Fan Culture @ Swarthmore

Imagine my surprise when I heard a pretty in-depth commentary on the commodification of user-generated content while watching the latest episode of South Park. (I tried to get a clip of this but was only able to find a link to the whole episode, so if you want to watch it click and go the last one. You can also go to 19:25 mins into it and find the clip). Anyway, the boys need to make a lot of money so they try to create a hit YouTube video, and succeed in doing so, only to find out that it doesn’t actually pay. Most episodes end with one of the characters having learned a valuable lesson and sharing it, a parody of the cheesy moralism found in many TV shows. After watching this clip like 20 times, I was able to transcribe it:

“You see, I’ve learned something today. We thought that we could make money on the Internet, but, while the Internet is new and exciting for creative people, it hasn’t matured as a distribution mechanism to the extent that one should trade real and immediate opportunities for income for the promise of future online revenue. It will be a few years before digital distribution of media on the Internet can be monetized to an extent that necessitates content producers to forgo their fair value and more traditional media.”

This seems to me to tie in to a lot of the things we’ve been studying, particularly Julie Levin Russo’s SkewTube presentation. She asks how user production might become more commodifiable in the future, and whether commercial production is the most legitimate type of production. To that last question, she answers with an unequivocal “no”; the boy in South Park (Kyle) however, suggests that commercial production is the most legitimate and desirable mode of production and that it would be best to hold off until user-generated content can be more profitable. I’d like to hear what everyone thinks about this, and if Kyle’s speech can be connected to other material we’ve been studying.

Fan Artifact Presentation: Week 11

The Sports Anti-Fan, Rivalries and YouTube

Steve Wolf and Loretta Gary

Red Sox Suck!

Red Sox vs. Yankees Lean Back Parody

Sports in general are filled with different rivalries. As Theodoropoulou points out in her essay, these rivalries can stem from various sources, but the most important factors in a rivalry are that the two teams are “opposing threats” and that the fans of each team share mutual feelings of “fear, admiration, respect, and envy” of each other. Right now, one of the longest lasting and most discussed rivalries is between the baseball teams the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees. This particular rivalry is interesting because the dominating side of the rivalry has shifted recently. The New York Yankees have been the most historically successful team in Major League Baseball while the Red Sox were historically inept teams. However, during the past few years, the Red Sox have won two championships in 2004 and 2007, while the Yankees have struggled, by their standards, and have had an 8 year title drought. While Yankees fans used to patronize Red Sox fans with chants such as “1918!” (the last year before 2004 that the Red Sox won the World Series) now, Red Sox fans have the upper hand in terms of recent success.

Another aspect of sports rivalries that Theodoropoulou discusses is the “game” of mocking each other’s teams. Similar to her example of Tom and Aspa’s argument (322), ESPN columnist Bill Simmons an avid Red Sox fan has a running gag in his podcast where he calls up his friend, who is a Yankees fan, and asks “Are you worried yet?” The openness about his fandom has varying results. First, there are similarities between the Red Sox-Yankees and the Olympiakos-Panathinaikos rivalries mentioned in Theodorpoulou’s essay. But also, as a columnist for one of the most popular sports websites (ESPN.com), Simmons garners a national audience, and his writing style, which clearly reveals his Red Sox fan status, leads to his ability to blur the line between being a media producer and being a fan. As a sports fan, Steve had some background knowledge of the Red Sox-Yankees rivalry, such as the curse of the Bambino, but a large part of his knowledge of the rivalry is derived from Simmons’ columns. Because of his national following, Simmons has developed some anti-fans of his own which then causes his anti-fans to become anti-fans of Simmons’ cherished fan objects. For example, during the last Super Bowl, the New York Giants played the New England Patriots. Although the Giants are one of the rivals of our favorite football team, the Philadelphia Eagles, Steve found himself cheering for the Giants. The biggest reason was because the Patriots were undefeated and heavily favored, but partly because Simmons’s article would be more interesting if his team lost rather than if they won.

The clips we’re focusing on showcase the role of YouTube as a venue for anti-fans to broadcast their opinions and participate in discussions with other fans, which Theodoropoulou describes as “antagonistic but also playful and teasing” (323). There are hundreds of videos not only about why a certain sport team sucks but there are also many response videos and comments from the rival fans explaining why the opposing team is worse. Two of the videos we selected support opposing teams the Red Sox and the Yankees. Both videos use image montages and mock the other team and their fans while bolstering support of their own team. This “game” of YouTube anti-fan postings is just another example of how the fans are aware of and perform their anti-fan identity. The “Lean Back Parody” video is especially interesting because it showcases the tradition of creating songs and chants that mock the other team and fans.

Finally, we’ve included a few other videos as well to highlight the wide variety of anti-fan activity through YouTube. Both videos come from YouTube users who have made multiple videos supporting their team while attacking others creating numerous anti-fans of themselves. The first is a short animation highlighting the Eagles dominance over the Cowboys. The other is a video blog entry in which the anti-fan explains why he hates Dallas Cowboys fans.

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On a different note, we also thought the following dialog between Howard Stern’s boss, Pig Vomit, and a media consumer researcher adds another perspective on the role of the anti-fan in other fandoms. Quote from Private Parts (Betty Thomas, 1997):

Researcher: The average radio listener listens for eighteen minutes a day. The average Howard Stern fan listens for – are you ready for this? – an hour and twenty minutes.
Pig Vomit: How could this be?
Researcher: Answer most commonly given: “I want to see what he’ll say next.”
Pig Vomit: All right, fine. But what about the people who hate Stern?
Researcher: Good point. The average Stern hater listens for two and a half hours a day.
Pig Vomit: But… if they hate him, why do they listen?
Researcher: Most common answer: “I want to see what he’ll say next.”

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More thoughts and questions:

1.)In what other realms of fandom are there prominent anti-fans?

2.) What are the distinctions between the consumption of an anti-fan and a “true fan” in non binary situations?

3.) If there is no clear opposition, is it possible to become an anti-fan that acts similar to an actual fan (i.e. someone who still consumes the fan object)? (such as Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Howard Stern, etc.)

4.) In one sided rivalries, what side is the “rival” and where does the loyalty lie?

5.) Are the gender dynamics and stereotypes that are explicitly seen in sports fandom an example of the fanboy/fangirl identities? Does sports fandom support the argument for the reality of the fanboy/fangirl structure or negatively perpetuate the concept?

6.) What role do commentators play on influencing (anti)fan identities?

Post by Danielle Tocchet and Sarah Reynolds

After doing the readings on music fandom for this week, we decided to look into online fan communities and focus on the fascination with music personalities as well as the commoditization of music. As two girls who grew up during the heyday of boy bands, *NSYNC was the first fan following that came to mind and, thus, became the topic of our fan artifact presentation. In our search for artifacts, we found a website that seemed to aptly illustrate common music fandom behavior. NSYNCery.com highlights many similarities between music fandom and the other fandoms we have already studied in this class as well. Apart from the typical photo galleries, band bios, and news updates that many music fan sites contain, this site also includes fan fiction, fan art, fan poetry, and a pen pal section where *NSYNC fans can locate other fans around the world to share in the *NSYNC fan community. Another really interesting feature of the site was a series of “obsession quizzes.” These quizzes essentially test the intensity of fans’ obsessions with the group as a whole and with individual band members specifically based on meeting certain criteria, such as, “Your friends keep telling you that you are sad and your *NSYNC obsession is constantly getting worse and you will end up in a mental hospital if you don’t snap out of it.” This quote seems to reinforce the saying we have used over and over in this class to explain interactions among fans:”I laugh because I understand.” The fans on this site have created a safe community in which they can share their intense emotional attachments to *NSYNC without being judged by the people who do not “understand.”

Once we found this site, we thought the Cavicchi article was particularly useful in understanding the content of our fan artifact. In talking about the origins of music fandom in the mid-nineteenth century, Cavicchi pays close attention to the star quality of musicians that seems to spark fan attention. He writes, “the act of loving music often idealized identification with performers” (238). He uses the example of Jenny Lind, a Swedish opera singer, to illustrate this more personal connection between fan and artist and argues that although Lind fans enjoyed her music, they were just as entertained and fascinated by her personal character. In fact, it sometimes appeared that the personal character of the star was more appealing to fans than the music was. We also found the Scodari piece to be important in understanding the additional romantic attachment many fans develop toward objects of music fandom. This is extremely relevant to the types of practices *NSYNC fans are partaking in on this website. Although these fantasies exist in other fandoms, Scodari draws a distinction between the different types of fans by arguing that these feelings and practices are often intensified when the subjects in question are real-life people rather than fictional characters (54).

We also wanted to talk about the commoditization of music briefly since we think it played a significant role in the *NSYNC fandom. Although Cavicchi intended his arguments for music fandom in the 19th century, the commoditization of music can be applied to current day fandom too. Cavicchi discusses that Boston “first created markets around making music, including sheet music publishing and instrument sales” as one of the results of the popularity of the music industry (237). In current day, this could be akin to sales of *NSYNC cd’s, the popularity of websites such as www.lyrics.com, and perhaps the use of the pop band songs in Karaoke bars. However, Cavicchi also mentions the early trend of consumer culture around goods that are unrelated to the music, and rather more relevant to the fandom surrounding the “stars” themselves, discussed above. Cavicchi writes, “with the growth of the music press at mid-century, including regular reviews and the use of lithography and photography for circulating images of musical stars, scrap-books supplanted diaries and sheet music binders as music lovers most useful tool, able to contain descriptive writing, clippings of reviews, and images” (243-244). The use of the word scrapbook, although likely unintentional on the part of Cavicchi, led us to a connotation of teeny-boppers making *NSYNC collages and scrapbooks. This leads us to another interesting fan artifact(s), which is the varied and quite interesting eBay search results for *NSYNC: http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?from=R40&_trksid=m37&satitle=nsync&category0=, which include bobble-head dolls, tee-shirts, barbies, cd’s and much, much more. Finally, if we had gone back in time a few years, we could have found *NSYNC tickets on sale for hundreds of dollars for the big concerts on this site. The evolution of what Cavicchi calls “commodification of music in concerts” certainly occurred, although now it is perhaps more than what he terms “the ways in which hearing could become a form of consumption,” as the performance part of the concert (the dancing, special effects, and the star’s speeches) has become of increased importance during the boy band era (248).

Discussion Questions:

1. Similar to in other fandoms, we face the question of where to draw the line on who is a fan and who is not. How would we attempt to do so in music fandom? (See Cavicchi 248-249)
2. How do we distinguish fandoms that revolve more around the music and those that revolve almost solely around the celebrity? Is it a distinction we have to make?
3. How had the existence of sites like YouTube, where we can see the musicians perform their songs, affected the importance of the commodification of concerts?
4. With increased media (MTV, celebrity sites etc), have music fandoms become less about the music? Or has this trend always existed?
5. There are some fans who worry that their favorite band may be tainted somehow by entering the music mainstream through the radio, TRL, etc. How do we fit these fans into the big picture of fandom?