Ancillary content models, which are typically constructed around television series with cult or fannish appeal and located on the show's official (network-sponsored) Web site, offer audiences a glut of "free" narrative and behind-the-scenes content in the form of Webisodes, Web comics, blogs, video blogs, episodic podcasts, and so on (note 1). Positioned precariously between official/commercial transmedia storytelling systems (Jenkins 2006:93–130) and the unofficial/gifted exchange of texts within fandom, ancillary content models downplay their commercial infrastructure by adopting the guise of a gift economy, vocally claiming that their goal is simply to give fans more—more "free" content, more access to the show's creative team. The rhetoric of gifting that accompanies ancillary content models, and the accompanying drive to create a community founded on this "gifted" content, is arguably more concerned with creating alternative revenue streams for the failing commercial model of television than it is with fostering a fan community or encouraging fan practices. Grappling with the growing problem of time-shifting, ancillary content models create a "digital enclosure" (Andrejevic 2007:2–3) within which they can carefully cultivate and monitor an alternative, "official" fan community whose participatory value is measured by its consumption of advertisement-laced ancillary content.
Sounds grim, right? And let's face it, some of these sites are pretty grim. Last spring, I stumbled across an "official fan site" for The Sarah Connor Chronicles, hosted on Fox Television's website but outsourced to some specialized "official fan site in a box" web company whose name I've forgotten. It was all very modular -- here's your episode recaps, here's your character guide, here's your discussion boards, here's your wiki, here's where you can post your fan fiction and fan videos. The whole thing looked pretty ugly, and felt like something of a fannish ghost town. There were people there, but it didn't seem particularly thriving or vibrant, as communities go.
Honestly, it came across less as an attempt at corporate control and cooptation of fan culture than, I don't know, some kind of network concept of keeping up with the Joneses -- a response to an anticipated, or at least optimistically hoped for, fan demand for a playground, and a sort of "well, everybody else is doing it, so I guess we should have something too." Like how corporations suddenly decided that they needed to set up shop in Second Life, or be on Facebook or Twitter.
The thing is, how do we account for the fans who do participate in these official fan sites, who do take part in the official contests? I'm not sure that Scott's account leaves much room to regard them as anything other than dupes of the corporate powers that be, at best hapless isolated fans who haven't found the authentic, autonomous, fan-created spaces & cultures and are too young or naive to realize that they're not getting the real thing but rather a manipulative simulation.
But outside of these "ancillary content models" there are tons of fans who seek out some kind of interaction or engagement or common space with the corporate and creative powers that be -- through cons, and the blogs of showrunners and producers and writers, and Twitter, and other proliferating means. That's certainly not everyone's cup of tea, but it's not exactly false consciousness either, and it's common in types of fandom where there's less of a gulf and more of a continuum between "fan" and "pro/PTB" like comics and science fiction books.
So I'd rather complicate the "threat or menace?" approach to official fan sites and related corporate close encounters of the fannish kind, or at least restore an account of fans' myriad agency, pleasures, and investments in those spaces and interactions.
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chasethestars
chasethestars
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("What's a feral fan?" "Someone who doesn't realize they're supposed to put up with your bullshit.")
Disclaimer: I like Suzanne Scott's work, and the kinds of questions she raises. It's mostly the stuff I like that I tend to want to argue with.
...now that I have read it, I am troubled by some of what's going on there. As in, the substantial body of literature on gifting and informal economic transactions that she's overlooking to go with this "white man keeping" metaphor.
To some extent, we can characterize online female fan communities as the Indians in this Hydean analogy, and the media producers pushing these ancillary content models as the "white man keepers" of online fan culture who have failed to understand that it is the reciprocity and free circulation of fan works within female fan communities that identifies them as communities.
Um. That's kind of loaded language there, and the thing where female fandom (inasmuch as such a thing exists) is being consciously identified with native peoples, that thing makes me uncomfortable. I think it's problematic to compare the experience of media products not being tailored to one's preferences (which can certainly be a legitimate problem, don't get me wrong) to, you know, centuries of genocide and cultural marginalization.
And...there are limits to how willing I am to take apart, in public, an article written in another discipline. But that part stuck out for me.
Edited 2009-09-16 12:50 am (UTC)
(Oh, and as I read further, there is much to love in the interview Zvi did with Denise and Mark. Hee.)
Edited 2009-09-16 04:26 am (UTC)
(I only skimmed the interview, as I quickly chalked it up to a Dreamwidth advertorial.)
Potlatch it's not, in that potlatch involves real economic cost to the giver(s) of gifts, and in fandom the real-world/currency based economic cost of gift provision is rarely all that much. Which is in contrast to some other areas of subcultural behavior (I've seen gift exchanges in the SCA which really do come at substantial economic cost to the giver, never mind the ritual exchanges of handmade textiles which I and various people I know engage in -- I could get a good paper out of the exchanges that go on in my mother's rural book club). That doesn't make the emotional cost any less significant, it just means that it's not at all straightforward to couple the "fandom gift economy" model to the cash economy.
Which I think is part of the argument Scott's trying to get over, actually -- but she dresses it differently than I would. I'm not sure how much of that is that we're coming from two different places in the social sciences spectrum.
(No, I'm not going to write it, I'm on the hook for a book review, getting four other book reviews out of contributors, and an academic paper this year, never mind the research grant I've got to write in the next two weeks. Or the, er, handmade holiday gifts which must be completed by the end of December to signify to various friends and relatives that I place a high value on our interpersonal relationships! But someone should write it. That would be a good paper!)
Please. I wish to read this NOW. Lots.
(Maybe we could get Dr. Ogas to write it? )
I think there are a lot of parallels. There really isn't much difference between you writing smut and my stepmother-in-law making peach jam, in terms of what those acts do for you in your respective social structures.
Which is not to say I don't think there's an argument there, but I am reminded by recent discussions that fandom encompasses more than simply LJ-based media fans, and there are certainly plenty of fannish spaces where male fans share their creativity for the joy of sharing their creativity.
So... yeah. Color me not entirely convinced.
It reminds me a bit of something that started to bother me about Rebecca Tushnet's testimony supporting a DMCA exemption on behalf of vidders and similar remix artists, when she talked about the anti-circumvention provisions as "essentially a digital literacy test and a digital poll tax imposed on fair use" -- analogizing to voter disenfranchisement tactics and laws that were primarily directed at black people.
I'm late to this conversation (that's what I get for going into dissertation hermit mode), but I'm happy to have stumbled across it. To offer a little context, in my own defense, this was intended to be a short symposium piece that (clearly) needs to be expanded on in order to address tease out some of the incredibly valid critiques above. There simply wasn't the space in a 3000 word piece to get into some of these intensely problematic definitions (for starters, what is "fandom" nowadays?).
I always hold a liminal position between utopian and dystopian views of convergence culture's relationship to fandom. I know it typically comes off as the latter, but I'm an avid consumer of the content I'm critiquing here. I think you're absolutely right that this is a case of "keeping up with the Joneses," and that is what's most interesting to me. Are the fans inhabiting these "official" fandoms the new Joneses? How are the Joneses (or fandom as we traditionally conceive it) responding to this encroachment? Do I think fans who exclusively traffic these ancillary content models are dupes? Not at all. In fact, if anything, equal blame has to be laid at fandom's feet, as it insulates itself against the industry, often at new fans' expense. Obviously, the space wasn't there to address any of this in the article, but I really do appreciate all the comments- food for thought when it comes to revising this for the dissertation!
For the record, Hyde's discussion of "Indian Givers" and "White Man Keepers" is framed in anthropological terms, I'm using it metaphorically here, primarily tied to the rhetoric that surrounded the FanLib debacle (which was very much framed as a "the natives are restless" sort of uprising, for better or for worse).
-Suzanne
PS: If I'm feral, does that make "official" fans housebroken? ;)