A new issue of Transformative Works and Cultures is up. I've only read/skimmed a few of the articles so far, but the one I was most drawn to is Suzanne Scott's "Repackaging fan culture: the regifting of ancillary content models." In her definition:
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.