenage digital citizens who approach TV entertainment harboring the dream

of gaining fame by breaking into the muchmythologized culture industry. In fact,

there are several ties between Glee and American Idol: both shows offer up the dream of becoming a star, both feature highly stylized stage performances, and both are

situated in the musical genre. Within this genre, musical performance and the

commonly televised teenage dream of stardom are neatly packaged as pleasurable,

easily consumable, and inspirational pop culture. Glee not only presents a narrative

that explicitly reflects and caters to this specific emotional moment in contemporary

American youth culture but also equally constructs a forum that allows audiences—

fans in particular—to live their dream vicariously through the show and, purportedly,

learn how to realize it—how to make it. Glee's marketing approach postulates

performance as the essential element in forming an intimate relationship between the

show and its core fans, known as Gleeks. Performances are distributed and shared

across several spaces, including a multitude of video and audio channels, to satisfy the

Gleeks' desire for maximum content. The show's cast and crew further offer to discuss

these performances and grant special insight into their creation. Glee's promotional

discourse characterizes fans as likeminded peers, and by positioning its programming

as an act of benefaction, it asks them to engage in the show's engineered sharing

economy. The overarching message of this marketing methodology is that Glee

thanks/compensates its fans for their (emotional/discursive) investment and loyalty by offering up both content and interaction in a variety of performative spaces that

transcend television. Within this gift economy (Caldwell 2009), Glee essentially

cultivates a business model that exchanges content for fan labor and the attached

cultural buzz.

[1.7] By examining this approach more closely and analyzing defining features of

Glee's corporate and fan culture through a framework incorporating cultural studies

and political economy, the show's creation and usage of a transmedia geography may

be seen as a site for extensive interrelated narrative and promotional practices

designed to address specific fan sensibilities. By carefully studying and illustrating

Glee's marketing visàvis the show's conceptualization and commodification of

performance space, I illuminate how it negotiates—indeed exploits—the concepts of

fan and labor practice.

2. Creating the Gleek community—The integration of cultural

and economic space

[2.1] Glee's aesthetic framework marks it as an emblematic artifact of the

postnetwork era in American television. Although the show's core commercial text

primarily centers on a serialized narrative revolving around amateur musical

performances and creative (self)expression in a fictional Midwestern high school

setting—a trope fans have enthusiastically embraced, as evidenced by their music

purchases, vidding, and performance videos—its overarching conceptualization of

textual content is designed to have it flow beyond the box (Ross 2008) in the form of

interrelated paratexts (note 1). These paratexts complement, extend, and/or enrich

the original text, thus adding value of both cultural and economic import (Caldwell

2008). This value is cultural in that it provides more information about the show's

narrative and mythology, and economic in that it promotes and markets the show as

popular entertainment to growing audiences. Glee is thus to be understood not simply

as one selfenclosed televisual text but, as Jennifer Gillian (2001) notes via her model

of multiclick TV, a multiplatform network of texts designed to address a digital fan

base. Fans are seen not only as active receivers but as largescale distributors. The

Glee text network is thus engineered to facilitate the spreading of content.

[2.2] The notion of a multiplatform network does more than add nuance to the

concept of the text in contemporary media culture. It introduces and posits the

concept of space as a crucial component in understanding media texts and their

industrial dimensions. Glee represents a volume of commercial texts—the core text

and its (un)official paratexts—that manifest themselves across multiple platforms,

both analog and digital, in a set of transmedia spaces. Per Henry Jenkins (2006a,

2006b), such a transmedia environment, composed of real and virtual spaces,

constitutes a construct in which integral textual elements are coordinated and

dispersed systematically for storytelling and marketing purposes. These spaces

primarily function as delivery channels for the process of entertainment reception and

promotion, a crucial component of which is the interaction between the show and its

audience. Thus, these spaces enable—indeed ask and invite—audiences not only to

receive but also to spread, create, and send information. Within this culture of

converging spaces, they are able to engage with a show's text on several levels, to act

as active consumers as well as producers/distributors—that is, laborers.

[2.3] Fans are the central agents within the paratextual dimensions of transmedia

spaces, rigorously tracking information. They view videos (including online previews

and trailers, deleted/bonus scenes, interviews, films, and DVD bonus features), play

games (console or Internet based), use online applications, read (electronic) books,

Web sites, and/or blogs, and listen to music via MP3 or CD. They make an effort to

consume the additional content provided by official paratexts, partially or entirely, and

their efforts are reflected in the show's revenue figures. Moreover, many fans are also

inspired to create (produce) new paratexts hosted in similar yet unofficial (not

originally corporate driven) transmedia spaces. This includes writing fan fiction,

discussing scenes and/or characters in online message boards or social media

networks, and reediting/recording and uploading video footage on YouTube, all

practices that admittedly had currency with active audiences before the digital era but

have now become more widespread and even de rigueur. Whether they consume or

produce, by acting within these spaces, fans interact with and participate in the show's

text, performing a labor of love. They derive and share extra information and

contribute new information. The properties of transmedia spaces thus reconfigure the

formerly passive (onedimensional) relationship between texts and their audiences as

an active, spatially framed interaction and discourse, one of teleparticipation (Gillian

2011). Glee is especially notable in this context because it cultivates a variety of

transmedia spaces, all of which are designed to engage a specific audience and extract

promotional labor in exchange for transmedia pleasure.

[2.4] Glee's focus on popular music and dance ensures wide mainstream appeal. The

show's core audience, although substantial, still comprises a niche group of spectators

with distinct cultural sensibilities. Known as Gleeks, these young fans, coveted by

advertisers, are reflected in the show's celebration of the underdog: the trials and

tribulations of the social outcast, the (selfreferential) emphasis on pop culture, music

in particular, and the art of showmanship (Kjus 2009). This mix of narrative and

performance is postulated as Glee's essence, its brand; thus it is consistently

emphasized in its promotional campaign. It is extravagant entertainment that

encourages teenage fan viewers to channel their energy and talent into musical (and

digital) performativity as a form of fun labor. Essentially, Glee narrativizes the format of reality competition shows such as American Idol (Rickman 2010), cultivating a new

approach to commercialize the reality TV juggernaut's popular youth appeal. Not

coincidentally, Glee's pilot prepremiered after the American Idol finale in May 2009, several months before its official premiere in September.

[2.5] This release strategy served two purposes: first, to broadcast the show in a

manner that capitalized on Fox's synergy and the substantial viewership of American

Idol; and second, to narrowcast it to reach, or even create, a niche fan base, and then

to anchor it within online fan discourse. After the prepremiere, Fox made the pilot

available in several commercial transmedia spaces, including its Web site, Hulu, and

iTunes. The marketing campaign specifically touted this service as a gift for Gleeks.

Fox also asked the show's producers (note 2)—including cocreators and writers Ian

Brennan, Brad Falchuck, and Ryan Murphy; actors Lea Michele, Cory Monteith, and

Dianna Agron; and many other abovetheline personnel—to talk up the show on

Facebook and Twitter, directly engaging fans of the pilot. At the same time, Fox

increased the personalized Gleekian media campaign by circulating a short TV spot

(simultaneously released on YouTube) that tapped into the pilot's narrative about

performance and teenage dreams.

Video 1. Glee season 1 promo teaser.

[2.6] The 1minute video features a stylized musical montage of the main characters

reciting the phrase, "You're a Geek! I'm a Gleek!" set to an updated version of

Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. This short paradigm of televisuality (Caldwell 1995)

established the identity of the Glee fan: a pop culture geek who likes Glee, the

teenage outsider with a dream about fame who constantly faces challenges from peers

and authority figures—the Gleek. With the introduction of the Gleek, Fox reacted to

the early fan buzz surrounding the Glee pilot, directly addressing fans' sensibilities and tailoring the show's public image to their interests. The Gleek is a concept created for

fans, a model they can identify with that fosters their investment in the emerging

show and its characters, and that provides an opportunity for corporate gain by

containing audience fragmentation. The video further provides a social meme by

disseminating an identifying gesture (and device for social bonding) for Gleeks: the

actors shape an L with their fingers and place their hand on their forehead. By using

this gesture, Glee appropriates and redeems the former negative connotation of the

term loser, situating the show within a historical discourse about the underdog and the

high school outcast (Lewis 2012). Fox subsequently launched the Biggest Gleek

Challenge on Facebook, offering a prize to the fan who most frequently and vigorously

discussed the show in their Facebook profile, including status updates, "likes," friend

invitations, and threads, thus offering a reward for active engagement or competitive

consumer labor. The official text of the original Facebook post

(https://www.facebook.com/notes/glee/foxinvitesgleefanstojointhebiggest

gleekcompetitionatwwwfoxcomgleek/136157066788) emphasizes the Gleek

community in order to increase fans' engagement with the brand, addressing fans as

Gleeks to underscore the validity of the concept, solidify its cultural significance, and

solicit measurable fan responses in various media channels. A week before the pilot's

official September premiere, a longer director's cut aired in the form of a tweetpeat. A

livetweet event, the broadcast compiled many of the tweets fans had generated about

the show since its prepremiere, with the writers and cast members responding to

questions and comments in real time (note 3). Fox incorporated real spaces in the

transmedia marketing campaign, organizing a Glee panel at the San Diego ComicCon

(engaging in an already established hardcore fan milieu) and taking the cast on a

Gleek tour across youthoriented Hot Topic stores performing songs from the pilot and

selling "I am a Gleek" Tshirts.

The 'Glee' Team Storms Hot Topic

Video 2. Glee Hot Topic store performance on October 5, 2009 (TalkofFame Video Report).

[2.7] Fox's overarching goal was to create a Gleek community of fanproducers and

distributors to create visibility and buzz for the show in an increasingly permeable

transmedia environment. The initial marketing was very successful. In fact, it yielded

more than just visibility and buzz; it created discursivity. The show's perceived

uniqueness, its appropriation of contemporary youth culture's desire for fame through

performative musical talent á la American Idol, and its effective corporate branding

and optin marketing techniques turned the text into a media phenomenon. Glee

evolved from a text into an ongoing discourse that generated additional texts. This

formation of other texts manifested as a form of concrete labor. As fans engaged with

the Gleek community, they began to adopt the show's aesthetic of performance by

creating and uploading singalong videos, musical montages, and scene remixes,

organizing flash mobs, and forming singing groups, all the while creating "performative

copies of the original" (Leavitt 2013) in an impressive display of collective authorship

and showmanship—essentially a uniform labor practice. They openly performed their

fandom by emulating the style of the show, thereby establishing alternate transmedia

spaces—fandriven spaces—to interact with the show in a more productionoriented

fashion (Lancaster 2001). The Gleeks' cultural expression—labor as leisure and fun

that manifests itself as an ongoing practice of discursivity—sustained the show's public

momentum, cementing it as a hit. For some fans, Glee evolved from a TV show into an

outlet for their artistic ambitions.

[2.8] Many of the early fan videos showed Gleeks performing Glee's version of

Journey's 1981 classic song, "Don't Stop Believin'," while others repurposed scenes

from the pilot. Yet Fox did not take any legal action against the materials circulated

within these fan spaces, ignoring issues of copyright infringement in favor of a largescale freeforall marketing campaign that fostered discursivity, though certain types of fan activities were not encouraged, particularly slash fiction (Hellekson 2012). Fox

integrated the cultural space of fan performance into its economiccentric marketing

space, capitalizing on the aforementioned labor of fan love. Thus, niche fan space was

centralized and rendered economically productive. Referencing a narrative tidbit from

the pilot—Rachel Berry's (Lea Michele) personalized award system—Fox publicized a

socalled Gold Star contest online, asking fans to submit their Glee performance videos

and photos with the prospect of winning a trip to the Kid's Choice Awards accompanied

by members of the Glee cast—again requiring competitive performance labor as a

prerequisite for the corporate gift. Fox thus set out to, as Clarke (2012, 11) terms it,

"operationalize fan activities," rather than discounting or penalizing them, as is often

the case, thereby constructing a new space of cultural economics in which creative

performance—whether professional or fannish—functions as promotional commercial

product while masquerading as intimate Gleek producerfan interaction. This choice

reflected Scott's (2005, 1) point about "the aestheticization of the economy and the

commodification of culture." The Gleek community evolved into a social marketing

network with ideal producers and consumers who would persistently advertise the

show's Gleek brand (Jenkins 2007).

[2.9] Fox's formative marketing campaign for Glee constructed a transmedia

environment with sites of interaction for Gleeks (both Glee producers and fans),

incorporating both official and unofficial spaces. Focusing on the act of performance—

both musical (singing and dancing by characters, actors, and fans) and discursive

(social media activities)—these spaces are operationalized as promotional venues for

the show, although paradoxically they are generally touted as interactive spheres of

fan selfexpression. Fans saw their own performances as an opportunity to express

and interact, but Fox openly utilized them as marketing labor. In this sense, the

transmedia discourse facilitated both promotion and selfexpression; however, its

overall purpose remained economically rather than artistically driven. This unspoken

contract between fans and the corporation, based on mutual benefit, defines Glee's

cultural economics of performance space. Fox expanded the Gleek spaces during

season 1, leading to a proliferation of fan spaces. Fox's marketing team then set out to

create a hub to organize and coordinate this expansion to optimize Glee's brand

promotion.

3. Synergizing Gleek performances— Glee's geography of

transmedia marketing

[3.1] Fox continued to foster the ostensible intimacy of the Gleek community by

furnishing more opportunities for producerfan interaction. The spectacular success of

the first season (with an average of 15 million to 17 million viewers per week) (note 4)

had demonstrated, in Green and Jenkins's (2009, 213) more general observation, that

fans represent "the drivers of wealth production in the digital economy." Glee's

marketing accordingly sought to increase fan involvement in—and labor for—the show

through the construction and implementation of a type of ritual media space (Moore

2009) that promotes the spectacle of performance, designed to ensure consistent fan

engagement by specifically targeting one of the fans' favorite element of the show: the

display of musical talent and the vicarious pleasure of dreaming oneself into this

performance space. Iterations of Glee's musical vignettes therefore came to dominate

the show's paratextual marketing. Fox used these as building blocks for expanded

transmedia spaces, establishing a vast geography.

[3.2] Glee's transmedia geography is predominantly composed of virtual spaces,

which include televisual and filmic channels. Within these spaces, paratextual

promotional content is regularly distributed to fans in order to foster their engagement with the show and substantiate the Gleek community. The spaces differentiate

between corporatedriven marketing and producerdriven branding. The former refers

to official Fox spaces, while the latter points to personal virtual channels maintained by

certain producers of the show, which are put in service of the show's marketing. All of

them are performancecentric and enable fans to interact with and feel part of Glee—

and Gleeks make an active decision to support their show by directing their attention,

energy, and creativity to these various spaces of media consumption, willingly opening

themselves to the practice of fan labor and fostering discursivity.

[3.3] The central spaces of Glee's transmedia geography are the official Fox Glee

Web site, the show's Facebook group, the Twitter account GleeOnFox, the eponymous

YouTube channel and Tumblr blog, and a (rarely updated) MySpace page (figure 1).

Except for the MySpace page, Fox has enlisted the service of the most popular virtual

sites of social interaction (MySpace, a now obsolete network, is mostly included

because it is owned by the media conglomerate News Corporation, just like Fox) (note

5). All of these virtual spaces are interrelated—synergized—via hyperlinks and offer

similar promotional paratexts via daily and weekly updates. The following are released

in all spaces: preview videos, videos of musical performances from specific episodes,

preview posters, cast and crew interviews, episode photos, music samples, and calls to

preorder Glee merchandise (mostly DVDs and CDs). However, each individual space

has specific offers as well; by this diversification, Fox ensures an even distribution of

fan engagement across the transmedia geography. This sustained engagement is

ultimately achieved by sustained labor. The Fox Web site functions as the merchandise

hub. Although it incorporates a library of fully viewable episodes (four at a time),

numerous performance clips, Glee episode recaps, and behindthescenes footage, it

primarily supplies links to free downloads and places to purchase Gleek memorabilia,

such as quizzes, games, wallpaper, iTunes content, iPhone apps, the karaoke video

game, DVDs, CDs, and clothing. It thus offers physical objects designed to create an

additional sphere of material fan devotion.

[3.4] The Facebook group is international, reaching fans all over the world. It

currently has 24 million subscribers. Although it equally advertises Glee merchandise,

its focus rests on measurable fan labor and discursivity, encouraging Gleeks to "like,"

post or repost, or thread the show. It creates daily updates to maintain consistent

interest and buzz, thus further cultivating distinct media rituals such as the Gleek of

the Week contest (fans share their personal Glee stories to enter), which honors one

Glee fan with a post on the official page every week (yet another gift/reward for highclass work performance), daily episode leadups, and photovideo streams addressing fans who have questions about favorite characters, performances, and story lines.

Occasionally the group hosts contests for live video chats with actors, enabling the

most interactive/productive users to meet their heroes in person. The Twitter account GleeOnFox (2.75 million followers) fulfills the same functions, but it equally creates

intertextual links to the accounts of fans and producers, again emphasizing the

communal nature of Gleek culture. Twitter hashtags allow Fox to centralize and direct

fan discourse over longer periods of time. The account organizes official live tweets for

every episode, pre and postviewing discussions, and daily reminders about the latest

episode. Glee's Tumblr blog puts up posters and videos on a weekly routine, resulting

in numerous reposts from fans who use this social media service.

[3.5] The Fox YouTube channel (over 1 million subscribers and over 200 million video

views) constitutes an exceptional marketing space, as it provides an abundance of

copyrighted material, featuring promos, cast and crew interviews, ComicCon footage,

and full performances from every Glee episode. Furthermore, it hosts the Fox Glee

Lounge, featuring short conversations between the show's actors about their personal

lives. Although Fox licenses Glee episodes to Netflix and Hulu, it offers the essential

parts of each episode—the musical performances—free of charge, all to satisfy a large

community of fans and to encourage them to maintain a high degree of discursivity

and labor by sharing these videos and/or reproducing them by creating similar

amateur ones.

[3.6] The corporatedirected spaces are complemented by the personal spaces that

individual Glee producers occupy. Glee's show runners and writers, casting agent,

choreographer, and the entirety of the cast maintain Twitter accounts where they

foster the brand of the show by engaging the Gleek community. Of course, their

rhetoric is still corporate directed, yet their tweets have a more personal touch

because they not only share Gleerelated information but also give insights into other

professional projects as well as their private lives. This strategy serves both corporate

branding and selfbranding, as Weprin (2009) has noted. Although not all of the

Twitter accounts are regularly active, the most popular are, including show runner

Ryan Murphy (600,000 followers) and actors Chris Colfer (2.6 million), Darren Criss

(1.6 million), and Lea Michele (4 million). These producers present themselves as

professional Gleeks who give back, offering information not available in other spaces

of the transmedia geography, particularly an inside look into the show's mythical

production space. Glee is shot on the Paramount lot in Los Angeles. It is a closedset

production. The producers regularly offer photos or videos from the set, allowing fans

to become a (passive) part of the production process yet an active part of the

promotional process. They enable fans to see through their eyes, then pass that

information on. This illusion serves to mythologize Glee's production space in order to

generate more fan discursivity about the show as a whole.

[3.7] Although the geography is mostly composed of virtual spaces, it features a

small set of realworld sites with a media component. These sites complement the

virtual dimension of the marketing geography in that they offer tangibility, thus

deepening the ostensible intimacy within the Gleek community as fans receive an

opportunity to meet the show's producers in person. The Glee live events are

invariably characterized as an expression of the producers' gratitude toward the fans,

although ironically, they are not free of charge. Thus, Glee has regularly offered a

ComicCon panel since its inception, providing Gleeks with tantalizing tidbits about

upcoming seasons. Furthermore, the show's producers frequently attend questionandanswer sessions in and around Los Angeles, many of which are open to the public.

At the end of the first season, Glee embarked on a 21city live North American tour,

giving a total of 31 concert performances. In 2011, at the end of season 2, the cast

gave nine more concerts, eight in England and one in Ireland (note 6). The content

performed in these realworld spaces only reaches a limited fan base, however. The

producers thus distributed this content via transmedia geography, synergizing the

performances across multiple spaces—a concert movie in theaters and on DVD; CDs;

YouTube videos; photos on Facebook and Twitter—again facilitating fan labor as fans

disseminated the content.

[3.8] Glee's transmedia geography utilizes the new role of the producer in the

postnetwork era of television. Although Glee's producers regularly appear in official

media outlets such as premieres and TV and radio interviews, they are equally

expected to promote the show in virtual spheres, not only acting for fans but also

interacting with them on a regular basis, forming a community that emphasizes

intimacy. Furthermore, this construction of a commercially interrelated and overtly

fancentric marketing macrospace is designed to invite fan participation and position

the corporate network as a mediator between stars and fans. Thus, "by emphasizing

the active participation of the viewer …, the show positions itself and its network as

'benevolent' … —graciously inviting the viewer to be producerly" (Ross 2008, 89)—that

is, to labor. The Gleeks largely embraced the interactive opportunities of the official

spaces, but they equally engaged in typical grassroots fan practice, creating a vast

amount of unofficial spaces, ranging from individual Glee blogs and YouTube channels

to largescale Web sites, the most comprehensive of which is Gleeksource

(https://www.facebook.com/gleeksource), which centralizes all the spaces from the show's transmedia geography, bundling the content, including merchandising, in one

place. The overarching fan tenor thus reflects Fox's marketing strategy of discursivity:

to have fans act as multipliers (McCracken 2005). Fans primarily reproduce the

content of the official transmedia spaces, reposting and commenting on corporatereleased videos and photos on their social media sites and engaging with the producers on Twitter. Their enthusiasm mirrors what John Fiske describes as

"empowering play" (1987, 236), the affect of wishing to be a part of Glee, to be a member of the community.

[3.9] However, the Gleeks also feel inspired by the show, which has led to an influx

of creative Glee performance videos on YouTube. These videos can be divided into two

categories: the Glee song video with lyrics and photos, and the fan performance

covering a Glee song, some of which generated millions of views during the first two

seasons. Fans created the videos to further increase their ties to the show and the

Gleek community while refashioning their identities as hardcore Gleeks. They are

consumers as well as producers; they are not necessarily laborers but rather devout

fans who live and breathe the show, dreaming about an opportunity to be in the

limelight (Carpenter 2012). Stein (2010, 138) aptly says of this type of fan behavior:

"Media fans understand themselves as authors and performers in online spaces, and

often take pleasure in blurring the lines between diegetic and nondiegetic

performance." Although those fanproducers—"the people formerly known as the

audience" (Rosen 2006)—utilized the videos as a source for fan and selfexpression,

Fox perceived them as additional promotional paratexts, with creative fanproducers

acting as brand advocates for the show, especially for the music covers (Edwards

2012, 2). Fox thereby created synergy between the official corporate and unofficial fan

spaces, prodigiously expanding the scope of its transmedia geography. The network's

willingness to release vast amounts of copyrighted material is attributable to the

corresponding rise in usergenerated content, which at almost no point opposed or

counteracted what Baughman and Wood (2012, 341) aptly characterize as "the

commercial and ideological practices of dominant culture." In fact, it immensely

contributed to them. The Gleeks, consciously or unconsciously, accepted their role as

Glee marketing agents in exchange for the manufactured intimacy of the interactive

Gleek community. Gleeks thus largely represent an affirmational fan base, although

fans of noncanonical scenarios are equally active in a transformational vidding

practice, albeit in a more furtive manner; and much of their work, while

unconventional, ultimately exists within the boundaries of the Glee system, as no

narrative or stylistic risks are taken. (For the affirmational/transformational divide, see

obsession_inc 2009; it should be noted, though, that Glee reconfigures the author's

gender argument about affirmational/transformational fans in that the show projects a

stronger female affirmational audience.) They follow, indeed celebrate, the official

rhetoric set forth by Fox and the Glee producers. Gleeks rarely have any communal

schisms, although they see themselves as gatekeepers for the show's public

perception, policing its dominant discourse in order to contain resistant readings and

misreadings (Hills 2002; Johnson 2007). This is not to suggest that all Gleeks are the

dupes of Fox. Gleeks might be viewed as a romantic fan base, but all of them make a

conscious choice to support the show, realizing that their engagement sustains their

beloved product and provides them with more content while experiencing interactive

labor as fun (De Kosnik 2013). In this regard, it can be argued that fans potentially choose not to confront the show critically because of the personal gains afforded to

them by the show and its transmedia geography. Nevertheless, some Gleeks expect

more from the networkauthored Glee experience than others, and Fox, through its

creation of a controllable environment that mobilizes fan activity as a form of

marketing labor, has actively seized on these expectations. I do need to acknowledge

here that Glee's legacy includes instances of fan resistance and agency in nonFoxaffiliated online forums, particularly with regard to the show's gender politics.

[3.10] Glee's transmedia geography can thus be defined as a synergy of corporate

and fan spaces, all of which communicate the acts of expression and performance as

promotional material to sustain discursivity about the show. The corporate message is

that fans form part of an intimate Gleek community that fosters interaction between

audiences and producers. Although this is true, the community's primary agenda is to

capitalize on these interactions to market the show. In this regard, the community

resembles a market that economizes culture. On the outside, Glee's transmedia spaces

appear to form what Lessig (2008) defines as a sharing economy—a market devoid of

monetary concerns that distributes goods altruistically. Indeed, it does offer

gifts/rewards to its users. Behind this benevolent veneer of cultural discourse,

however, is revealed an elaborate commercial economy. Labor is partially rewarded,

albeit noneconomically, but more is constantly asked for. To use French sociologist

Pierre Bourdieu's (1986) terms, the transmedia geography rigorously fosters Glee's

cultural capital to be cashed in as economic capital. Its social construction effectively

operationalizes fans' involvement in the show, economizing their emotions and cultural

activities as marketing rhetoric. This pseudocollaborative (one might even call it

protoexploitative) practice went to further extremes after the zenith of Glee's

popularity at the end of season 1.

4. Commodifying the Gleek—Spatial convergence and nouveau

professionalism

[4.1] In light of the proliferation of Gleek fan videos on the Internet, Fox

reconfigured the geography of its transmedia spaces to yet again maximize

discursivity, complementing the concept of interaction and communal intimacy

between producers and fans with the process of mobility—upward mobility, to be

precise. The marketing thus seized on both the show's generic ties to live musical

competition shows and fans'—as well as mainstream youth audiences'—enthusiasm for

(and active engagement in) online video singing performances, introducing an open

MySpace casting call for Gleeks. The call offered up the dream most of them share: to

become a star like their favorite actors on Glee, to truly become part of the show, to

evolve from a fan Gleek into a producer Gleek. Although this marketing ploy openly

revealed the social hierarchy within the supposedly equal Gleek community (which was divided into Gleek producers, active Gleek fanproducerdistributorconsumers, and

mere Gleek consumers), it also lowered the boundaries between the professional and

fan spaces, which had direct ramifications on the show's onair narrative. The prospect

of choosing an amateur to become part of a professionally produced, multimilliondollar narrative TV show intensified the established practice of what I term nouveau professionalism, cultivated on reality TV shows like American Idol. Nouveau

professionalism denotes the process of an amateur transforming into a corporate

entity with cultural and economic capital. Fox's strategy aimed to select a fan from

within its niche audience and posit (groom, market, promote) him or her as an

emerging star. In this regard, the spaces of Glee's transmedia geography not only

expanded but converged, ostensibly facilitating the possibility for fans to break into the

show and, by extension, the TV industry, albeit not as a fresh outsider but as a

corporationcreated and directed product.

[4.2] The FoxMySpaceNews Corporation synergy launched the casting call for one

of three new roles on the show at the end of season 1 in 2010, effectively setting out

to coopt the show's fan spaces, complementing its gift economy with the (ludic)

principle of rewarding performance. Clear rules were formulated and publicized online;

they asked fans to perform a song that had been featured on Glee (thus ensuring

continued commercial investment) and to explain why they wanted to be on the show.

This approach underscores the motif of the underdog, particularly social alienation and

the chance of a lifetime; Glee effectively calls on this motif to recruit belief in the

show. Promoted by the Glee cast by Internet videos directly addressing the audience

as Gleeks, the call received 34,000 submissions, along with 23 million video views and

1.3 million MySpace friends (" Glee Launches Casting Call on MySpace" 2010). The

project generated a lot of media attention, exposing Glee to an even wider audience

and increasing fans' emotional ties to the show and its aesthetics of stylized "amateur"

performance. However, the project ultimately did not come to fruition. Whether

submissions were reviewed remains unclear, yet Glee returned to its second season

with three new traditionally cast industry professionals (performers with

representation), thus exposing the call as a potential marketing scheme (O'Neill 2010).

Fox's until then effective customary strategy of disguising its marketing as a

benevolent gift/competitive reward for fan labor had, to a certain degree, publicly

failed. Yet Gleeks did not engage in any resistance to the show. Rather, they embraced

it even more vigorously, making the season 2 debut an enormous success. There was

no call for public resistance against Fox or the show; the issue just faded away. I

advance the assertion that, at this stage, the Gleek community had reached a point of

evangelical devotion, blindly (and, granted, in some cases grudgingly) accepting

corporate dictum, regardless of its ethical implications. Of course, it is equally possible

that fans cared more about a passive form of teleparticipation than an active form of

nouveau professionalism. At any rate, Fox had established a type of fan ecosystem,

subject to the outside control and calculated input of the network. Fans' investment in

the show was so strong that the prospect (hope, desire) to become part of the show

itself effectively contained any efforts at largescale resistance.

[4.3] The casting call had another major impact on Glee's fan culture, earning the

producers of the mostviewed videos what Mark Deuze (2009) calls a networked

reputation—a high amount of cultural capital measured quantitatively in video views

and qualitatively in "likes" (termed Gold Stars). This form of capital further increased

the layers of social hierarchy within the Gleek community and added an additional

dimension to its discursivity: that of selfpromotion. As a consequence, the myth of

spatial convergence, although now proven to be an illusion, manifested itself in the

consciousness of hardcore Gleeks. Fans began using Twitter and Facebook to circulate

their videos to the show runners and actors, hoping mostly for a professional

compliment and more virtual face time (a form of cultural capital in itself), or even the

miracle of being offered a role and realizing spatial convergence. Glee's transmedia

geography thus evolved into a marketing forum for both the show and its fans—a

sphere of artistic expression and labor. The myth of spatial convergence grew even

more. Fans turned their attention to Glee's production space, traveling to the Glee set, perhaps harboring the hope of somehow finding a way to make it on the show despite

the closed set. I interviewed three seasoned tour guides at Paramount studios, all of

whom reported of a few instances when fans left audition DVDs and letters on the lot

or asked the guides to pass them along to Ryan Murphy. Generally, visitors asked the

guides questions about how to audition for the show, erroneously considering the

guides to be industry insiders. The guides further stated that about 30 percent of

visitors, in their estimation, attend the tour to see Glee specifically, in many cases well knowing that the set is closed. The belief in spatial convergence, as set forth by the

faux casting call, emphasized the notion of capital within the Glee fan spaces, with

fans positing their videos not only as expressions of Gleekian devotion but as forms of

cultural capital potentially enabling them to move from fan to professional, corporate

space. The notion of labor was thus fully realized. Although the transmedia geography

overall served as a marketing construct for Glee, both the show's producers and fans

commenced to utilize its spaces for selfbranding. Or, to recontextualize Mark

Andrejevic's (2004, 196) work, Glee practiced "the paradigm of active participation as a form of selfcommodification" on all spatial levels.

[4.4] In 2011, Glee cocreator Ryan Murphy reacted to the fan craze and returned to

the idea of amplifying fan interest through nouveau professionalism. He conceived of a

new show, titled The Glee Project, to cast new talent from the Gleek community, now

fully embracing the show's generic ties to the American Idol formula. Although Fox did

not believe enough in the project to finance it, in order to retain the possibility of

creating major marketing hype, it outsourced the production to NBC Universal's

network, Oxygen, receiving licensing fees in return (and thereby externalizing risk in

case the show underperformed). The show's principle was the same as that of the

MySpace casting call. Fans were asked to perform official Glee songs and upload them

to the Oxygen portal with the prospect of being cast to compete for a sevenepisode

arc in Glee's third season. This time, however, the involvement of Ryan Murphy,

cocreator Ian Brennan, choreographer Zach Woodlee, vocal arranger Nikki Anders, and

casting agent Robert Ulrich, as well as members of the cast serving as guest mentors,

lent authenticity to the new endeavor. Furthermore, the online video auditions were

complemented by live casting calls in select major American cities, further

underscoring the legitimacy of the venture.

[4.5] The Glee Project's (2011–12) marketing campaign underlined the show's

conceptualization as fan service, with the promo footage consistently emphasizing the

concept of spatial convergence within Glee's transmedia geography as well as fans'

ability to transition from fan to professional space through sheer talent and devotion to

Glee; the show's rules even intimated that those familiar with the show's style and

music would create performances that appeal to the jury, hence underscoring the

significance of Glee viewing knowledge and merchandise ownership.

The Glee Project Season 2 - I Am... | Promo

Video 3. The Glee Project season 2 promotional trailer.

[4.6] The 1minute TV spots repeatedly feature the phrases, "Do you want to be on

Glee?" and "You can be on Glee!," directly targeting hardcore Gleeks as well as a mainstream audience of American Idol–weaned teenagers. (All of the spots also

fetishize the Glee set through long shots of and slow trackins to the McKinley High

School stage and auditorium, creating an aura of performance that unites Gleeks.) In

this regard, The Glee Project marketing directly tied in with Fox's strategy of

promoting performance space. For season 1 of The Glee Project, 12 contenders were chosen, all supposedly amateurs. During the course of the show, they received

professional singing, dancing, and performance lessons from Glee producers. These

manufactured moments of contact constituted the main appeal for Gleeks watching the

show, catering to its communal and intimate sense of fandom. Overall, season 1 of

The Glee Project functioned as a nineepisodelong advertisement for Glee's upcoming season, averaging 800,000 viewers and a high share in the show's key demographic

as well as a breeding ground for new talent. (The second season of The Glee Project

consisted of 12 episodes and marketed Glee's upcoming fourth season.) The show

chose a talented Gleek to be part of Glee; it simultaneously created a new star type,

the former fan turned Glee professional. Elizabeth Ellcessor (2012, 48) provides a

functional framework to analyze the overarching marketing strategy of The Glee

Project as making a star through the lens of the "discursive construction of the star."

She argues that in the digital era, the creation of a star persona requires a set of

interconnected sites of expression and that the constructed "transmedia story of the

star is formed through repeated connections between these discursive sites." The Glee Project and Glee itself aim to create these subcultural forms of stardom through their convergence of performative marketing spaces.

[4.7] The fanturnedprofessionalGleek concept was rigorously marketed within

Glee's transmedia geography. The Glee Project had its own Web site, Facebook group

(over 1 million fans), Twitter account (420,000 followers), and YouTube channel

(55,000 subscribers, 14 million views), and all of them were connected with Fox's

official marketing spaces. The Glee Project's focus rested on the fan community,

further cultivating an already strong sense of solidarity among Gleeks, with the

contenders now actually working/laboring for the fans (in achieving their commonly

held dream) rather than for the corporation that owns, commodifies, and profits from

Glee—at least in idealistic terms. The transmedia spaces enabled Gleeks to follow their

favorite Gleek on The Glee Project. The Gleeks on the show, in return, regularly posted

personal messages to their fans (who could join teams on the Web site), fostering the

sense of communal interaction that has come to define Glee's (fan and marketing)

culture. The winners of the respective two seasons of The Glee Project who went on to

appear in several Glee episodes (and indeed received extended contracts)

subsequently shared their nowprofessional insights with the Gleeks on how to succeed

on the show and make it to Glee. These videos, clearly corporate driven, consciously

evoked the style of a selfmade home video (released in YouTube's commons, and not

an official channel), underlining that those who made the video just want to give back,

thus continuing Fox's gift economy marketing, which posits freely circulating

transmedia materials as gifts for fans' devotion to the show. It also referenced the new

reward system by emphasizing the competitiveness of The Glee Project.

The Glee Project Casting: Message from Damian McGinty and Sa...

Video 4. "The Glee Project Casting."

Cameron & Damian Tips

Video 5. "Cameron and Damian Tips."

[4.8] Video 4 presents the actors in a studio setting (code: official and real), while

video 5 shows them in a private space (code: intimate and real). Although the two

videos are stylistically different, they carry the same connotation. The Gleek producers

want others to succeed in the competition. This manufactured intimacy is a key

component of the show's marketing.

[4.9] Although the show mirrored Glee's rhetoric in ostensibly celebrating the

underdog—the raw musical jewel with a heart of gold and a dream—the main

contenders had at least some professional experience in the entertainment industry. In

fact, the finalists of both seasons did not even go through the initial application stages

of the public casting call but were discovered through industry channels. Moreover, the show's proclamation that contenders should display their own personality in order to

win was undermined by an obvious typecasting process; the contenders all exhibited

characteristics known from characters on Glee. Hence, The Glee Project can be

accused of negating its call for diversity through the fabrication of Glee clones as well

as undercutting the notion of nouveau professionalism because the winners were in

fact (quasi)professionals—or at least more professional than the average Gleek.

However, this information never entered the official Gleekian discursivity, as Gleeks

continued to embrace and celebrate the show, leaving little room for critical reflection

(or deliberately choosing not to engage in critical reflection) (note 7). Uncertainty and

suspicion must have surely existed within the fan community, but the strong emotional

investment of the Gleeks (a natural fan reaction) still dominated the discourse.

[4.10] The Glee Project continued Glee's notion of the empowered fan, the Gleek,

being given the opportunity to move from fan to professional through performative

labor and spatial convergence within an industrial transmedia geography. At the same

time, it commodified the Gleek as a commercial entity to generate ratings and revenue

while it acted as a promotional engine for the show. On the one hand, it extends the

promise that fans have a shot at fame, an opportunity to realize the common teenage

dream that Glee narrativizes in its stories about social outcasts, thereby deepening

fans' emotional investment. On the other hand, it subverts this promise, exploiting

fans' emotionalism and creative activity as corporate promotion.

5. Gleek-x-ploitation—Confronting the dichotomy of fan agency

and corporate labor

[5.1] With the marketing for Glee and The Glee Project, Fox and Oxygen aimed to

position themselves as benevolent networks that enable fans to interact with the

people they admire in a communal and equal space while facilitating and legitimizing

creative fan practice in form of media performance as a way to break in and get on

Glee. The overarching effect of this network strategy, however, was the integration—

indeed exploitation—of fans' cultural activity as promotional labor. Although this

approach seemingly fosters fanproducer collaboration with mutual benefits for both

groups (and these benefits indubitably exist, particularly in terms of emotional

economics), its implications for fans as consumers and new media producers ought not

be misinterpreted. Glee's increasing interest in human capital and the modern

consumer (Hartley 2009)—a widespread phenomenon in the digital economy of culture

—manifests itself most explicitly in its conceptualization of fans as media outlets (note

8), mere data channels that produce objects measured exclusively in economic value.

[5.2] Glee's transmedia geography of marketing effectively illustrates Mark Andrejevic's (2004, 197) critical observation that "the contemporary deployment of

interactivity exploits participation as a form of labor." This does not only apply to fans.

Before the 2007–8 Writers Guild of America strike, producers of mainstream network

and cable television shows did not receive compensation for their work on a second

screen, so they were not ensured a constant revenue stream (Mann 2009). Although

these abovetheline workers are now compensated for their efforts and have a

platform to promote themselves, fans' reward for contributing to a marketing

campaign is dispensed in emotional economics only. They are rewarded in the

paratextual realm, with the ability to be close to and interact with professionals and

stars, and they are provided with opportunities for cultural repute within the Internet

sphere. However, the emotional value may be based on false promises. The strategic

exploitation of fan activities as labor—their emotional investment in a pop culture

product and the creative expression of said investment—portends a marketing

strategy that promotes "the colonization of consumer/producer agency by markets"

(Deuze 2009, 148).

[5.3] Viewed through the lens of the Frankfurt School, this dialectic of fan agency

and fan labor assumes an even more pessimistic dimension. The notion of a

community between producers and fans that empowers fans to actually become a

professional constitutes an elaborate system of emotional direction. The emphasis on

space within Glee's transmedia geography further strengthens this system in that it

facilitates a control over access to specific areas and the forms of capital attached to

them. Fans are in fact not part of a corporatedirected community. The Gleeks may

rather be regarded as a hive within Fox's media industry, a postFordist construction

that externalizes risk and generates promotional material without costly employment

contracts. Their performances within Glee's transmedia spaces have cultural

significance, especially for likeminded peers, but overall, they are predominantly

solicited, viewed, and promoted as corporate marketing boosts. Ultimately, Glee's

performance registers as an explicit form of cultural labor.

6. Conclusion—Following the Gleeks … further

[6.1] John Caldwell (2009, 161) notes that we need to understand "media industries

not just as corporate institutions, but as collective cultural activities and embodied

social communities as well." Glee's transmedia geography encapsulates Caldwell's

argument through its ties to Fox and News Corporation, its focus on performance as

cultural expression and economic value, and its construction of a conformist fan base.

Glee's marketing has created elaborate techniques to solicit, control, and exploit fan

contributions that serve as additional promotional material for the show. The show

promises fanproducer engagement and exchange within an intimate community of

Gleeks and extends the possibility of joining the Gleek elite by transitioning from fan into nouveau professional space. Glee thereby enlists fans through an exploitative play

with their emotions. Although it is certainly true that the network of interrelated

spaces generates emotional reciprocity—fans' input is rewarded with responses from

producers and abundant media materials they love—the overarching practice of

positing a benevolent veneer of magnanimity for the sheer purpose of economic

revenue, while ultimately capitalizing on false illusions, is dubious and needs to be

examined critically, especially in the interest of fans whose emotional investment

outweighs their critical perception—a state that could potentially result in psychological

damage.

[6.2] My analysis has only explored the surface of Glee's transmedia geography of

marketing; a more indepth study is necessary for a more comprehensive

understanding of the phenomenon. Interviews with Gleeks who underwent the casting

calls for MySpace or The Glee Project constitute the main desideratum of such a

project. Furthermore, it is crucial to add a more personal dimension that investigates

Glee's transmedia spaces from within, adopting a detached yet informed fan

perspective in an effort to learn how Gleeks perceive the dichotomy of fan practice and

labor. The affirmational, corporatecentric dimension that the Gleek community

exhibits needs to be rendered more lucidly as well, especially because it directly

correlates with the input of the corporate institutions that oversee the marketing

practices of the show. The model must also be systematically examined across the

contemporary TV landscape.

[6.3] Overall, the intricacies of Glee's marketing approach, notably its conceptual use

of performance and space, offers a framework through which to analyze fan cultures

and their evergrowing ties to the media industries' production of culture. The Gleeks

create, traverse, and operate within today's space of cultural economics—and many do

so willingly and quite astutely, building their own fan profile, absorbing extra content,

and communicating with their idols. They essentially get what they want in exchange

for emotional and practical forms of labor. In following their footprints from the inside,

we might be able to learn more about the dynamics that inform this space of cultural

economics and how they shape fan practice and labor.

7. Acknowledgments

I thank Professor John T. Caldwell (UCLA) and James Gilmore (Indiana University) for

their insightful feedback. I would also like to thank the editors at TWC for their

dedication to this piece.

8. Notes

1. According to Jonathan Gray (2010, 4), "Paratexts can amplify and/or clarify many of

a text's meanings and uses, establishing the role that a text and its characters play

outside the boundaries of the show, in the everyday realities of viewers' and nonviewers' lives." Gray's predominantly textual analysis of paratexts effectively establishes the relation between the extra text source and the audience. I focus on

how the economic dimension of paratexts factors into this equation.

2. Although the term producer refers to a specific job description, I am using a broader, cultural studies–oriented understanding of the term as someone involved in

creating creative (media) content. This thus involves people involved in creating Glee

as entertainment spectacle, including belowtheline workers and fans.

3. The tweetpeat was largely targeted at Gleeks, reminding them that the show

valued their tweets (questions, comments). As a result, Glee became the most

tweetedabout show of 2009.

4. Over the course of its fourseason arc, Glee's ratings have steadily decreased, with the fourth season averaging 5 to 6 million viewers per week. Nevertheless, iTunes and

CD sales remain high, regularly topping the download and sales charts.

5. This largescale implementation of popular social networking sites supports Fox's

strategy to shape fan reception and production. Hartley's (2009) concept of the

economics of attention captures the minutely orchestrated, systematic approach to fan

activity very well.

6. In the press release for the initial fourcity live tour, cocreator and show runner

Ryan Murphy emphasized the concert as the show's thankyou to Gleeks: "The

response of the fans to our little show has been so immediate and so gratifying, we

wanted to get out and thank them live and in person. And what show lends itself more

to a concert than Glee? We can't wait to take this show on the road and the actors

couldn't be more excited to perform live for audiences in these four cities" (Weintraub

2010).

7. In fact, the Gleek community is strictly policed, with fans generally ignoring,

marginalizing, or openly attacking any critical viewpoints on the show. Ironically, the

show itself celebrates diversity and tolerance—qualities that are not commonly

displayed in critical discourses revolving around the show.

8. Clay Shirky (1999) argues that the digital age has rendered consumers more

powerful in that they now represent media outlets that can either embrace and

advertise or reject and undermine the marketing of a media product. Shirky does not

mention, however, the dimensions to which this paradigm shift enables media

industries to exploit the consumer anew through the controlled illusion of

empowerment. Glee's transmedia geography effectively practices this exploitative new labor economy.

9. Works cited

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Caldwell, John. 2009. "HiveSourcing Is the New OutSourcing: Studying Old

(Industrial) Labor Habits in New (Consumer) Labor Clothes." Cinema Journal 49 (1):

160–7. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/cj.0.0176.

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De Kosnik, Abigail. 2013. "Interrogating Fan Labor." In Spreadable Media, edited by Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. New York: New York University Press.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2010/mar/31/gleecastingcallmyspace.

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Green, Joshua, and Henry Jenkins. 2009. "The Moral Economy of Web 2.0—Audience

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ConsumerCreated Content, Social Network Markets, and the Growth of Knowledge."

In Holt and Perren 2009, 231–44.

Hellekson, Karen. 2012. "Creating a Fandom via YouTube— Verbotene Liebe and

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Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 15 (2014)

Symposium

Fan work: Labor, worth, and participation in fandom's gift economy

Tisha Turk

University of Minnesota, Morris, Minnesota, United States

[0.1] Keywords— Community; Gift culture; Participatory culture; Work

Turk, Tisha. 2014. "Fan Work: Labor, Worth, and Participation in Fandom's Gift

Economy." In "Fandom and/as Labor," edited by Mel Stanfill and Megan Condis,

special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 15.

http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2014.0518.

1. Introduction

[1.1] Fandom has often been discussed, by both scholars and fans themselves, as a

sharing economy, and specifically as a gift economy based on giving, receiving, and

reciprocating (note 1). Within this economy, art objects—fan fiction, fan vids, fan art—

have typically been the most obvious and appreciated gifts; Rachael Sabotini (1999)

calls these art objects "the traditional gifts" of fandom. Reciprocation of these gifts

may take a number of forms, both tangible (other art objects, feedback for the

creator) and intangible (attention, recognition, status). This ongoing, reiterative

process of gift exchange is part of what makes it possible to experience and analyze

fandom as a community, or rather an overlapping series of communities, rather than

simply a large and shifting number of people occupying the same affinity space.

[1.2] While art objects may be the gifts most publicly recognized or validated by

fellow fans, and while these gifts are indeed a crucial part of fandom's gift economy,

we can better appreciate the scope of fandom's gift economy if we recognize that

fannish gifts include not only art objects but the wide range of creative labors that

surround and in some cases underlie these art objects. We can better understand the

relationship between gift exchange and community formation if we see fandom as a

system not just of reciprocal giving but of circular giving. And we can better evaluate

the relationship between fandom and production if we attend to not just the giving but

the receiving of gifts.

2. Production: Acts of labor

[2.1] Generally speaking, media fandom operates on a labor theory of value—not

necessarily in the Marxist sense of the phrase, but in the sense that value derives from

work. Fandom's gift economy assigns special worth to "gifts of time and skill"

(Hellekson 2009, 115), gifts made by fans for fans. The worth of these gifts lies not

simply in the content of the gift, nor in the social gesture of giving, but in the labor

that went into their creation. Commercially purchased gifts, such as the virtual

cupcakes and balloons that can be purchased in the LiveJournal shop, may be given

and appreciated, but will generally be worth less, in the context of fandom, than gifts

made by the giver (note 2). This labor theory of value is often invisible or

unarticulated until something goes wrong: a site skin doesn't work as anticipated, a

vid is plagiarized, a story in progress—or an entire archive—is abandoned. These

events remind us that our experience of fandom depends on the labor of others: "A

gift is a thing we do not get by our own efforts. We cannot buy it; we cannot acquire it

through an act of will. It is bestowed upon us" (Hyde 1979, xi).

[2.2] In practice, of course, not all labors are equally appreciated or even

acknowledged. The phrase fan work is typically used, by both fans and academics, in

the sense of work of art; it refers to fan fiction, fan vids, fan art. Within fandom, these objects are "the main focus of most discussion outside of the show itself" and are

"highly prized" because they "require some level of artistry to master" (Sabotini 1999). They are the objects, and thus the labors, most likely to be publicly assigned

value (in the form of comments, kudos, likes, reblogs, recommendations, etc.) by

other fans and to be studied by academics.

[2.3] But there are many other forms of fan work, including work that does not

necessarily result in objects for recirculation. Media fandom runs on the engine of

production, but much of what we produce is not art but information, discussion,

architecture, access, resources, metadata. Think about all the behindthescenes

labor, for example, that goes into commenting on stories, betaing vids, writing essays

and recommendations, reviewing and screencapping episodes, collecting links,

tagging bookmarks, maintaining Dreamwidth and LiveJournal communities, organizing

fests/challenges/exchanges, compiling newsletters, making costumes, animating .gif

sets, creating user icons, recording podfic, editing zines, assembling fan mixes,

administering kink memes, running awards sites, converting popular stories to ebook

formats, coding archives, updating wikis, populating databases, building vid conversion

software, planning conventions, volunteering at conventions, moderating convention

panels—and the list could go on.

[2.4] Such activities and their outcomes tend to be less discussed and commended,

in both fannish and academic circles, than fandom's "traditional gifts," even though in

many cases these activities facilitate the creation of art objects or provide the

infrastructure that enables the dissemination and discussion of those objects. The

sheer volume of fan work, in the inclusive sense of the phrase, necessitates further

fannish labor; the navigation of online fandom is made possible by the creation of

metadata, access points, links, and so on: important though sometimes

underacknowledged work. These labors, too, are gifts.

3. Community: Gifts of labor

[3.1] Most discussions of fandom's gift economy have conceptualized gift exchanges

as onetoone transactions, what Lewis Hyde calls "reciprocal giving" (1979, 16): an

author's gift of a story is reciprocated with a reader's gift of a comment (or, in a

smaller number of cases, with the gift of fan art or another story). In fact, most

fannish transactions, and fandom's gift economy as a whole, are considerably more

complicated than that. While some gifts are made for and presented to specific fans,

whether in the context of a preexisting friendship, a prompt or request, or a fest or

challenge, they are typically made available not only to that individual but to the

community as a whole, to be taken up by whatever subsets of the community are

interested. (There are exceptions; some user icons, for example, are made for one

person only and are therefore marked as "not shareable." However, the very fact of

this designation demonstrates the extent to which, within fandom, "shareable" is the

default—and commercial gifts, unlike fannish gifts, are generally not shareable in a

fannish context.) Put another way, gifts within fandom are not simply given but

distributed—and potentially, via links and reblogs, redistributed, sometimes well

beyond the corner of fandom in which they first appeared. Fandom gifting is not just

onetoone but onetomany.

[3.2] Community, therefore, is not just an abstract byproduct of the fannish gift

economy but a recipient within that economy; Sabotini's metaphor of the potlatch, the

community feast, as discussed by Marcel Mauss (1967) and Hyde (1979), is thus

especially apt. Many or even most of the art objects distributed within fandom are not

gifts meant for specific individuals; they are meant for everyone who wants them, and

once presented, all in attendance are welcome to help themselves. This openended

gifting is even more true of nonobject gifts: it would be highly unlikely, to say the

least, for someone to create an archive or organize a convention or maintain a

newsletter for just one fellow fan. And in those cases, gifting may well be not onetomany but manytomany, either because the work is done by a team or because the

full effect of the gift depends on the aggregated labor of many individuals (note 3).

[3.3] Many largescale fandom endeavors involve multiple types of gift. To take just

one example: the organizers of Festivids (http://fanlore.org/wiki/Festivids), the annual

rarefandom vid exchange founded in 2009, match participants offering vids to

participants requesting vids for the same shows or movies. Each participating

individual both gives and receives at least one vid (onetoone). Each vid is also

publicly posted and therefore available not just to the intended recipient but to any

interested fans, including fans not participating in the exchange (onetomany). And

the cumulative effect of Festivids—the festival effect—relies on the participation of

many givers doing parallel work (manytomany).

[3.4] Fandom's gift economy is therefore fundamentally asymmetrical: because a

single gift can reach so many people, and especially because it can go on reaching

people well after the initial moment of distribution, most fans receive far more gifts

than we give. Even the most productive fans generally don't make as many vids as we

watch, code as many sites as we use, moderate as many convention panels as we

attend, or create as many links as we follow. This asymmetry is critical to fandom's

functioning because it balances out the asymmetry in the other direction: not every

gift recipient will reciprocate with "the gift of reaction" (Hellekson 2009, 116), and

even when recipients do respond, few fans would argue that a single reblog or

comment, however detailed, constitutes full reciprocation for the gift of a carefully

crafted vid or an expertly recorded podfic or a painstakingly compiled rec list.

[3.5] From a systemic point of view, the inconsistency and unreliability of full

reciprocation is not a failure of the gift economy but an integral part of it. Hyde points

out that "if a man gives a secondrate necklace in return for a fine set of armshells,

people may talk, but there is nothing anyone can do about it. When we barter we

make deals, and if someone defaults we go after him, but the gift must be a gift"

(1979, 15). While fully reciprocal giving does occasionally take place within fandom,

the fannish gift economy as a whole more closely resembles what Hyde calls "circular

giving": "when the gift moves in a circle no one ever receives it from the same person

he gives it to…When I give to someone from whom I do not receive (and yet I do

receive elsewhere), it is as if the gift goes around a corner before it comes back. I

have to give blindly…When the gift moves in a circle its motion is beyond the control of

the personal ego, and so each bearer must be a part of the group and each donation is

an act of social faith" (1979, 16). Fandom's gift economy is not just an accumulation

of contiguous reciprocal relationships between individuals but a complex system in

which the reciprocation of gifts, and by extension the reward for labor, is distributed

across the community rather than concentrated in a single transaction (note 4).

4. Reception: Uses of labor

[4.1] Although not all fan gifts, and therefore fan labors, are equally likely to be

publicly acknowledged or specifically reciprocated, that doesn't necessarily mean that

those gifts and labors are not valued. Gift economy exchanges are made up not only of

giving and reciprocating but, importantly, receiving gifts. As Hellekson demonstrates,

"gifts have value within the fannish economy in that they are designed to create and

cement a social structure" (2009, 115), but the way in which they create and cement

that social structure is not just by being given but by being accepted—which is to say,

consumed or used. We see the value of fan labor, then, in fans' consumption of the

gifts produced and distributed by fellow fans. Fans may write stories or essays or

make vids or art because we feel an internal compulsion to do so, but we distribute

them for other fans to read and watch. It's hard to imagine fans maintaining an

archive or designing new videncoding software purely for the sake of doing so or even

for exclusively personal use; fans make these things for other fans to use. Use is

therefore the clearest sign of a gift accepted.

[4.2] Thinking about the gift economy as a matter of not just giving but receiving

allows us to reexamine what constitutes "participation" within fandom. Fandom has

famously been described and discussed by many fan studies scholars, beginning with

Henry Jenkins in Textual Poachers, as a "participatory culture which transforms the

experience of media consumption into the production of new texts" (2013, 46). In

recent years, however, some scholars have criticized the narrowness of this definition

of fandom. Matt Hills argues that emphasizing production has resulted in a misguided

"attempt to extend 'production' to all fans" when in fact, as he notes, some fans "may not be producers" in the sense that they "may not be interested in writing their own

fan fiction or filk songs" (2002, 30). Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee

Harrington concur when they argue that "petty producers" are "only one, and possibly the smallest subset of fan groups on a wide spectrum" (2007, 8).

[4.3] It is certainly true that not all fans produce art objects or, for that matter, any

of the other forms of fan work. Fandom has a long tradition of lurkers. But Hills's

dismissive reference to fan fiction and filk obscures not only the fact that fans,

collectively speaking, produce far more than fic and filk but also the fact that many

fans who are not producers participate in fandom's networked gift economy by

consuming the gifts of fan works—and perhaps even reciprocating occasionally in the

form of kudos on the Archive of Our Own, reblogs on Tumblr, or other lowthreshold

forms of feedback and redistribution. What, after all, are the lurkers doing if not

reading episode commentaries, searching archives and rec lists, downloading

podcasts, streaming vids, admiring cosplay, enjoying fan art, and so on? This concept

of participation may still exclude "fans who merely love a show, watch it religiously,

talk about it, and yet engage in no other fan practices or activities" (Gray, Sandvoss,

and Harrington 2007, 3–4), but it does allow us to recognize the ways in which even

nonproductive fans can participate in fandom's gift economy through their

engagement with the fruits of fannish labor.

5. Notes

1. For a brief overview of this concept (including its roots in the work of Marcel Mauss,

Lewis Hyde, David Cheal, and others) and its application to fandom from a scholarly

perspective, see Hellekson 2009. For recent academic discussions of the future of

fandom's gift economy and its intersections with commercial economies and

commodity culture, see Scott 2009, Booth 2010, 130–38, and Noppe 2011. For a few

examples of fannish accounts of the gift economy, see Sabotini 1999, Purpleyin 2006,

Mazar 2007, Doctor Science 2012, and lady_songsmith 2012.

2. There are exceptions; some gifts, such as donations of money or objects, may be

highly valuable in both commercial and fannish economies: a check to offset web

hosting costs, a new computer to replace a vidder's damaged one, an ereader for

reading fic during hospital stays. Such gifts are not necessarily fandomspecific,

though they may be organized and funded through fannish networks or used by the

recipient for fannish purposes.

3. Manytoone gifts are possible but tend, like onetoone gifts, to be distributed

publicly, thus becoming manytomany in practice while still retaining a special

connection to the original, singular recipient. For example, if a group of friends creates

a private community for collecting or recommending fan works created or curated with

the recipient's tastes in mind, that gift might remain private but is more likely to

become public and shareable at the time of gifting.

4. This may or may not be a consolation when, say, the vid into which you put so

much effort gets fewer than ten responses.

6. Works cited

Booth, Paul. 2010. Digital Fandom: New Media Studies. New York: Peter Lang.

Doctor Science. 2012. "50 Shades of Fandom: Publishing. Part IIb."

Obsidianwings.blogs.com, May 16.

Gray, Jonathan, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington. 2007. "Why Study Fans?"

Introduction to Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, edited by

Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington, 1–16. New York: New York

University Press.

Hellekson, Karen. 2009. "A Fannish Field of Value: Online Fan Gift Culture." Cinema

Journal 48 (4): 113–18. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/cj.0.0140.

Hills, Matt. 2002. Fan Cultures. London: Routledge.

Hyde, Lewis. 1979. The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. New York:

Vintage.

Jenkins, Henry. 2013. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture.

Rev. ed. New York: Routledge.

lady_songsmith. 2012. "Fandom Economy." Livejournal.com, May 24.

Mauss, Marcel. 1967. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies.

Translated by Ian Cunnison. New York: Norton.

Mazar, Rochelle. 2007. "Henry Jenkins and Fan Culture." Random Access Mazar,

October 20.

Noppe, Nele. 2011. "Why We Should Talk about Commodifying Fan Work." In "Textual

Echoes," edited by Cyber Echoes, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures,

no. 8. http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2011.0369.

Purpleyin. 2006. "Giftgiving and Fandom Theory." GateWorld Forum, February 2.

Sabotini, Rachael. 1999. "The Fannish Potlatch: Creation of Status within the Fan

Community." The Fanfic Symposium.

http://www.trickster.org/symposium/symp41.htm.

Scott, Suzanne. 2009. "Repackaging Fan Culture: The Regifting Economy of Ancillary

Content Models." Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 3.

http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2009.0150.

Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 15 (2014)

Symposium

Better Badges: Image as virus

Joly MacFie

New York, New York, USA

[0.1] Keywords— Fan community

MacFie, Joly. 2014. "Better Badges: Image as Virus." In "Fandom and/as Labor,"

edited by Mel Stanfill and Megan Condis, special issue, Transformative Works and

Cultures, no. 15. http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2014.0521.

[1] In 1976 I founded Better Badges, a publisher/marketer of promotional button

badges based in London, UK. I had a background in the British underground, and I

was very much inspired by "people power" campaigns—the principle, embodied in the

protest movement, of bottomup change—which I wanted to apply to music. It

happened to coincide with the first stirrings of punk rock, and badges became a

mainstay of that movement, especially in the early days when little else in the way of

product was available.

Figure 1. A rare Better Badge, part of a batch that sold for $500 at Christie's in 2008.

[View larger image.]

[2] My founding principle was "Image as Virus, Elitism for All," suggesting that fans could wear and support whatever they liked, without either (a) being at the mercy of

promotional largesse, or (b) being gouged by merchandisers. The idea was that fans,

rather than industry gatekeepers, could dictate trends.

[3] Some designs I created; some were supplied by bands; some by fans. I had a

stall at the London Roundhouse concert venue, and mail order took off. I ran a Top

Ten of the most popular badges in the weekly music newspaper, NME.

[4] I attempted, after a fashion, to pay royalties, to designers, bands, or both, but it

was patchy and impossible to administer. The reality was that if, say, Patti Smith

needed help with her hotel bill, or The Clash needed to get their van to Europe, I

coughed up. Others, like the Sex Pistols, took payment in kind. The acts that did

demand accounting were somehow never those that had wide support, so it was never

an issue.

[5] However, things came to a head with Joy Division—not over money, but over the

Factory Records policy of treating all output as fine art. In the early days, they had

supplied designs; later I did them. They were in a dilemma whether to give the badges

FAC numbers like the rest of their catalog. Eventually, after a sitdown, it was

concluded that the badges were, like fanzines, outside activity. It was not, as Stiff

Records, another close associate, termed it "dumping on the people" but a form of

feedback and backchannel promotion. So I threw out royalties and established a fresh

system. Any new design accepted would get awarded 200 free badges to the band and

samples provided to the designer. This worked very well.

Figure 2. The original Joy Division set. [View larger image.]

[6] I was successful enough to purchase a printing plant. As badges became more

common and commoditized, I turned to printing fanzines as a way to maintain street

cred as an underground medium. I settled on a similar deal for fanzines. I would cover

setup, plates, and camera work, and finance the print run. There were flat rates for

publisher, wholesale, retail. Rapidly, we were producing a steady stream, three or four

titles and 10,000 copies per week.

Figures 3–5. Fanzines produced at Better Badges. [View larger image (3). View larger

image (4). View larger image (5).]

[7] The economics were always peculiar, in that one could print 24 badges on one

sheet and sell them at 20p each, or print one fanzine on 12 sheets doublesided, which

still sold for the same 20p. The badges subsidized the zines with ads and a distribution

avenue, and the zines did practically break even.

[8] Of course, and this addresses the fandom as labor theme, the fanzine publishers

were never paid beyond what they made from hawking a few copies. I used to goodhumoredly mock them when they would arrive breathless from Rough Trade (the music store a block away) clutching a couple of promo 45s. "Oh look, they gave me

review copies!" The fact was the rapidly growing UK independent record business had

established itself almost entirely via peer promotion, seeded by cassette swapping,

fanzines, and badges.

[9] There is a wider truth that it was new technologies, widely available dualcassette

decks, cheap "instant" printing, and Xerox (especially for resizing graphics) that

enabled all that pioneering p2p, the sum of which led to a hijacking of the cultural

agenda beyond my wildest dreams.

[10] At the end of the decade, just like notes being passed round at the back of class

eventually becoming adopted as curricula, the underground became overground, and

thus beyond such activity. The most egregious example of this was Adam and The

Ants, in 1980 the topselling badge act and fanzine subject. Overnight, they suddenly

went from cult heroes to genuine chart toppers. The result was that the punks dropped

them like a stone. Badge sales stopped dead. Kids everywhere were painting out the

Antz logos on their jackets and replacing them with Theater of Hate or Killing Joke.

Figure 6. Ants badges. View larger image .

[11] So the other truth, which I learnt early, was that it is not fame that drives fan

support but leverage—coolness over hotness.

[12] I gave it up in 1982, having made around 40 million badges, maybe 100,000

zines. I could see the future was online, but that took another 12 years to arrive …

Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 15 (2014)

Dialogue

Veronica Mars Kickstarter and crowd funding

Bertha Chin

United Kingdom

Bethan Jones

Aberystwyth University, Aberystwyth, Wales, United Kingdom

Myles McNutt

University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin, United States

Luke Pebler

California, United States

[0.1] Keywords— Crowd sourcing; Ethics; Fan agency; Fan exploitation; Fan labor

Chin, Bertha, Bethan Jones, Myles McNutt, and Luke Pebler. 2014. " Veronica Mars Kickstarter and Crowd Funding" [dialogue]. In

"Fandom and/as Labor," edited by Mel Stanfill and Megan Condis, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 15.

http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2014.0519.

1. Introduction

[1.1] In March 2013, social media was abuzz with news of the Veronica Mars Kickstarter, and each of our Twitter and Facebook feeds were filled with speculation from fans about what the movie would be about, questions from media scholars about how the Kickstarter might affect the relationship between fans and producers, and cynicism from others about what Warner Bros. might get from the film. Within just a few hours of the Kickstarter campaign being announced, blogs had been published by academics, including Jason Mittell and Mel Stanfill; industry professionals, including Richard Lawson and Joss Whedon; fans, including James Poniewozik and Willa Paskin; and of course the four of us (note 1). But what exactly did the Kickstarter entail, and why were we

so interested in it?

[1.2] Launched by Rob Thomas and Kristen Bell on March 13, the project was an attempt to fund a Veronica Mars featurelength film entirely through a crowdfunding platform. Thomas (2013b), in his "Day One" message, discussed the reasons behind the project, noting, "Kristen and I met with the Warner Bros. brass, and they agreed to allow us to take this shot. They were extremely cool about it, as a matter of fact. Their reaction was, if you can show there's enough fan interest to warrant a movie, we're on board. So this is it. This is our shot." The fact that Warner Bros. had given their permission for the Kickstarter to take place added an interesting facet to the debates around crowd funding and fandom, but within 11 hours, the campaign had reached its initial $2 million goal and eventually went on to raise $5,702,153, making it, as Kickstarter noted, "an alltime highest funded Kickstarter film project." The campaign also boasts the most backers at 91,585, among other Kickstarter records that were broken.

[1.3] Smashing Kickstarter records aside, Thomas and Bell's success also brought into question for each of us the issue of fan labor. Bertha raised this question in her blog, noting that "fan agency always gets left out in arguments which purports concern that fans are being duped by studios and networks," a point Bethan took up in a post, writing, "In this case I would agree that fans are well aware that they are donating to a large studio—the difference is that it doesn't matter. " Both Myles and Luke also addressed this issue of the importance of the Kickstarter, with Myles writing, "I could hear dozens of media studies professors mentally adding to their lesson plans on fan cultures," and Luke arguing that "the creation and subsequent success of the Veronica Mars Movie Kickstarter represents a troubling landmark in the emergent history of crowdfunding." The importance of the Veronica Mars Kickstarter to issues around fan labor and exploitation is thus one that stood out to each of us immediately; this thread continues to run through this piece. No longer merely acting as grassroots promoters, celebrity gatekeepers, subtitlers, and such, fans are now financing featurelength film projects on crowdfunding platforms. What are the implications of this, not just to fandom, but also to the industry? Each of us understands the issue of fan labor and exploitation in different ways, and this conversation entails both trying to understand what we mean by each of those terms and how they can be related to the Veronica Mars Kickstarter specifically and crowd funding more generally.

[1.4] In this dialogue, we gather academics and industry professionals to reflect on four issues that underpin the debates on crowd funding: fan agency, the Kickstarter platform, crowd funding itself, and finally the media entertainment industry. The dialogue took place primarily through a master document stored on Google Drive, although Twitter and email were also used to

share ideas and links, as press coverage, particularly on the ethics of Zach Braff's Kickstarter campaign and crowd funding, continues. Braff launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund his film Wish I Was Here in April 2013. In the introduction to the Kickstarter, Braff (2013) wrote,

[1.5] I was about to sign a typical financing deal in order to get the money to make "Wish I Was Here," my follow up to "Garden State." It would have involved making a lot of sacrifices I think would have ultimately hurt the film. I've been a backer for several projects on Kickstarter and thought the concept was fascinating and revolutionary for artists and innovators of all kinds. But I didn't imagine it could work on largerscale projects. I was wrong.

[1.6] After I saw the incredible way "Veronica Mars" fans rallied around Kristen Bell and her show's creator Rob Thomas, I couldn't help but think (like I'm sure so many other independent filmmakers did) maybe there is a new way to finance smaller, personal films that didn't involve signing away all your artistic control.

[1.7] Much more controversy circulated around Braff's Kickstarter than the one for Veronica Mars, however, with many commentators asking whether it was ethical for Braff to use Kickstarter to fund the campaign given that he had been about to sign a deal and could afford to fund the film himself if he wanted to retain creative control. We return to Braff and the differences between his Kickstarter and that for Veronica Mars later in this conversation, and raise the issues of both antifandom of a producer/writer and the ethics of each campaign.

[1.8] The participants in this conversation are Bertha Chin, Bethan Jones, Myles McNutt, and Luke Pebler. Bertha Chin graduated with a PhD from Cardiff University; her thesis explored the notion of community boundaries and construction of the fan celebrity in cult and scifi television fandom. Her published work has appeared in the Journal of Science Fiction Film and Television, Social Semiotics, and Intensities as well as the edited collection Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World. Bethan Jones is a PhD candidate at Aberystwyth University, researching fan fiction and gender. Her work has been published in the journals Participations, Sexualities, and Transformative Works and Cultures as well as the edited collection The Modern Vampire and Human Identity. She has recently coedited a journal special issue on the Fifty Shades of Grey series. She blogs at

http://bethanvjones.wordpress.com. Myles McNutt is a PhD candidate in media and cultural studies at the University of Wisconsin,

Madison, where he serves as a contributing editor and administrator for Antenna: Responses for Media and Culture (http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/). He can be reached via his personal blog, Cultural Learnings (http://culturallearnings.com/),

and on Twitter @Memles (http://twitter.com/memles). Luke Pebler is a television editor working in Hollywood, currently on the

CW drama Hart of Dixie. He holds an MFA in film production from the University of Southern California and a BA in communication arts from the University of Wisconsin.

[1.9] The discussion was moderated by Bertha Chin, who blogs for On/Off Screen (http://onoffscreen.wordpress.com/) and is on

Twitter as @bertha_c (https://twitter.com/bertha_c), and Bethan Jones, who can be reached on Twitter at @memories_child

(http://twitter.com/memories_child).

2. Fan agency

[2.1] Q: A lot of debate has taken place around crowd funding being a form of fan exploitation. What are your thoughts on this?

[2.2] Jones: I've been thinking about this a lot lately, in part because of what something a friend of mine said on Facebook, in response to Stacey Abbott's blog post on the Kickstarter. Abbott (2013) argues that the darker side to the debate is "the potential that this is a case of the fans being financially exploited, by getting them to fund a Hollywood movie from which they will not earn any profits or even recoup their money." My friend, however, said that since the film isn't likely to come out where she lives, she's more than happy to pay the $35 to get a digital copy, plus another $15 for the DVD which she'd buy anyway. And that's something that I hadn't considered when thinking about the VM Kickstarter. I had assumed (always a dangerous thing to do) that fans would be paying to see the film in the cinema, and some of them will. But others won't, and so this gives them another way of getting to see it, as well as the DVD which they'd buy anyway. I think that a lot of the time, academics (me included), the media, and the industry forget that fans actually do have agency, and a lot of the fans being exploited rhetoric seems to come from a similar place to the fans as cultural dopes discourse. Fans can be pretty savvy—we're not all the screaming fangirls the media likes to make us out to be—and I think something like the VM Kickstarter shows that. Yes, there's a lot of emotion or feeling there, as far as the object of fandom is concerned (and here I'll admit to seeing the second XFiles film in the cinema nine times because I wanted to put as much money into the box office as I could), but there is also a line that fans won't cross. For me it was buying multiple copies of the DVD as part of the XFN campaign.

[2.3] Chin: I always cringe when the term fan exploitation is thrown around—not that I don't think it happens (Tanya Cochran's 2008 piece on Firefly fans is a good example that comes to mind), but I think Bethan made a great point there about it coming from a similar place as the fans as cultural dupes discourse. I think it's important that we don't assume fans' complete ignorance about what they're doing when they reach into their wallets and donate to the Veronica Mars Kickstarter campaign. And I'd go back to Jason Mittell's argument of this being an extension of preordering DVDs, merchandise, and/or (fan) experiences.

Figure 1. Jason Mittell's Veronica Mars tweet, March 13, 2013. [View larger image .]

[2.4] In this case, for the fans, it may not necessarily be about funding a studio film (which seems to be attracting some of the criticisms) but more about funding the creative vision of the man who brought them the beloved universe and characters of Veronica Mars (which, admittedly, was my gut reaction when I donated to the campaign). I think a more interesting question might perhaps be on fan expectations, now that fans are backers. Would fans now feel entitled to the project now that they've invested money in it? Would Rob Thomas—or any other filmmaker who received his funding via Kickstarter for that matter—now be obligated to create a piece of work that they think fans want, and would that affect forms of artistic integrity?

[2.5] McNutt: Fans are exploited every day. When they tweet about a show using a hash tag, or when they tell a friend about that show, they're completing free labor for the television network whose show they're watching. Of course, we subject ourselves to this exploitation because we've accepted that the value we get from participation—the enjoyment of social media, the satisfaction of sharing things we love with other people—is worth giving part of ourselves over to the industry. "Save our show"

campaigns are an extension of this: when Chuck fans bought Subway sandwiches, or when Jericho fans purchased peanuts to send to CBS, they were protesting an industry decision by using money—and time, and energy—to reassert the series' value to their respective networks (and hopefully get more of what they love).

Figure 2. Bring Jericho Back campaign poster. [View larger image .]

[2.6] The Veronica Mars Kickstarter is certainly an evolution of this principle, asking fans to do more than send Mars bars—

which, to their credit, they had to import from other countries—to the CW and instead "funding" production, but the way the Kickstarter was framed very much placed this into the context of fan activism: the logic was not that Rob Thomas and Kristen Bell needed fans' money to make this movie, it was that they needed their money as a symbol of their fandom which would convince Warner Bros. the movie was viable. And so while the end result of the campaign was fans funding the production of the Veronica Mars movie, Thomas and Bell's rhetorical pitch to fans was comfortably within the logics under which they had previously engaged

—and on some level continued to engage, after cancellation—with the show; combined with the existence of tangible goods being exchanged for their pledges, I find it hard to consider this exploitative of fans (or, rather, I find it hard to differentiate this form of exploitation from the daily exploitation that we've commonly understood as part of television culture).

[2.7] Pebler: Of the four of us, I have probably been the most critical of the VM Kickstarter up to this point. All your points are well taken: fans are, by and large, a smart and actualized group. They wield real power, they've got good bullshit detectors, and they're not generally in need of protection from the evil content producers. And, yes, you can broadly view almost all fan activity (online evangelism, auxiliary product consumption, etc.) as exploitation that is weighed against the enjoyment fans derive from their participation. But this is different. Traditional preordering is one thing, but this amounts to an auction wherein Warner Bros.

effectively gets to set prices based on the intensity of each individual fan's devotion. Instead of maximizing revenue by courting more customers at fixed prices, which is the way things normally work, they get to maximize on a perfan basis. Even better, they can bid up their customers with soft talk of not only the reward premiums but the actual product. The more vague they are about the tees and posters and the very movie itself, the more people will imagine the best and be willing to pay! The fact that Kickstarter allows unlimited funding beyond the initial goal is, to me, a huge problem. It's a loophole that makes this sort of exploitation possible. Bethan, your friend may be happy to pay $35 for a digital copy of 90 minutes of Veronica Mars (marginal cost to producer = $0), but that doesn't make it right for Warner Bros. to ask her for it. I'll be getting the same movie, likely on the same release day, for no more than $5 or $6 at Amazon or iTunes. Fans' devotion to the series was used as leverage to get them to massively overpay for goods they won't see for a year, at least. That is absolutely exploitation, as far as I'm concerned.

[2.8] Jones: Does the VM Kickstarter become more about a question of ethics than exploitation, then, in that it's unethical for corporations like Warner Bros. to exploit both loopholes in the system and fannish attachment to a text in order to profit from it?

If so, I think that's an interesting shift from the way that fan exploitation has typically been analyzed (fans as dupes rather than corporations as unethical). As Bertha and Myles have noted, fans aren't ignorant of what they're doing when they put money into a Kickstarter or use official hash tags, and fandom can be extremely vocal about and critical of texts. I'm sure there are VM fans who won't have contributed to this Kickstarter because of issues around how it's been framed, Warner Bros.' involvement, or a variety of other reasons. I think that, on the whole, if fans think they are being exploited, they will make their feelings known. I do think there are issues with the VM Kickstarter (i.e., fans are funding a studio film), and I can see your point, Luke, about Warner Bros.' actions, but I think Bertha's point about the fan experience is an important one (Myles also wrote about the Kickstarter as a social experience, which I think is useful in thinking about the fan experience). By contributing to the VM

Kickstarter, fans don't simply get a script, Tshirt, copy of the DVD, etc.; they become part of the success of the project. That affords them cultural capital within fandom (though of course, the more they contribute, the more capital they accrue, which I do think has interesting repercussions for hierarchies in fandom and the amount that gets contributed to the Kickstarter), at the same time as consolidating a feeling of community between fans who have contributed. I don't think that can be ignored when we talk about things like exploitation. I also wonder whether we need to take fan voices into account more in these discussions. If we're having fans telling us no, they don't feel exploited, is there value in us as academics and industry professionals telling them that actually, they are? Do things like the VM Kickstarter mean that we need to reevaluate how we study fandom and the language that we use?

Figure 3. "I saved Veronica Mars on Kickstarter" sticker, one of the stickers offered as a reward for backers pledging $10 or more. [View larger image.]

[2.9] McNutt: Connecting two of your points, Bethan, is there a risk of reinforcing fans as dupes if we insist on their exploitation despite their insistence they are willing participants? It's slippery territory, although I would generally resist telling fans anything—

rather, I think anything I write about fans or fandom which is then consumed by fans is designed as the start of a conversation rather than an intervention. I don't know if we have to reevaluate how we study fandom, but I do think this is an area where our understanding of its exploitative qualities might need to wait until discussions like this one have taken place within fandom. Even just a few months later, we're still in the glow of the Kickstarter's success, and a lot of this will come down to how the Veronica Mars fan community participates in this process over the course of the next year or so.

[2.10] Pebler: You're probably right, Myles, that we're in a rosetinted honeymoon period. Perhaps it will selfcorrect; certainly the success of future campaigns will be contingent on (fans' judgment of) the results of today's. That said, it's often voices from outside the community that spark subsequent debate within it. Starting the conversation is a worthy pursuit, as you say. In that spirit, I think it's important to point out that there are other creators exploring alternative models for continuing their stories and distributing content direct to fans—ones that eschew leveraging their fame through crowd funding. Look at Joss Whedon's Buffy season 8 comic or Dr. Horrible's SingAlong Blog Web series, or Brian K. Vaughn's new Weboptimized comic The Private Eye (http://panelsyndicate.com/).

Figure 4. The Private Eye issue 1 cover. [View larger image.]

[2.11] Vaughn refers to crowd funding in the afterword of issue 1: "[Private Eye artist] Marcos and I really like sites like Kickstarter, but as relatively old hands in this biz, we didn't want to shake the tin cup until we had a finished product to share."

Fans are encouraged to "name your price": casual readers can try the work for free, while those that crave the experience of helping to support future issues can do so to any degree they desire. Granted, it costs more upfront money to make a movie than an online comic, but if the ultimate goal is continuing a story that fans love, by hook or by crook, with less meddlesome suits in the middle, then these methods achieve that goal without placing an unethical financial burden upon the consumer. I think that's to be applauded.

[2.12] Chin: I do wonder if those rosetinted honeymoon period is starting to fade, though, with the recent backlash against Zach Braff's Kickstarter campaign (Gadino 2013). Or is this a case where, in terms of Hollywood hierarchy, Rob Thomas is seen as the underdog whereas Zach Braff isn't? Luke, your mention of Brian K. Vaughn's name as your price model reminded me of a similar thing the British band, Radiohead, did with their 2007 independently released album. Interestingly enough, Radiohead's front man, Thom Yorke, recently spoke of how much he regretted going down that route, suggesting that their experiment with the model actually helped companies like Apple and Google devalue music (Sandoval 2013). Although music is a wholly different industry, I wonder if the same thing would eventually happen with other creative industries. Bethan's point about ethics is also an important conversation to have, I think, and Kickstarter's unlimited funding beyond the initial goal, which Luke highlighted, can be argued as an ethical issue as well, particularly for campaigns like VM's and Braff's. But it becomes a complicated issue, as the unlimited funding would certainly allow creators without any industry connection to put more into their project.

[2.13] In terms of reevaluating how we study fandom, or at least reconsider the language and terminology that we use, I think this is something that is already happening. In terms of thinking where the study of fandom began, from justifying the cause of active audiences to the current work on fan activism and fans turned producers, fanancing, to borrow the term from Suzanne Scott (2013), is likely going to be the next step, especially seeing as we're already having this conversation right now.

3. Kickstarter (as a platform)

[3.1] Q: What are the benefits and/or drawbacks to the crowd funding model offered by Kickstarter and other sites like it?

[3.2] Jones: One interesting thing I've found now is almost a backlash against Kickstarter. I noticed a conversation someone had retweeted into my timeline the other day which illustrates this really well, and it does seem to be the case that the more well known projects on Kickstarter are the ones where there are big names attached (VM, Amanda Palmer, etc.).

Figure 5. Twitter conversation about Kickstarter being overtaken by celebrities. [View larger image.]

[3.3] I wonder whether this will cause problems either for Kickstarter or for the indie projects that want to use it. Is it likely that indie projects will get sidelined and not raise the money they need? Or will Kickstarter start changing the way they run in order to make more of a profit from the larger names?

[3.4] Chin: I actually got to know about sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo via friends who are indie filmmakers, so I've donated to quite a few of these myself. It's certainly a great platform for indie filmmakers, for people who are making short films and Web series to get their material seen as long as they manage to get it funded. It also allows them to work outside of the studio system. Having said that, I've seen how fulfilling perks to backers have taken its toll: if you're already strapped for cash for a project, imagine having to spend even more on printing Tshirts, DVDs, and shipping. I often wonder how much of the money I

donated actually went into the production costs instead of delivering the perks. There's also the issue of accountability: what happens when perks aren't delivered on time? Or if things change and you lose an actor you've cast but fans have already donated money?

[3.5] McNutt: There's no definitive answer to this question, which is itself both a benefit and a drawback to Kickstarter and other sites. For every indie developer whose video game gets a new lease on life through fan support and online promotion, someone like Zach Braff—successfully (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1869987317/wishiwashere1)—or Melissa Joan Hart—unsuccessfully (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/318676760/darciswalkofshame)—uses his or her celebrity to help fund passion projects, and in the process our perception of crowd funding is shaped and reshaped. The Veronica Mars Kickstarter was received as a triumph of audiences—which is not to say that Luke and others haven't expressed their reservations, but rather that the press around the project has been largely positive—while Braff's effort to retain final cut on his followup to Garden State was considered a bastardization, even though one could argue that Braff's desire to maintain his independence from the demands of studio financiers is actually closer to the spirit of Kickstarter than Veronica Mars' Warner Bros. production account. The uncertainty of Kickstarter's value allows a project like Veronica Mars to emerge and catch the Internet by storm, but the same uncertainty of value could lead to other worthy projects—projects that lack the same promotional push—going unfunded as the site is flooded with projects that shift the value of crowd funding in different directions. The freeforall nature of the site enables huge success stories, for content creators to redefine value to their benefit, but it also makes it impossible to pin down a consistent logic of crowd funding on the platform (or on any platform).

[3.6] Pebler: I agree with Myles—Kickstarter is a platform, and its rise to prominence is at least partially due to its flexibility.

It's able to serve the needs of a variety of users, large and small. I doubt that backlash against highprofile campaigns will somehow soil the platform and negatively affect the ability of smaller projects to find funding because campaigns are generally promoted through separate channels controlled by the artists themselves (social media, personal Web sites, word of mouth).

Bethan, your idea of KS trying to use big projects to generate revenue is a really interesting one. It's a sort of progressive tax, where the bigger the project total, the bigger the Kickstarter share gets, while the smallest projects have their fees waived. It could be a way to make the system a little more selfregulating and even the playing field. You'd have the Amanda Palmers and Zach Braffs of the world indirectly subsidizing the tiny projects. Matt Honan's 2013 article in Wired posits a future of proliferating crowdfunding sites geared toward specific niches, and I think he's right on. If Kickstarter does turn off part of their user base by deciding to somehow cater to large, highprofile projects, surely another site will pop up as the place for true independents, and so on, as is the circle of life in the age of software and social networks. As crowd funding matures, it will likely stratify in order to court different user bases, just as social media and fandom itself have.

[3.7] Jones: I think the points you make, Bertha, about production costs versus the cost of perks and accountability are really important ones. I'd be interested in seeing a full breakdown of the costs of a crowdfunded project to look at how much time and money is spent on the promotion (including the perks) and the actual production. If it's the former, is Kickstarter better seen as a means to promote and publicize a project rather than raising money to fund it? I also think the question you raised earlier about fan expectations is relevant in relation to accountability. I know Rob Thomas said in an interview with Hitfix that he had to seriously consider what kind of film he wanted to make:

[3.8] There was a real internal debate, for me, about what kind of movie I wanted to make. Just by way of example, I really enjoyed "Side Effects," and that sort of noir thriller that I could see Kristen Bell as Veronica Mars in something like that. I liked the plotting of that movie. I had some desire, as a filmmaker, to take Veronica in a slightly new direction and do something adventurous with her. Or, there's the "give the people what they want" version. And I think partly because it's crowdsourced, I'm going with the "give the people what they want" version. It's going to be Veronica being Veronica, and the characters you know and love…but it was a creative debate I had with myself, and I finally made the decision that I'm happy with it, to go with, "Let's not piss people off who all donated. Let's give them the stuff that I think that they want in the movie." (Sepinwall 2013)

[3.9] Here, at least, there seems to be some element of accountability toward fans, but how much will this impact upon the story being told in the film? How will Thomas giving people what they want affect future bigname Kickstarters? Will it actually have any effect?

[3.10] Also thinking about what you said about value, Myles, how are we defining value in relation to Kickstarter and crowd funding? Who determines what is worthy and what isn't? And is this another case where we need to look at the terms we're using and whether they're relevant to what we're actually discussing?

[3.11] McNutt: Value is a huge question, one that obviously we don't have room to answer here, but your example raises a good point: does Rob Thomas still get to define the value of his own projects when he's accountable to tens of thousands of backers? However, I would argue that by creating a Kickstarter built on nostalgia (the video featuring the previous actors), and by choosing to directly appeal to fans, Thomas was very clearly accepting of fandetermined value from the moment the campaign began.

 PLAY

Video 1. Veronica Mars Kickstarter video.

[3.12] I'd actually argue, though, that this gives him greater space in which to define value, in that he is allowing fans an opportunity to guide broad discussions of value in order to allow him some wiggle room. As Thomas has spoken of Veronica's romantic entanglements and returning cast members, he has been very careful to speak around certainties in favor of a promise that it will be true to the series, something that fans can trust knowing that the project as a whole is positioned as "more of what they love." Any continuation of a canceled TV series would have to handle this balance in the same way, whereas I think original bigname Kickstarter projects are possible provided they are up front about how much value backers have within the creative process. Thomas used his appeal to fans as a way to encourage them to participate, ensuring them their participation was already being valued as he wrote the film, which I think is a big part of the Kickstarter's success as it relates to cultural capital; not every project could do the same, but the definition of value remains open for interpretation within the platform.

[3.13] Chin: I agree with Myles that the definition of value is open for interpretation. Thomas pitched the campaign as a continuation of the VM universe, and his updates to backers have been quite detailed thus far, with promises of more. In his last update, for example, he wrote: "We want to find new and better ways to keep you involved. We want you to feel like you're part of the process. And while we don't want to spoil the fun of the movie, we do want you to see as much as you can." Just as backing Braff's project is about ensuring that the filmmaker has full artistic control of the project, as he detailed in his project's rationale: "I want you to be my financiers and my audience so I can make a movie for you with no compromises."

[3.14] I think it'll be interesting to see—perhaps after the final cut of the VM film has been released—how accountability fits into the conversation, particularly among fans, which brings this back to my earlier point about fan expectations, especially now that they have a financial stake in it. I know of one other Kickstarter project that may have lost one of its main cast, and whose fundraising pitch was rather dependent on the casting of the actor. Nothing has been officially announced by the filmmakers on this change as yet, so it remains to be seen how, and if (or when), accountability—and fan expectations—comes into the picture when that happens.

[3.15] Pebler: A recurrent theme in these discussions seems to be, how will it all look once it's over and the thing kickstarted is complete and released? Will backers ultimately be happy? Will producers be happy? Will it all have been worth it? It's going to be an excruciatingly long wait to find out, in many cases. There seems reason to be bullish on the future of crowd funding in general, though. Kickstarter's official response (Chen, Strickler, and Adler 2013) to the VM/Braff backlash is, "Look how many people join as a result of these headline grabbers and end up giving to lots of other smaller projects as well!" And I think that's great news, if it proves to be true in the long run. Perhaps, regardless of ethical implications or quality of final products, the big names are to be tolerated because of the halo effect they generate.

4. Crowd funding

[4.1] Q: Crowd funding isn't a new phenomenon, so why do you think it has become so successful and widely known in the last couple of years?

[4.2] Jones: I'm going to say that social media has played a big part in this. I certainly heard about Kickstarter through Twitter (more so than Facebook), and it being used and promoted by big names (Neil Gaiman, for one) means that a lot of Kickstarter

projects pop up on my feed regularly. It's a quick and easy way of getting information about projects out there to a lot of people, and that makes a big difference, I think.

[4.3] Chin: I think the VM project certainly propelled the concept to the mainstream consciousness. But as I understand, it's been common in the music and games industry. The success of Joss Whedon's Dr. Horrible's SingAlong Blog very likely made people aware that it's possible to make a creative piece of work without the backing of a studio, but because not everyone is Joss Whedon, the existence of crowd funding seems like the next best (practical) thing. Furthermore, we're in a climate where usergenerated content and the idea of the collective intelligence and crowd sourcing are becoming increasingly recognized and cultivated.

[4.4] McNutt: In the case of the media industries, one of the factors has been how new forms of distribution have made the logics of crowd funding much easier. Within the video game industry, new platforms like Apple's App Store, Valve's Steam, or even the major console maker's respective digital distribution setups have all given small independent developers the ability to reach wide audiences without the need of a large publisher and physical distribution. Similarly, the rise of the Web series Video Game High School (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/freddiew/videogamehighschoolseasontwo?ref=live), which was, before Veronica Mars, the highestearning film/video Kickstarter, has created a new space for content creators where they can turn to crowd funding to make something they can then release on their own terms without the need for networks or studios. The Veronica Mars Kickstarter is perhaps outside of this development, given that the film will be distributed through traditional means, but I think the larger move toward crowd funding has been the result of nontraditional ways of delivering content to audiences who lend themselves to nontraditional ways of funding that content.

[4.5] Pebler: I see crowd funding's rise in profile as a natural side effect of technological progress and the maturation of online culture. You've got more people with more connected devices, more comfortable with technology, and invested in online communities. The customer base is increasingly receptive to a media landscape that includes nontraditional content sources consumed in a myriad of ways. Meanwhile, artists seeking patronage are as old as art itself. As people increasingly live their lives online, it's only natural that they start to look for seed funding online as well. Kickstarter, on its surface, represents a way for fans and creators to get closer together, cutting out the corporate middlemen, so it's no wonder that it's become a great white hope for fans of media properties cut down before their time. The trick will be to wrest the underlying intellectual property of these shows from the giants that own them. Otherwise any appearance of independence will be an illusion, as it is with Veronica Mars.

[4.6] Jones: Reading your responses made me think of the way that Amazon is making selfpublishing much easier. Although it's not crowd funding, it certainly comes under the umbrella of nontraditional ways of delivering content as well as technological progress. Crowd funding does seem to be a more acceptable way for getting your film, Web series, or game out there than selfpublishing is. Whether that's to do with the history of traditional publishing and the idea of what literary work is I'm not sure, but do you think crowd funding will make other areas of nontraditional content delivery more acceptable?

[4.7] McNutt: While it might make them more acceptable, it doesn't make them easier. The logistics of crowd funding—as noted above—are a challenge, such that anyone who could secure solid terms on more traditional capital is likely to take that opportunity. It's similar to selfpublishing in that way: if you could get reasonable terms with a real publisher, you would probably take that deal. There have been a number of video game kickstarters that have backed out of crowd funding after their campaigns brought investments from traditional sources, which removes the burden of fulfilling rewards and the like. As a result, while nontraditional content delivery is absolutely part of what makes crowd funding possible and in many cases desirable, the legitimacy and efficiency afforded by traditional publishing continue to hold value.

[4.8] Chin: Myles definitely made a great point there. The symbolic capital attached to traditional content delivery still holds great value. That's not to say that nontraditional content delivery isn't equally important. I think in terms of your comparison to the selfpublishing industry, Bethan, perhaps the difference is that films, games, and music are often a collaborative effort compared to a selfpublished book, whereby it's easier to be accused of vanity publishing.

[4.9] Pebler: You've hit upon another reason it's difficult to make generalizations about crowd funding, Bertha: the huge variety of projects it's being used for, and the accordingly wide range of collaborative and capital needs of those projects. Production costs of different mediums don't always correlate nicely with the relative fame/support level of the artist Kickstarting. This leads to situations such as Amanda Palmer raising $1.2 million—12 times her goal—to produce a record, and being subjected to (presumably) more scrutiny than if she'd only raised what she initially set out to. Again, the uncapped nature of Kickstarter could be considered a boon or an albatross, depending on how things play out. With increased funding comes increased accountability and increased exposure to criticism. The media properties we currently enjoy are products of the industrial systems that produce them; it will be interesting to see if a change in the nature of funding precipitates any change in the content itself.

5. (Media/entertainment) industry

[5.1] Q: Are crowdfunded projects really likely to change the entertainment industry?

[5.2] Jones: They already are, aren't they? We're having a dialogue about a VM Kickstarter that raised close to $6 million—

that's a big change, and I think regardless of what happens next, the industry is going to have to adapt in some form.

[5.3] Chin: It probably is, but I don't think they're big changes that we can see right away—it is enough for us to be having this particular dialogue right now though. But I also think VM happened because all the industry players agreed to it, chief of which is Warner Bros., which may not necessarily be the case for other fan favorites out there—Bryan Fuller said a Pushing Daisies film will need at least a $10 million budget, and XFiles fans who immediately asked former executive producer Frank Spotnitz about the possibility was told that it isn't likely going to happen (note 2). More importantly, I think the big studios would want to look at

ways of taking opportunities with this which probably culminate in the criticism that Kickstarter has come under lately, for being a playing field of the big boys now instead of the darling of the independents.

[5.4] McNutt: More broadly, the answer is no: crowd funding will still represent a small percentage of projects within the entertainment industry, highprofile examples of crowd funding like Veronica Mars still depend on the industry for distribution/promotion, and there remain enough concerns over the logistics and ethics of Kickstarter and other crowdfunding platforms that any sort of widescale implementation would be both ill advised and ill received. However, I do think it changes how we conceptualize value and how we understand the audience's place within film and television production, prompting new questions we'll pose to students when considering concepts like Derek Johnson's (2013) notion of cocreativity; at the same time, however, the industry has always worked to subsume audience labor and audience contributions within its preexisting logics, and the Veronica Mars Kickstarter—while empowering on a surface level—represents a case where the industry isn't being threatened by crowd funding so much as they are evolving to work crowd funding into their existing logics. That's a change, certainly, but not a substantial one (at least not yet).

[5.5] Pebler: If you define the entertainment industry as large, established players, then probably not—certainly not in the short term. At its core, crowd funding is about just that—money—and the studios don't lack startup capital. Being too cash strapped to produce content is not a problem they have. Also, keep in mind that the people who raise millions on Kickstarter can do that because they already have mainstream media identities. Without the fertile loam of Hollywood shows and movies and music, there'd be no one famous enough to reap giant crowdfunding harvests. I've thought about it a lot, and I'm still not quite sure what Warner Bros. is hoping to gain by letting Rob Thomas crowd fund VM. It may be simply good press, which they (briefly) got. But I predict it's going to be a long, strange road for them to get this movie out, with too much accountability to the legion of people whose money they accepted. I doubt that they'll think that a paltry $5.7 million was worth it, in retrospect. That said, social media has put content producers in close proximity with their audiences. Continued evolution of that relationship is inevitable, and potentially a great thing. I've often wondered whether TV networks might find a way to start showing pilots to the public before they decide which ones to pick up for broadcast. (Challengers like Amazon are doing it already; see Thomas 2013a.) Instead of jilted fans coming together after a show has been canceled to beg or bribe the network to bring it back, we might have viewers' voices helping decide what goes on the air in the first place.

[5.6] Jones: I realize I should have been more clear on the terms I was using! I'm thinking about the entertainment industry in its broadest conception, so not just the large, established players like Warner Bros., but indie producers, fans, and to an extent the academy which studies fans and audiences. I do think that for the latter, crowdfunded projects will change the way we study audiences and how we conceptualize the terms we use, as Myles said. I think you're right, Luke, in saying Warner Bros. have a long and strange road ahead of them, and it will be interesting to see how that develops and whether any other studios decide to follow in their footsteps.

[5.7] McNutt: I also think that a lot of this depends on a sort of selfregulation: as I write this, a new video game crowdfunding experiment by Precursor Games—for a new game called Shadow of the Eternals (http://www.precursorgames.com/)—is using a selfmade platform with its own terms of use, which stipulate that "a donation cannot be canceled or returned once it has been completed, whether or not Precursor Games completes the Game or fulfils the specified reward." Online users criticized this legalese, forcing one of the developers to reiterate that they would, in fact, refund any donations should the game not be completed, but it created controversy around the project that could threaten its reputation (as the terms of use are far more legally binding than a FAQ page). I definitely agree that Warner Bros.' experience will be watched very closely by other studios before making a move—we're not the only ones watching this situation closely, and we're not the only ones who are working to conceptualize its uncertain impact on the industry.

6. Notes

1. McNutt's blog on the Veronica Mars Kickstarter can be found at http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/2013/03/15/kickstarting

veronicamarsamomentinamovement/; Pebler's blog can be found at http://www.suzannescott.com/2013/03/15/guestpost

mygiganticissuewiththeveronicamarskickstarter/; Chin's blog can be found at

http://onoffscreen.wordpress.com/2013/03/13/theveronicamarsmoviecrowdfundingorfanfundingatitsbest/; and Jones's

blog can be found at http://bethanvjones.wordpress.com/2013/03/15/fanexploitationkickstarterandveronicamars/.

2. Bryan Fuller's comments on a Pushing Daisies Kickstarter can be found at http://www.filmschoolrejects.com/features/bryan

fulleronkickstarterpushingdaisieswouldneed10million.php; Frank Spotnitz's response is available at

http://biglight.com/blog/kickstarter/.

7. Works cited

Abbott, Stacey. 2013. "A Long Time Ago We Used To Be Friends, But…" CST Online, April 12. http://cstonline.tv/longtimeago.

Braff, Zach. 2013. "Wish I Was Here." Kickstarter, April 24. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1869987317/wishiwashere1.

Chen, Perry, Yancey Strickler, and Charles Adler. 2013. "Who Is Kickstarter For?" Kickstarter, May 9.

http://www.kickstarter.com/blog/whoiskickstarterfor.

Cochran, Tanya R. 2008. "The Browncoats Are Coming! Firefly, Serenity, and Fan Activism." In Investigating "Firefly": Science Fiction on the Frontier, edited by Rhonda V. Wilcox and Tanya R. Cochran, 239–49. London: IB Tauris.

Gadino, Dylan P. 2013. "Kickstarter Abuse: Why Are You Giving Your Money to Wealthy Celebrities?" Laughspin, April 24.

http://www.laughspin.com/2013/04/29/kickstarterabusewhyareyougivingyourmoneytowealthycelebrities/.

Honan, Matt. 2013. "Beyond Kickstarter: Why One Site Shouldn't Dominate Crowdfunding." Wired, February 28.

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/02/beyondkickstarter/.

Johnson, Derek. 2013. Media Franchising: Creative License and Collaboration in the Culture Industries. New York: New York University Press.

Sandoval, Greg. 2013. "Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, and Other Digital Pioneers Sour on 'Pay What You Want' Music." The Verge, March 4. http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/4/4054634/musicspaywhatyouwantpioneerssourongivingawaysongs.

Scott, Suzanne. 2013. "My Gigantic Issue with the Veronica Mars Kickstarter." Revenge of the Fans, March 15.

http://www.suzannescott.com/2013/03/15/guestpostmygiganticissuewiththeveronicamarskickstarter/.

Sepinwall, Alan. 2013. "Exclusive: Veronica Mars Creator Rob Thomas on the Wildly Successful Kickstarter Movie Campaign."

Hitfix, March 15. http://www.hitfix.com/whatsalanwatching/exclusiveveronicamarscreatorrobthomasonthewildly

successfulkickstartermoviecampaign#YcJ0zVGB5mCVurA3.99.

Thomas, June. 2013a. "Can Amazon Transform TV?" Slate, April 22.

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/television/2013/04/amazon_tv_pilots_john_goodman_and_bebe_neuwirth_star_in_new_streaming_sitcoms.html

Thomas, Rob. 2013b. "The Veronica Mars Movie Project." Kickstarter, March 13.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/559914737/theveronicamarsmovieproject.

Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 15 (2014)

Book review

Digital labor: The Internet as playground and factory, edited by Trebor

Scholz

Stephanie Anne Brown

University of Il inois, Urbana-Champaign, Il inois, United States

[0.1] Keywords— New media; Playbour; Prosumer

Brown, Stephanie Anne. 2014. Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and

Factory, edited by Trebor Scholz [book review]. In "Fandom and/as Labor," edited by Mel Stanfill and Megan Condis, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures,

no. 15. http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2014.0551.

Trebor Scholz, ed. Digital labor: The Internet as playground and factory.

New York: Routledge, 2013, paper, $37.95 (258p) ISBN 978-0-415-89695-

5; hardcover $150 (258p) ISBN 978-0-415-89694-8.

[1] As I write this, I'm fighting, as I so often do, with my compulsive urge to check

my Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr feeds. On the one hand, I need to be productive,

but on the other hand, I feel an intense desire to find a new message in my inbox

telling me I've been retweeted, commented on, or reblogged. As Trebor Scholz and his

fellow scholars illuminate in Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory,

many of us conduct labor online for nothing in return save the affective and social

capital earned when we receive measurable attention for our content. Meanwhile, the

monetary capital for our labor is funneled into the pockets of corporate Internet

gatekeepers like Google and Verizon. The underlying question these scholars seek to

tackle is one that many scholars working in areas of fan creativity and transformative

digital authorship wrestle with: does the unpaid labor Internet users and fans put into

writing 140character tweets or producing fulllength fan films constitute exploitation?

Furthermore, is it appropriate to use a theory often equated with physically punishing

factory labor as a framework with which to study types of labor generally undertaken

by those privileged enough to have both access to the Internet and the time to spend

laboring online?

[2] In this essay collection , Trebor Scholz, associate professor of culture and media

at the New School in New York City, author of a forthcoming monograph on the history

of Orwellian economies of the social web, and the coauthor (with Laura Y. Liu) of From

Mobile Playgrounds to Sweatshop City (2010), gathers a group of prominent scholars in the areas of labor, digital networks, technology, surveillance, and critical cultural

studies including McKenzie Wark, Lisa Nakamura, Christian Fuchs, and Tiziana

Terranova, each of whom brings a "commitment to understanding the complex

implications of new forms of waged and unwaged digital labor" (1). This collection was

precipitated by the international Internet as Playground and Factory conference that

Scholz chaired at the New School in 2009. The goal of the conference (and the

resulting book) was to explore "whether Marxist labor theory, with its concept of

exploitation of labor, is still applicable to emerging modes of value capture on the

Internet" (1).

[3] The book comprises 14 chapters divided into four sections that replicate the

structure of the original conference. The first section, "The Shifting Sites of Labor

Markets," covers what Scholz considers the overarching issues in the debate, including

defining free labor and exploitation, along with other terms; discussing gamification

rhetoric, gift economies, and the fight over technical standards; and assessing the

ways that historical examples of corporations profiting from unpaid labor can

illuminate issues in the current monetization of unpaid digital labor. Andrew Ross and

Tiziana Terranova provide the book's first two chapters; their contributions act as a

solid primer on issues discussed and debated throughout the rest of the book. For

example, Ross argues that although new technologies did not create the idea of free

labor, the Internet has made it easier to capitalize on its existence. Terranova builds

on Ross's discussion of free labor by recommending the use of Maurizio Lazzarato's

term immaterial labor to describe and more fully understand the ways in which the

tremendous amount of user activity that makes the Internet monetizable to

corporations might constitute exploitation. Terranova argues that immaterial labor

severs digital labor from a set class association and frees it from any parameters of

what constitutes a knowledge worker. Even more so than free labor, immaterial labor

allows for the conceptualization of online space as a site where knowledge, art, and

cultural ideas and norms are often produced collaboratively, but with only a few

actually being compensated.

[4] These accessible opening chapters provide arguments and keywords that

subsequent contributions build on and refer back to. The second section,

"Interrogating Modes of Digital Labor," narrows the focus to specific case studies and

sites of digital labor, including fandom, blogging, and Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk

(https://www.mturk.com/mturk/), a crowdsourcing operation launched in 2005

wherein workers from around the world choose and complete discrete human

intelligence tasks. The third section, "The Violence of Participation," examines the

stakes involved in digital labor exploitation by relating online practices to forms of

physical exploitation and by illuminating the ways in which a discussion of digital

exploitation can help us to more clearly theorize other contemporary forms of labor exploitation. The book concludes with the section "Organized Networks in an Age of

Vulnerable Publics," which looks into the near future at possible alternatives to the

current capitalist and neoliberal logic of the network and tangible solutions to the

issues and critiques raised in the volume. In this section, Michel Bauwens proposes the

creation of benefitsdriven institutions, which participate in market exchanges but do

not accumulate capital. He hopes they might spur an entire countereconomy focused

on the commons and based on the ideology of peertopeer production. Fuchs points

toward commonscentric projects like Wikipedia as cells of struggle against capitalism

that could potentially be harnessed into a fullscale revolution of communication and of

society itself.

[5] It is within sections 2 and 3 that the most specific attention is paid to fans and

fan labor. Abigail De Kosnik argues in her chapter on the free labor undertaken by fans

that although fans often think of their activities as residing outside of any economic

framework, there should be methods of providing compensation for this work—or at

least potential paths to employment given by corporations who benefit from the buzz

and transformative works created by fans. In her chapter on the practice of gold

farming within the massively multiplayer online roleplaying game World of Warcraft,

Nakamura discusses the racialization of the practice and certain specific instances of

racist rhetoric within fanmade machinima created to express players' disapproval of

the practice.

[6] The essays in this collection conceptualize the landscape of digital labor as a

continuation of traditional workplace social structures while also exploring

discontinuities and intensifications of those often exploitive relations. As Scholz

explains in the introduction, "These are new forms of labor but old forms of

exploitation" (1). A key thread throughout the collection is that the Internet,

technology, and related labor are not new or neutral. Rather, they are scaffolded by

societal structures and rules. Like other societal structures, they contain both the

potential for exploitation and the potential for revolution; as Ross puts it, "Like any

other technology, they are facilitators, not causes of changing social forces" (16).

Similarly, Terranova draws our focus to what she refers to as the outernet, the social,

cultural, and economic relationships that connect the Internet to societal power

structures. She argues that characterizing cyberspace as an escape risks ignoring the

reality of how deeply the Internet is both embedded in and is a cause of the structure

of postindustrial society. This sentiment, echoed throughout the book's essays, is

summed up nicely in the final chapter by Ned Rossiter and Soenke Zehle, who argue

that "a misunderstanding perhaps exists—that new technologies call for radically new

forms of political organization" (235).

[7] Although the book seeks to apply familiar theories of labor to newer technologies, a major source of the book's tension is the focus on the exploitation and monetization

of social behavior that does not "feel, look, or smell like labor at all" (2) rather than on more familiar discussions of factory and physical labor. From Dallas Smythe's 1981

argument that television audiences are produced and sold as commodities to

advertisers to Lazzarato's conception of immaterial labor, there has long been a

blurring of the lines between work and pleasure—and in our current digital world,

everything, from Facebook to fandom, "is put to work, unfairly harnessing implicit

participation for wild profits" (2). However, the contributors to this volume differ in

their views on how zealously we ought to focus on the digital labor being performed by

largely middle to upperclass laborers. Scholz addresses this issue up front, arguing

that although the ability to call for resistance to the more capitalistic implications of

the Internet is a privileged position, the digital divide is shrinking with the growing use

of cheap cellular phones across the globe, and the degree to which participation in

digital labor is voluntary varies widely across the global and socioeconomic spectrum.

Many essays grapple with similar juxtapositions of digital labor and factory labor, with

varying levels of success. Mark Andrejevic sums up his position by explaining, "The

point of running them alongside one another is not to diminish the brutality of the

exploitation of industrial capitalism but to add depth and urgency to the critique of

exploitation in the emerging information economy" (162). Therefore, focusing on

digital labor and exploitation can shed light on the larger implications of exploitation in

the current global economy as a whole.

[8] Another issue inherent in a discussion of labor that does not always look like

labor is the question of false consciousness. As Ross argues in the opening chapter,

work for nothing has become normal because it is not experienced as work. Money has

been replaced by the "affective currency" (19) of retweets, blog comments, and page

views; the real currency goes to those who own the domains and bandwidth. As Wark

puts it, "We have to pay for the privilege of producing our own spectacle" (71). But is

it fair to say that Internet users are being exploited if they are enjoying their labor? Is

it a form of false consciousness for fans to feel satisfied running a fan site that likely

contributes to the bottom line of a major movie studio when they do not see any of

that money themselves? "The Internet is fun" seems to some of the book's scholars to

be the most dangerous ideology surrounding digital labor. Yet as Terranova argues,

"free labor isn't necessarily exploited labor" (47). Andrejevic calls for work to be done to more clearly define exploitation in free labor contexts in order to respond to

accusations that such critiques fail "to acknowledge the benefits and pleasures

received by those engaged in various forms of free labor" (154). Indeed, several

arguments throughout the book would have been bolstered by at least acknowledging

the agency and pleasure of those doing the digital laboring while still interrogating the

ways in which those users are being exploited. Wark, for example, describes World of

Warcraft as "the fantasy version of the power of the vectoral class perfected," where players "pay for the privilege of laboring to acquire objects and status that are only

artificially scarce," but he does so without taking account of any of the reasons behind

players' love of the game (71). Some essays, however, do acknowledge and attempt

to deal with this tension by bringing in relevant notions from cultural studies.

Nakamura, for example, argues that if scholars are going to take game worlds

seriously, they "must be willing to take their racial discourses, media texts, and

interpersonal conflicts seriously as well" (201). However, an absence of discussion of

agency and specific Web content is to be expected in a book focusing largely on

political economy.

[9] There are moments when the opposing side in a debate is exaggerated, distorting

the picture of whom the author is speaking to. I would expect a scholarly book on the

political economy of the Internet to speak to a target audience of relatively likeminded digital scholars interested in delving into political economy, or political economists interested in exploring the Internet as a site of labor exploitation.

However, there are points when the debate is framed in such a way that this

assumption is called into question. For instance, Ross contends that "many readers will

no doubt conclude" that the exploitation of Internet users by corporations is a tradeoff for the amenities offered by the Internet (21), when it would be fair to assume that most readers would not in fact come to that conclusion. Similarly, in her chapter on

blogging, Jodi Dean spends several paragraphs arguing that "word clouds aren't

revolutionary" (144), when those reading this book would likely similarly not make the

argument that they are. Overall, this volume provides a nice entry point for those

interested in political economy, the Internet, or both, although jarring moments such

as these gave me pause and made me wonder about the book's target audience. The

collection's intended audience of political economists likely necessitates that its only

direct discussion of fan labor is overly broad. De Kosnik takes as a starting point the

refutation of the idea that fan activity is "a waste of time at best and pathological at

worst" (99), which makes for a useful starting point in an essay directed at Marxist

academics uneasy with situating the exploitation of digital labor alongside the more

abject working conditions that are often their focus, but which is not a helpful or

convincing argument for fan studies scholars.

[10] Although Scholz and the scholars in the collection are obviously not going take a

utopian view of the Internet, they fortunately do not go so far as to disregard the

Internet as a site of possible resistance either. As Ross argues, "Technologies are not

simply weapons of class war, designed to control and deskill workers, they also harbor

the potential to eliminate wage labor, socialize production, and free up our time" (16).

The world the collection paints certainly isn't sunny, but it isn't entirely without

optimism. Scholz agrees with Henry Jenkins that a Marxist solution to the current state

of the capitalist Internet is not to "live in the woods, eating acorns and lizards" (8), but instead to come up with tangible steps toward a more open and free version of the

Internet. The solution could be to more fairly compensate labor within the current

system, as De Kosnik suggests in her discussion of fan labor; to create a communist

Internet countereconomy, as Bauwens champions; to do away with the idea of

intellectual property, as Wark suggests; or to lead a revolution to overhaul society, as

Fuchs argues, noting that "a communist Internet requires a communist society" (222).

Whether these solutions are possible or even feasible is up for debate, but at least

Scholz and the essayists in his collection are looking for solutions.

Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 15 (2014)

Book review

Cognitive capitalism, education, and digital labor, edited by Michael A.

Peters and Ergin Bulut

Simone Becque

Southern Il inois University, Carbondale, Il inois, United States

[0.1] Keywords— Biopolitics; Cognitive capitalism; Digital labor; Education

Becque, Simone. 2013. Cognitive Capitalism, Education, and Digital Labor, edited by

Michael A. Peters and Ergin Bulut [book review]. In "Fandom and/as Labor," edited

by Mel Stanfill and Megan Condis, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures,

no. 15. http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2014.0554.

Michael A. Peters and Ergin Bulut, editors. 2011. Cognitive capitalism,

education, and digital labor. New York: Peter Lang, 2011. $38.95 (341p)

ISBN 978-1-4331-0981-2.

[1] As I sit to write this review, the lead story in the local paper is about the

elementary school board's plan to sell advertising space in the schools. Placement of

ads include locations such as the ball fields, gymnasium, and school entrances. This

single example shows the prescience of the intersection of education and capitalism

discussed in the essay collection Cognitive Capitalism, Education, and Digital Labor,

edited by Michael A. Peters and Ergin Bulut. Cognitive capitalism is a response to

earlier conceptualizations of capitalism: mercantile and industrial. In this newest

phase, accumulation focuses on ephemeral or immaterial objects, such as an idea in

the form of a patent. The editors have this to say about how cognitive capitalism and

digital labor link to education: "in this environment, public universities, community and

schools become the public infrastructure for knowledge capitalism" (xxxii). In other

words, these educational systems are linked to an economy dominated by the

production of knowledge. These essays explore the connections between cognitive

capitalism, education, and digital labor. Although the book does not specifically deal

with fandom issues, I do think the issues raised by the individual essays can be of use

to fans and fan scholars, primarily because of the way in which fandom intersects with

an economy of ideas. In an economy of ideas, all spaces are commercialized, and so

the selling of advertising space in schools and product placement in movies become

issues for all of us to think about.

[2] The editors have arranged the essays into two groups: the first four tackle the theoretical foundations of immaterial labor, and the next 11 essays focus on specific

examples relating to education and labor with regard to cognitive capitalism. The

authors come from different disciplines—education, cultural studies, mass

communications, and sociology, to name a few—and the wide variety of essays in the

collection reflects this interdisciplinarity. Although the essays lean more to practice

than theory, overall, the collection comes across as a balanced take on the issues at

hand. The book begins with an engaging essay from luminary scholar Antonio Negri,

"The Labor of the Multitude and Fabric of Biopolitics," which sets the tone for the

essays that follow. In the essay, he argues for the postmodern consideration of

multiplicity; capital cannot collapse identities as it once did (i.e., to a class or a set of

people), so we must instead contend with multiple identities. In my view, the essays

take on this challenge and offer different understandings of a postmodern

consideration of multiplicity.

[3] Perhaps the most provocative statement in the collection of essays comes in

Jonathan Beller's essay, "Cognitive Capitalist Pedagogy and Its Discontents." Beller

writes: "Today we can more easily imagine the death of the planet than we can the

end of capitalism" (131). For Beller, the power structures of production depend on this

inability to imagine the end of capitalism. However, this formulation struck a chord for

me; I think this imaginary failing is reflected in our current media culture. One needs

only to glance at the spate of television shows, books, and movies that are fascinated

with imagining an end to civilization as we know it — Revolution (2012–present), the Hunger Games series (books published beginning 2008, films released beginning

2012), World War Z (2013), and the Divergent series (books published beginning

2011, films released beginning 2014), just to name a few. However, most of these

imaginings maintain the spirit of capitalism and its power structures. Often, of course,

these stories exaggerate power structures to help enhance the drama, as in The

Hunger Games or in the 2013 film Elysium. Although I am not denying the dramatic

power of the dystopian narrative, it can also be difficult to imagine a way outside of

the genre's inherited structures.

[4] As a media studies scholar, I found the collection's emphasis on the creative

economy and on social media to be a refreshing approach to the idea of digital labor.

Indeed, the definition of cognitive capitalism offered in the introductory essay includes

the importance of Web 2.0 technologies. The essay by Mark Coté and Jennifer Pybus,

"Learning to Immaterial Labour 2.0: Facebook and Social Networks," takes on a

specific example of Web 2.0 technology, Facebook, in order to examine the free labor

of users that such sites require from their participants. This essay and several others

in the collection offer further examination of Foucault's conceptualization of biopower

and biopolitics. For Foucault, biopower and biopolitics are related concepts that refer to

the managing of populations—their physical bodies, and hence the prefix bio—by those in political power. The mechanisms of power commonly conceptualized by Foucault

and others in regard to biopower are traditionally thought of as institutions, such as

hospitals, health care, and other governmental regulatory groups. Coté and Pybus use

a less physical idea of biopower and investigate the ways by which social media sites

like Facebook can be used to harness the biopower toward collective action while at

the same time recognizing the commodified nature of the platforms that are enabling

some collective movements. To put it another way, if you heard about the movement

on Facebook, does that mean there's already something commodified about its goals?

Or are social media sites, such as Facebook, places for action, change, and a gathering

of biopower—where a company just happens to make money on the side? Coté and

Pybus conclude their essay by emphasizing the possible liberating nature of social

media sites. We have seen hints of the power of digital technologies in organizing, with

events such the Arab Spring. From my perspective, and with my interest in media

studies and fandom, I can't help but think of the possibilities of this line of thinking

with regard to immaterial labor and fandom. For example, how might social media

chatter about a television episode influence the perceived value of the show for a

network?

[5] Also related to the issue of education and social media is Michael A. Peters's

"Algorithmic Capitalism and Educational Futures," which gets at the issue of the

"googlization of education" (255) and raises questions about the intersections among

Google's dominance, their algorithms, and the organization of knowledge. This

googlization, Peters implies, has lead to a greater centralization of the knowledge

economy than has previously existed. Furthermore, when so much of our information

is stored in the realm of cybernetic capitalism, what does this mean in regard to

information ownership? Who owns the information stored on the cloud? Facebook, for

example, has faced numerous problems relating to user privacy and ownership of

digital materials. In another example, Google has recently started a program linking

items users have liked on the Web and uses people's images and names to

recommend those items to others during specific search queries. As the amount of

information continues to grow exponentially, this kind of knowledge organization and

presentation is very important.

[6] Although I find the discussions brought up in the collection thoughtprovoking, I

had been hoping that one of the essays might grapple more directly with the idea of

fan labor as it relates to education. The closest would be Toby Miller's essay, "For Fun,

for Profit, for Empire: The University and Electronic Games," which discusses the

relationship between universities and the Pentagon through academic journals and

institutes that use research to test recruiting and training of members of the public as

potential military recruits. However, with regard to fan labor, for example, what do we

make of the labor performed by Wikipedia editors? Although academics are often quick to dismiss the site, it represents the organization of knowledge in a Web 2.0 culture as

well as the culmination of thousands of hours of work by individuals. Wikipedia is just

one instance of fan labor; others deserve further consideration. For example, the

success of E. L. James's Fifty Shades of Grey (2012) and its sequels, which originally

started as Twilight fan fiction, began as free fan labor and then turned a profit.

Recently, Amazon has started Kindle Worlds, an attempt to monetize fan fiction stories

and avoid legal issues by acquiring licenses. Although the stakes for military training

and gaming seem higher for education than those posed by fan labor, understanding

both is important for our digital future.

[7] As a graduate student teaching and working at a state school in a state with

budget problems, I have witnessed the intersection of student learning and capitalism.

The results, which turn students into commodities to be processed through a system

at maximum value, are occasionally less than stellar. Certainly administrators and

faculty do not always intend to approach students as commodities, but such an

approach highlights the contradictions in a knowledge system that is also required to

support itself financially. As Ergin Bulut states in his essay on the creative economy,

"students and academics' work are becoming objects of quantification, surveillance

and standardization; payments are becoming related to performance" (161). This

volume succeeds in its goal of illuminating the links between this new form of

capitalism and education, which has ramifications for young scholars like me hoping to

inherit the keys to the academic kingdom.

[8] However, as someone without an extensive background in Marxist theory, I

occasionally found the essays challenging, especially the first four focusing on

theoretical underpinnings. Although I think the issues explicated in these essays are

important reading for those in the field of education, they are also perhaps not for the

uninitiated. It would probably not be an ideal volume for beginning students but better

for graduate students and scholars. As the creative economy continues to grow, social

media technologies continue to develop, and capitalism continues to reign,

understanding this new era of capitalism will be useful for everyone. These questions

will also continue to be relevant for fans and fan scholars as the economy of ideas

continues to become more commercialized.

Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 15 (2014)

Book review

Gaga feminism: Sex, gender, and the end of normal, by J. Jack Halberstam

Anne Kustritz

University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands

[0.1] Keywords— Lady Gaga; Popular culture; Queer theory

Kustritz, Anne. 2014. Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal, by J.

Jack Halberstam [book review]. In "Fandom and/as Labor," edited by Mel Stanfill

and Megan Condis, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 15.

http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2014.0560.

J. Jack Halberstam. Gaga feminism: Sex, gender, and the end of normal.

Boston: Beacon, 2012, hardcover, $26.95 (192p) ISBN 978-0807010983.

[1] It's an easy mistake to make, but Gaga Feminism by J. Jack Halberstam is not

about Lady Gaga. Instead, it might best be considered the populist companion text to

his previous book, The Queer Art of Failure (2011). Much of Halberstam's early work

centered on drag kings, female masculinity, butch identity, and rural queers, using

these largely overlooked subjectivities to challenge the limitations of queer theory and

construct theoretical frameworks like "queer time" to make sense of

nonhomonormative lives. These concerns have not disappeared, but in Halberstam's

recent work, popular culture takes center stage. Thus The Queer Art of Failure argues

for creating accessible scholarship that steals from the academy to benefit "life's

losers," those systematically relegated to failure by capitalism and social normativity.

To do so, Halberstam explores what he terms the "silly archive" of popular culture,

especially animation, both because of its relevance to many people's everyday cultural

life and because he finds there a kind of anarchic, childish ability to forget or refuse

understanding of social systems and thereby to invent new modes of life unhampered

by adults' learned social assumptions. Yet The Queer Art of Failure itself is highly

theoretical, engaged in a direct rebuttal, or at least a strong modification, of queer

theory's negative turn, argued most prominently in Lee Edelman's No Future (2004).

Even its readings of cartoons serve largely academic ends, and its rallying cry largely

urges academics to think beyond the normative career path and disciplinary

boundaries of the university.

[2] In Gaga Feminism, Halberstam attempts to put the theoretical insights and social prescriptions of The Queer Art of Failure into action, directly addressing a broader

public audience and centering on questions of popular culture and politics rather than

academic debates. He therefore approaches the same perilous crossroads of academic

and popular audiences, popular culture and academic theory, where fan scholars often

work. Gaga Feminism can thereby become a good addition to fan scholars' theoretical

tool kit, offering timely and accessible approaches to popular culture, gender,

sexuality, and public scholarship, as these themes repeatedly surface in fan studies.

The book builds a model for public political engagement using the metaphor of Lady

Gaga, although often in tension with the specific actions and positions taken by the

actual person of Lady Gaga. Rather, what Halberstam identifies as useful in the Lady

Gaga phenomenon is, first, her ability to speak directly to a new generation of

"women," broadly defined, and second, her mindbending propensity to twist

expectations: to turn meat into dresses, an awards show into performance art,

sexploitation into feminism—to generally take the assumptions of normal life and go

gaga.

[3] The preface, introduction, and first chapter of Gaga Feminism outline a tentative

definition of gaga feminism and situate it within modern politics as "the feminism

(pheminism?) of the phony, the unreal, and the speculative," engaged not in secondwave "coming to consciousness" as women but in unbecoming women in the wake of destabilizations of the gender system wrought by the visibility of trans people, the

economic collapse, and alternate family structures (xii). Halberstam frames the project

as a timely form of feminism for postcapitalism. He then goes on to outline the book's

central paradox: that recent demographic transformations such as the rise of divorce,

women's entrance into higher education and the workforce, and the increased visibility

of gay, lesbian, and trans people should help us all rethink normative standards for a

successful life path and for satisfactory family and living arrangements. Yet often these

very transformations increase dissatisfaction with heteronormative marriage and

nonetheless reinforce and reinvest in marriage's hegemony, despite its acknowledged

flaws. At this juncture, Halberstam takes up the figure of the preenculturated child

who has not yet internalized or understood social hierarchies and categories, nor the

shame of living outside their boundaries, and so engages in fanciful and imaginative

improvisation to make sense of the unpredictable world. In the childish ability to

accept and accommodate all human variation, and to constantly question accepted

common sense, Halberstam sees a potential model for retraining adults in a practice of

critical nonsense that refuses to yield to the authority of social discipline. The first

chapter ends with a list of five tenets for gaga feminism: first, discard "basic

assumptions about people, bodies, and desires"; second, "transformation is inevitable"

but is often invisible in everyday life; third, "think counterintuitively, act accordingly";

fourth, "practice creative nonbelieving," because Halberstam ties the political

entrenchment of religion to the major historical disasters of gender and sexuality

oppression; and fifth, gaga feminism requires a bold, abrasive refusal of shame and an

embrace of the outrageous (27–29).

[4] Chapters 2 through 4 deal with case studies organized by gender, sexuality, and

marriage. Chapter 2, "Gaga Genders," frames its argument with a discussion of the

media frenzy surrounding Thomas Beatie, who was billed as the first pregnant man.

Halberstam reminds readers that trans men had babies before 2007 without alerting

the media, but he continues to tease apart a variation of the theme outlined in the

introduction: given the existence of artificial insemination, why have so few social

gender norms surrounding reproduction and parenthood changed? Via feminist scholar

Shulamith Firestone, Halberstam presents a vision of a future free from any theoretical

connection between biology, gender, reproduction, and parenthood roles. Halberstam

skewers romantic comedies like The Switch (2010) and The Backup Plan (2010), in

which women utilize alternative reproduction technologies only to nonetheless be

reincorporated by the narrative happilyeverafter of heterosexual monogamy. He then

champions the radical possibilities raised by butch fatherhood, as distinguished from

the more mediafriendly "two daddies" or "two mommies" framework. Reading against The Kids Are All Right (2010), Halberstam argues that butchfemme parents present

"authority without patriarchy" and "gender polarity without compulsory

heterosexuality," providing their children an education in the "arbitrariness of all

gender roles" (58). From this basis, Halberstam argues that the butchfemme dynamic

can denaturalize heterosexuality by offering an alternative that is just as—if not more

—compelling, equitable, and sexy.

[5] In chapter 3, "Gaga Sexualities: The End of Normal," Halberstam explores sexual

fixity versus fluidity over a life span and questions how the combined challenges of

divorce and straight men's persistent preference for younger women as partners might

lead some straight women to seek lesbians or trans men as partners. Halberstam

questions the universality of the gay/straight binary and calls attention to popular

press reports that women's desires are commonly flexible. He concludes by suggesting

that straight men might learn from butch masculinity to regard gender identity as

constructed, and, as it is in the animated 2009 film Fantastic Mr. Fox, constantly

contingent and subject to transformation.

[6] Chapter 4 lays out Halberstam's critique of the mainstream gay and lesbian rights

movement's positioning of gay marriage as the preeminent political priority. Under five

headings, Halberstam points out that the marriage push is not a universal priority

among queer people. First, he states that "reactive politics are weak politics," arguing

that gay marriage only became central because of rightwing opposition (104).

Second, under the dictum "inclusion maintains the status quo," he questions

marriage's deliberate decoupling from a broader civil rights agenda, indicating that marriage will only benefit gays and lesbians who already benefit from race and class

privilege (104). Third, examining the bundle of health care and parental rights

wrapped into marriage, Halberstam asserts that "rights should not be marriagedependent" (108). Fourth, arguing that "alternative intimacies are not served,"

Halberstam explores the many models for allocating rights, responsibilities, and

resources that people might devise if freed from the hegemony of the marriage

system, allowing people to share health care, child rearing, and homes in any way

they see fit (109). Finally, Halberstam argues that "marriage is an oppressive

ideology," noting that a radical critique of marriage has been central to the history of

feminism, making it "ironic to see marriage as an unquestioned good and a worthy

goal in a gay imaginary" (111–12). He then reviews the many romantic comedies that

excoriate marriage as a trap for both genders and then uses that dissatisfaction as

merely an illusory obstacle for the happy couple to overcome on their inevitable path

to wedded bliss. He argues that this outcome sutures the fissures within marriage

caused by demographic shifts and the legacies of feminism, ideologically insisting that

despite a changing world, marriage must remain sacrosanct. For Halberstam, gay

marriage rhetorically strengthens marriage just when other social changes might have

led to its ultimate decline and transformation.

[7] Chapter 5, "Gaga Manifesto," sums up Halberstam's intention to create a feminist

platform for the contemporary world, wracked by uncertainty and danger, by

championing not a return to safety but instead further commitment to instability,

crisis, and inventive new dreams emerging from the ruins of business as usual. He

finds shared purpose with the Occupy movement (which began in 2011), anarchy as

imagined by the Invisible Committee, and Lady Gaga's live performances. Returning to

formulations from The Queer Art of Failure and The Wire (2002–8), Halberstam

explains that by recognizing the ways the social game is rigged in favor of the

powerful, "gaga feminism is for the failures, the losers, those for whom the price of

success is too high"; the inevitability of defeat thereby lends itself to bold action under

the principle that if you're going to lose, then lose big—lose fabulously (147).

Halberstam therefore calls for a process of social unlearning inspired by the anarchy of

children and for alternative models of family. He advocates an ethos of flexibility,

improvisation, and inclusivity in solidarity with multiple global revolutions. As he

began, Halberstam ends by reminding readers that this book is not about Lady Gaga

and that "what is gaga today will be something else entirely tomorrow," requiring that

gaga feminism constantly reinvent itself to remain just at the edge of what is currently

unnamable at the horizon of a queer new future (149).

[8] Although Gaga Feminism's greatest strengths are its personal approach,

engaging writing style, commitment to popular culture, and unabashed appeal to

general audiences, these very characteristics often undercut its coherence and

persuasiveness. Gaga Feminism often seems like only the punch line to a larger story,

or a sequence of coded references for which The Queer Art of Failure serves as the

decoder ring. This sense of déjà vu is compounded by the fact that many of the

examples and close readings in Gaga Feminism were first performed in The Queer Art

of Failure. When it is read in isolation, popular audiences may find aspects of Gaga

Feminism inspiring, exciting, and relevant, but it is also likely that full understanding

of crucial sections of Gaga Feminism hinges on having previously read The Queer Art

of Failure. Further, although the introduction decries earlier generations of feminists'

refusal to engage with contemporary popular culture and figures that contemporary

young women find inspiring, such as Lady Gaga and Beyoncé, Gaga Feminism

ultimately finds very little to celebrate in the person of Lady Gaga apart from the

music video for "Telephone" (2009) and a metaphorical spirit of inventiveness. This

selectiveness and critical rejection of so many staples of popular films, although

perhaps well deserved, may also alienate precisely that popular audience that the

book originally targeted by centralizing Gaga and the popular pleasures she

represents.

[9] Likewise, the fact that many of the chapters are framed by personal anecdotes

makes Gaga Feminism an enjoyable read. Yet it also raises the specter of

nongeneralizability; because Halberstam stages each argument through the lens of his

own experience, readers may wonder how many of these insights are limited to his

own life and are not applicable to other people's. This limitation becomes particularly

evident when Halberstam explains his theory that unenculturated children's anarchic

subjectivities allow them to construct unexpected and novel ways of inclusively

understanding human variation, as represented by his own experience being

accommodated into the sex/gender system as a "boygirl" by his partner's children and

their friends. He explicitly states that this formulation acknowledges the danger in

using children as a political cipher of innocence, but one might also easily imagine that

encounter going very differently with a different group of children. Would a group of

cruel children who exclude a gendervariant playmate prompt us to reconsider the

entire politics of unlearning that Halberstam advocates? Perhaps not, but that

possibility also calls into question this founding metaphor of childish progressive

anarchy in a space sealed off from the taint of adult culture and shame.

[10] Of similar theoretical concern is the way that Halberstam's centering of butch

identity stigmatizes and erases other social and sexual possibilities. Butch identity

hardly holds institutional or social sway, and in that sense the description of political

and social possibilities tied to butch subjectivities is welcome and necessary. However,

it is unfortunate that these moments often occur at the expense of other often

sidelined sexual and gender subject positions. By constantly returning only to butch

identities and butchfemme relationships as the most important engines of social

change and possibility, Halberstam undermines solidarity with numerous other life

paths, embodiments, and relationships. This particularly becomes an issue in chapter

2, when Halberstam evacuates any political or social utility from gay and lesbian

parenting that follows a samegender model as "gay daddies or lesbian moms."

Although these styles are more often portrayed in the media than butch characters,

and in that sense could be argued to have been reincorporated into the system, that

does not mean such arrangements cannot teach straight couples or other samesex

couples something worthwhile about how gender could function differently. Capitalism,

as the saying goes, sells everything, including the rope for its own repeated ritual

hanging; if we insist on finding political utility only in things that can't be sold by

Hollywood, we will never do politics again. Halberstam acknowledges this in most of

the book as he finds such productive pleasures in Pixar and Gaga.

[11] Further, the entire book commits a rather curious erasure of bisexuality, a term

that appears only twice: once in the editors' foreword and once in a quotation from

another scholar. Halberstam includes the requisite B in LGBT, but when he actually

spells out the identities of nonheteronormative people, he writes only "gay, lesbian,

and trans people," leaving bisexual unstated. This is especially ironic because bisexual most closely describes Gaga's own sexuality, so its lack is keenly felt in a book bearing

her name. One can only speculate about this conspicuous absence and wonder how

the discussions of straight, gay, lesbian, and trans lives would have been complicated

or further elucidated had Halberstam also addressed bisexuality. This suppression of

bisexuality becomes especially problematic in chapter 3, when Halberstam seems

almost to invent the concept of bisexuality from scratch in his thorough description of

people who desire more than one gender or whose desires fluctuate over their life

span; yet he does this without ever actually using or engaging with the word bisexual.

In part this elision becomes a critical part of the argument, as Halberstam argues that

men's sexuality is fixed while women's is fluid, with the exception of the stone butch.

Yet this dichotomy is only possible precisely by ignoring bisexual men and men who

identify as gay or straight but have sex with both men and women. Rather than

critique the quasiscientific foundations of the popular press study that asserted that

men's arousal follows a rigidly homohetero binary, Halberstam accepts that assertion

and reinforces the biphobic notion that real bisexuality is a myth.

[12] Thus, in sum, Gaga Feminism successfully addresses a popular audience in tone

and structure; yet in doing so, it often undercuts the depth of its arguments and may

seem unsatisfying to academic audiences already familiar with Halberstam's other

works. However, scholarly work suited to pressing political issues and responsive to

the challenges of average people's lives remains a worthwhile goal, and Gaga

Feminism may offer lessons and inspiration to fan scholars who likewise seek to

engage a hybrid audience of academics and fans. Gaga Feminism may motivate other academics to go gaga and reimagine how theory can serve the public, and how

academic work might be repurposed to engage with the everyday politics of modern

life.

Document Outline

Transformative Works and Cultures, special issue: Fandom and/as labor, No. 15 (March 15, 2014)

Editorial

Mel Stanfill & Megan Condis, Fandom and/as labor