Fan Culture @ Swarthmore

I was looking through the New York Times today, and there was a fairly negative article
on the Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales. I don’t really have much of an opinion on this article because I don’t really know much about Wikipedia besides what’s in the reading. I was wondering if people would mind talking a bit more about their experiences with Wikipedia and similar sites especially in regards to the reading. Ben made an interesting post before where people got talking in the comments, but I’d like to bring it up again and see what people are thinking and perhaps get more perspectives.

Fan Artifact Presentation by Noah Lang and Kathy Alexeeff

In 2004 Brian Burton, also known as DJ Danger Mouse, produced a mashup album combining The Beatles self-titled 1968 album (also known as The White Album) and Jay-Z’s 2003 album The Black Album. Originally intended only for close friends and to encourage further mashup experiments, the album’s popularity spread rapidly culminating in EMI sending Burton cease and desist letters regarding the album’s continued release and promotion.

Later in 2004, music video directing team Ramon and Pedro released a music video mashing up concert performance footage of Jay-Z and footage of The Beatles playing on The Ed Sullivan Show. The video attracted similar internet popularity and picked up much of the same mainstream coverage that Burton’s mashup was given.

You can watch the video here.

The Grey Album demonstrates several key concepts introduced by Chris Anderson in The Long Tail. As a niche market product, The Grey Album was never intended for a large audience but through the internet the album reached the same audience an industry backed “hit” would hope to reach. Despite its widespread appeal and acclaim, The Grey Album has never been commercially released and Burton has received no direct compensation for his work. Since the album’s “release” Burton has essentially been co-opted by the mainstream he originally was outside of and ironically he is currently contracted by the same record label which threatened to sue him, EMI. Entertainment Weekly named The Grey Album record of the year in 2004 and GQ named Burton one of their “men of the year” following the album’s popularity and mainstream coverage. Oh yeah, he also won a grammy for his production work on the Gorillaz second studio album, Demon Days.

Basically Burton was able to leverage a non-commercially viable product into a successful music career on products that are commercially viable such as the Gorillaz album and further works with MF Doom, Gnarls Barkley and an upcoming collaboration with Beck. Anderson describes this trend: “ such profitless publishing can be lucrative all the same…such [works] are best seen as enhancing the reputation of their authors”.

However, such liberal use of copyrighted material is not without the threat of potential litigation. Following EMI’s extensive litigation to prevent further “releases” of Danger Mouse’s work, an NPO known as Downhill Battle organized an event called Grey Tuesday which took place on February 24, 2004. The event called for websites to post copies of the album for free download in order to protest the record industry’s apparent ignorance of fair use laws that permit limited use of copyrighted materials. The event culminated in over 100,000 downloads from participating websites and not a single charge filed in court against the organizers.

The Grey Album and further related media as well as Downhill Battle’s Grey Tuesday, touch upon issues we have previously discussed in class with the Grey Tuesday representing an apparent fan community protecting transformative works against the powers that be. New concepts addressed in the readings include the continuing issue of copyright and its relation to new media as well as the utility of seemingly non-commercially viable products.

Things to consider-

(1) Should we care about copyright when the copyright owner is not the artist? (I.E.-Michael Jackson originally controlled the Beatles catalogue after outbidding Paul McCartney for the rights)

(2) Is it possible for other forms of entertainment to be as thoroughly digitalized as music has been transformed? For example, will books remain physical objects or will they too become digitalized?

In Jenkins’ article about convergence culture, he brings up a lot of interesting ideas about industry and regulation that most of the class (including myself) seemed to find especially relevant to discussions of vidding. I was interested though in the point that he makes about collective intelligence and the idea of a knowledge community and its applications to a study of fan communities in general.

It is certainly true that a lot of popular fan texts have wikis devoted to them (My favorite is this Battlestar Galactica wiki), and Textual Poachers describes chatting about the narrative of shows as being an integral part of much of the fan activity Jenkins observes. But with many fan sites including episode guides and collections of fan fiction, I was wondering if the idea of pooling knowledge about a program intersects cleanly with negotiating fan interpretations, particularly in light of our discussions of reading strategies.

Basically, I want to know if any of you have encountered areas on fan sites that purport to be only summaries but instead include personal notes and commentary either about UST in a heteronormative pairing or homosocial undertones. The idea of internet fan communities as massive, international, and largely anonymous water-coolers is fascinating to me; at the same time a fan may want information about the explicit narrative of an episode he or she missed, what he or she may receive is a barrage of responses from fan-critics not just describing the episode, but also preparing the person inquiring (especially if a knowledgable fan) for certain themes that will emerge. I know that people sharing information with me about my favorite shows has included thinly veiled commentary that ultimately affected the way in which I watched the episode, especially if it brought up elements that I focus on in my own readings.

So, there were a couple of things that I wanted to discuss today that came up in class and in Julie Levin Russo’s talk. They aren’t really related, but I thought it would be obnoxious of me to create two blog posts, so I’ve created one obnoxiously long post. Here goes.

1. In the discussion of fan economy v. mainstream economy, there has been a fair amount of objection to the ways the producers have run their economy, i.e., for profit. This has been contrasted to the fan “gift economy,” which I think in our discussions has been cast as somehow a little more pure, worthy, creatively inspired (the assumption that if you’re not doing something for the money, your artistic vision becomes the primary focus of a reading), etc. One of the things that I’ve think we’ve lost track of is that fandom, ultimately, is a hobby. It may be an extremely consuming, engaging, important, totally all-consuming hobby, but it is not a person’s job (mostly–for a very few it is). Presumably, fans are participating in capitalist forms of commodity/labor production and exchange–just not in fandom. But they have jobs that give them the capital that allows them to work within the fan gift economy. Going back to Bizzy’s point from last week about exclusionary issues in fandom, I think that you could make an argument that the gift economy is not necessarily lowering the barriers to fandom, but raising them–people who would perhaps like to produce for fandom may not be able to afford to enter this world if they cannot turn their significant time and effort investments into money. Poorer people may need to spend their time on a profitable venture–it’s only those with a financial cushion who can afford this gift economy.

On the flip side, I do think we need to recognize that producers create their texts and expect to live off of them. To me, it is therefore not the same to ask them to participate in an economy of free exchange the way fans ask other fans to. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t problems when producers attempt to turn fan work into a profit-venture or attack fans for violating copyright (and therefore their profit margins). There’s a huge power imbalance that Julie Russo brought up with YouTube taking down videos when producers ask, but fans basically can’t appeal. Also, many make the argument that producers are making truly ludicrous amounts of money off of their work, and therefore the fact that fans have cut very narrowly into that is negligible. I’m more in tune with the first argument than the second; I just don’t think it’s up to fans to decide what a reasonable salary is.

2. I’ve been thinking a lot about the point that Julie Russo made about how fandom should, in some ways, be a protected space for queer and feminist expression, and that’s part of the reason why certain voices in the mainstream should not be able to co-opt vids (to give one example from the lecture–people laughing at the Brokeback Mountain parodies out of homophobia). Ultimately, I think I still disagree. I’m simply not prepared to say that being a fan is the same thing as being queer, or being a woman, or being a person of color, or any other kind of deeply marginalized group in our society.

To explain, I want to reference where I come down on a similar issue–the recent controversy over the Campus Republicans’ use of queer slogans like “coming out.” (I know many people are sick of this discussion, so I’ll try to keep it short.) I really support the people who objected to the Republicans’ posters, because I think that a) Being queer is not something that is/should be negotiable–society has no right to question the legitimacy of someone’s sexual orientation; b) Queer people are very silenced in society; c) Republicans are doing a lot of the silencing; d) Republicans appropriating queer slogans is therefore doubly silencing, problemmatic (though indirect) mockery, and a totally illegitimate comparison of what it means to be a conservative in a liberal environment v. what it means to be queer in a straight society. (Note: I really don’t mean to piss off any Republicans in the class, I’m trying to make a point about fandom, I promise.)

Now, right off the bat, I don’t think that fans as fans (not as queer people, women, etc.) can simply claim an unquestionable perspective because they are a minority. I think that there are legitimate ways to look at fan production and disagree with it–maybe even laugh at it. I understand that this may be hurtful to the producer, but I don’t think that it is necessarily oppressive. Being a fan means taking a certain perspective on a text; it is not an inherent, unchangeable part of an identity (like sex, race, sexuality). Questioning it is therefore not the same as questioning other marginalized identites. I could laugh at a Kirk/Spock slash vid not out of homophobia, but because I see these characters as so obviously straight that this pairing is amusing. My interpretation of that text should not be less privileged. Similarly, I could also laugh if a vid took a character that in the show canon I interpreted as obviously queer (say, Jack from Will and Grace) and paired him with a woman–that would be amusing to me, even if the vidder was completely sincere (and maybe trying to make some kind of feminist statement about editing women out of fan texts).

Because fan identity is a choice, the fan community is so diverse, and fan production has so many available meanings, I think it’s simply impossible to take most of fandom and say, “This is subversive minority speech. Because it protests The Man (the mainstream), it is silencing for The Man to comment unfavorably upon it/co-opt it/trivialize it.” This isn’t to say I think it’s okay that people laugh at Brokeback Mountain parodies out of homophobia; it is to say that I think that fan production should not be sequestered away and viewed by limited communities, and given the openness with which I think it should be displayed and discussed, I have to accept the fact that a few idiots will comment on the conversation.

a fan artifact presentation by Diana Pozo and David Pupkin

Easy Version:

Read the Jenkins Articles.

Watch “HuckChuckFacts.”

Scroll to the bottom and read the Important Questions to Consider.

Hard Version (not for the faint of heart):

In his article, “The Cultural Logic of Media Convergence,” Henry Jenkins discusses new trends in Internet publication such as blogging as they apply to politics, saying, “popular culture becomes the venue through which key social and political issues get debated. What models of democracy will take roots in a culture where the lines between consumption and citizenship are blurring?” Certainly, independent Internet commentators influence the way politics are run in the U.S. today from political blogs all the way through the CNN YouTube debates run for both the Democratic and Republican primaries. However, with convergence culture, the influences are never only one-way. Though “grassroots” Internet political activism may influence politics, politicians are also likely to use Internet culture to further their own goals.

2008 Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee uses convergence culture to appeal to a more diverse constituency than his traditionally conservative base by adopting the celebrity of Chuck Norris, a television actor and martial artist featured in Walker, Texas Ranger. Chuck Norris had, since 2005, been canonized over Internet messageboards and in the MMORPG World of Warcraft through a phenomenon named “Chuck Norris Facts.” Each “fact” credits Norris with one of an array of improbable superpowers and special abilities, such as “Chuck Norris can sneeze with his eyes open,” and “Chuck Norris does not sleep, he waits.” Though Chuck Norris’ television celebrity has led him to even create his own style of martial arts, and his well-publicized conservative politics were what led him to endorse Mike Huckabee’s candidature, Huckabee uses Norris’ Internet celebrity, and not his television celebrity to back up his campaign through an ad called “HuckChuckFacts.” In the ad, footage of Huckabee reciting “Chuck Norris Facts” is juxtaposed with Chuck Norris reciting facts of his own about Mike Huckabee’s policies. This ad gained so much publicity that Mitt Romney responded with his own Chuck Norris-themed video, criticizing what he claims to be Huckabee’s weak stance on crime, and claiming Norris’ attitudes as his own. However, this video received far less publicity (Romney’s ad received under 100, 000 views on YouTube, as opposed to the over 1 million views of just one posting of Huckabee’s Chuck Norris video).

Huckabee makes several important claims in “HuckChuckFacts.” First, his use of Chuck Norris to endorse his political campaign appeals to fans of Walker,Texas Ranger, a show beloved by social conservatives due to its appeal to a sense of “moral values,” its genre (the Western), and its glorification of traditional individualistic modes of heroism, as well as of the justice system. Second, Huckabee also draws on Chuck Norris and Walker, Texas Ranger’s campy appeal, through the use of his final frame, “Chuck Norris Approved,” in which a freeze frame of Norris’ face is combined with over-the-top “western” motifs, including a fist-shaped burn hole where Norris has punched the screen. Third, Huckabee lays claim to a sort of Internet panache through his use of popular Chuck Norris Facts familiar to many technologically-inclined Americans. Though contemporary Internet front-runners would say that a 2005 phenomenon such as Chuck Norris Facts is remarkably out-of-date, the large majority of Internet-savvy Americans would most likely recognize Huckabee’s appeal to a sense of being “in touch” with modern technology and younger constituents.

Jenkins’ theories about convergence culture center mainly around what he sees as an upcoming struggle between producers and consumers over rights to the use of major media products. In his chapter, “Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars,” he seems to advise commercial producers that it would be in their best interest to allow fan producers almost free reign over media products, since their efforts often do more to promote the product in question than to challenge its validity or diminish its appeal. Jenkins also touches on the ways in which medial conglomerates try to harness and control the flow of fan productivity so that fan producers’ work becomes their property (Lucasfilm’s Star Wars web space, ex.), or so that they can police what content is allowed to be published (J.K. Rowling’s struggle with Harry Potter Lexicon author Steve Vander Ark, ex.). However, he spends much less time elaborating the ways in which major media producers can create their own products in traditionally fan-dominated media, such as digital video, using references derived from Internet popular culture, such as Huckabee’s reference to Chuck Norris Facts. Jenkins discusses how aspiring filmmakers such as George Lucas In Love co-creator Joseph Levy use the aura of a large media franchise like Star Wars to draw attention to their films, but he does not mention that big fish like Huckabee may be drawn to Internet culture icons like Chuck Norris in order to establish themselves as relevant to the everyday lives of a certain group of media users.

However, it is important to note that the Internet media that becomes profitable both for large media conglomerates and for grassroots producers themselves comes from a relatively small fraction of the overall Internet “population.” Jenkins’ chapter on Star Wars videos mentions the often gender-based disparity between producers of Lucasfilm-sanctioned “parody” videos, and Lucasfilm-condemned “fanfiction” videos. Similarly, the Chuck Norris Facts phenomenon was largely perpetuated by what Henry Jenkins calls “early adapters,” the members of the population most likely to respond to technological advancement. These early adapters are among the most privileged members of American society, since their financial resources and digital education allow them access to the latest hardware and software, as well as the know-how to use them in creative ways. It was these “early adapters” that moved Chuck Norris Facts from Conan O’ Brian Show segment, to messageboard joke to World of Warcraft application, and then rejected the phenomenon as out-of date. Jenkins may be arguing for more power to be placed in the hands of “consumers,” but which consumers will receive that power? Would this be a substantive change from the patterns of power and weakness observable more generally in American society?

***

Important Questions to Consider:

1. Is Huckabee’s use of Chuck Norris Facts an expropriation by conservatives of a movement that was originally designed to poke fun at traditional ideals of heroism? If so, does media convergence actually undermine the revolutionary potential of oppositional (fan) readings?
2. Among the Republican candidates for the presidency, Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney appealed to Chuck Norris’ Internet following, while Rudy Giuliani and John McCain did not. Is there something about a candidate that would make him/her more likely to publish ads on YouTube and make reference to Internet culture than others?
3. We mentioned the CNN YouTube debates above as another example of how politics and Internet media collide. In what ways have you experienced the influence of Internet media or Internet culture on the world of politics? Do you believe the Internet is making significant changes to the way politics is reported to or received by the public?

The Creepy Side of Gaming

ughh… so i don’t have much (read: any) profound insight to shed on this link and its content but when i saw the headline “Gaming Gets Creepy: we all love it, but do you love it TOO much?” i knew there was potential for yet another problematic representation of fans… and i was right! so i figured the best thing to do was to share it with y’all!

this time it’s all about attacking those bizarre gamers!

i stumbled upon this link from the (annoying yet enjoyably distracting) AIM Today site. it links to a slide show that has nine slides that each provide snide comments about different aspects and stereotypes of the gaming community.

Also, I found it interesting that this page is located in the Game Daily section of the AOL website world. This made me question who the intended audience is. Is it for people who don’t identify as a gamer, or for people who play video games and may very well partake in some of the activities that are shown in the slide? My first answer is that it’s obviously for those on the outside who can point and laugh at a community they don’t understand, but placing it on a gamer’s website is slightly contradictory. This also made me think about how gamers would respond… which led me to realize that there is probably some continuum where “extreme” gamers who identify strongly with the identity presented here would probably be offended while more “casual” gamers may be able to remove themselves from the identity and still find amusement in laughing at the “others.” but who knows…

overall, i’ve decided that this example of fan representation just provides more ammunition against the close-minded (and mean) mainstream meadia and more support for why fan communities remain exclusive and are hesitant to stand up to be “loud and proud.”

p.s. i kind of scared myself when i realized that before taking this class i would have seen this link and thought nothing of it except maybe “those people are odd and immature. aren’t i much more grounded and normal? good job loretta!” which i guess is the desired effect. but now i just view it like any other problematic, prejudice piece of poo polluting the public… and that worries me even more.

(final note: i just noticed that there is no link to this slide show on the main Game Daily page… nor is it easy to find without starting at aim today!)

So given the topic of our first response papers and the enduring topics of fan interactions with media we have been discussing, I thought I’d bring up an ongoing story in the Star Wars fan world.

A film called Fanboys was filmed in early 2006 about a group of Star Wars fans that journey to George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch before the release of The Phantom Menace in order to steal a copy for their friend who is dying of cancer and will not make it till the world premiere. Sounds like a pretty reasonable film premise…. albeit a bit similar to the “Free Hat” episode of South Park.

Well the film basically kept getting delayed until eventually reshoots were done by a different director almost a year after filming had ended due to scheduling conflicts. After all of this, a version of the film was edited which removed the cancer plotline altogether after certain test screenings found the subplot ‘depressing’.

When the news broke about this on Aint it Cool News and Darkhorizons, a petition was started by a group of fans to “Stop Darth Weinstein” – Harvey Weinstein’s The Weinstein Company is releasing the film -to ensure that the original version is released to theaters. The petition has picked up mainstream coverage including articles in the Daily Telegraph, Vanity Fair and the New York Post as well as less visible coverage through facebook and myspace petition groups.

I find this whole ordeal really interesting as it shows a level of dedication and assertiveness sometimes lost upon fans. It’s refreshing to see fans who care so much about their text are willing to work so hard to protect a little film like Fanboys. It remains to be seen if their efforts will actually have any effect as currently both versions of the film have been shown to test audiences and it is still unclear which version will get a release but in any case their petition has made a significant impact and is yet another example of fans exercising power over their texts.

Furthermore, much of our focus upon fan interactions with media has been upon the transformative aspects (I.E.-Slash as redefining character relationships,  fan productions of non-canon or loose canon storylines, etc) but we have not discussed at length the degree of power fans can exercise over their text’s future.  This form of power seems remarkably relevant given our discussions of the relationships between producers and fans; when a producer can have power over fan produced content such as in the FanLib example.

Today’s “Doonesbury” comic deals with some issues that I’ve been thinking about in relationship to the vidding discussion, namely, who gets to define fair use?

Currently in the Doonesbury story arc, characters are enrolled in “The Poetry of Barack Obama”. The context of this particular comic strip is the recent contention that Obama lifted some of the text of his speeches from a political ally (Mass. Gov. Deval Patrick). Regarding this practice, Hillary Clinton said: “Lifting whole passages from someone else’s speeches is not change you can believe in. It’s change you can Xerox.”

The comic, however, takes a different tack, putting the reacquisition of language in a more fannish context, utilizing the language of hip-hop and music remixing. Or does it? Any Trudeau fans? Is this comic critical of rewriting practices? Critical of the academy’s reading strategies? Does the fact that (stereotypical deadhead/stoner–here, in an orange shirt) Zonker, endorses the “collaborative” assignment, mean anything?

P.S. The Universal Press Syndicate guidelines allow educators/students the use of 7 images per year free of charge, providing they are used in an academic context. Not that I’m endorsing one particular fair use policy over another, but it’s nice (for me, the blogger) to know that this post is doing nothing illegal.

I don’t mean to piggy-back on Brandon’s comment in class today about ethnicity issues surrounding the fandoms we’ve studied thus far…

But…

I can’t stop thinking about it.

Kathy had the last word in class today (Kathy, speak up if I misparaphrase you): Star Trek takes a stab at addressing the ethnic issue by giving Deep Space Nine a black captain, Benjamin Sisko, as an attempt to draw in black viewers.

However, a multicultural cast does not a multicultural show make: having a black character does not mean that the show will tackle issues pertinent to the black community. In a discussion we had on the way to lunch, Diana pointed out that Star Trek has attempted to break the racial divide since the very start with Uhura, a groundbreaking character because she was a black woman in a role of (debateable) power on television. We continued on to discuss how Uhura as a black character was, quite frankly, white-washed and placed in a form that would be easy for a majority white audience to swallow. The problem, we concluded, is that Star Trek, and many other shows, have not progressed from that early model.

Shows that attempt to target the minority community are aired either on cable or on basic broadcast channels that suffer from lack of viewers (the channel that comes to mind is UPN, now called My9, in New York—it’s known for showing black sitcoms and was nearly pulled from the air, sparking a huge debate in New York over the silencing of minority voices within various media mediums). That is not to say that the major broadcasting networks such as ABC or CBS, which have primarily white viewers, haven’t tried to target the minority market. The George Lopez Show was a fairly successful show on ABC for a number of years, but was eventually cancelled in favor of other (re: whiter) shows. I personally couldn’t stand the show because, as was said previously about Uhura, I felt that the show took the Latino family and made it palatable to a white audience and, in the process of doing so, sacrificed certain elements that would have made it more attractive, and identifiable, to the Latino community (sometimes it’s just not enough to see a Latino face on television–you have to believe it’s real, and The George Lopez Show just wasn’t real to me). The show (or the producers of the show?) chose instead to tailor their network line-up to appeal to their most reliable market which happens to be dominantly white.

When thinking about why it is that the fandoms we’ve been studying is mostly comprised of white middle class Americans, maybe we should consider what it is about the texts themselves that attract a certain ethnic following. Not to be cynical, but is there an avarice on the part of the producer to play towards the tastes of the ethnic majority? And what happens when a certain fandom becomes deeply associated with a certain group? For example, white fans of hip-hop are referred to by the pejorative “wigger”; on the flip side, growing up in a predominantly Hispanic and black neighborhood in the South Bronx, I was often accused of “acting white” because I liked Friends and listened to bubblegum pop music.  This isn’t only limited to the question of ethnicity–these same questions can apply to the issue of gender within fandom…

I don’t know, I can’t think of a proper conclusion. I’d like to hear what you guys think.

Before the screening Tuesday night, Lauren and I briefly the various meanings that the word ‘fandom‘ can possibly have.  The Wikipedia definition touches on the fact that fandom can refer to narrow or broad subcultures. The term has been used in a wide array of ways throughout class and blog discussions, and I definitely felt uncertain while writing my paper about whether or not I was using the term correctly.  To me, fandom refers mostly to the phenomenon of people clustering towards a text.  For example, in my paper I referred to Star Trek as the “object of a fandom.”  Considering that I have already handed in my paper, I hope that I was on the right page as far as my usage.  But, the main goal of my post is to hopefully illicit discussion and establish a flexible class definition of fandom.