Introduction
Having worked in digital media for television since 1999, I have taken a keen interest in watching how the perception of digital technology as a threat to traditional media, particularly by large media conglomerates, has evolved. The reactions of the film and recording industries to so-called “piracy” have received the most attention, but there has also been a backlash against sharing technologies and practices within the broadcast television industry as well. Networks have spoken out against fans posting even short clips of copyrighted content on fan sites and YouTube, and have been active in forcing takedowns of such clips and even, at times, of the sites themselves.
The proposed topic of research is the effect these efforts have had on the fans’ relationship to the brand and its franchises. How, exactly, do these networks think these types of activities will affect their revenues, and have those fears been borne out? Is the fan’s affinity with the brand or franchise adversely affected by persecution by the network? How is the fan community at large affected by the networks’ activities, and what effect does that, in turn, have on the brand? What are some potential solutions that would satisfy both the brands and the networks?
Definitions of Fans and Fan Activities
In order for us to examine the question of whether or not corporate media’s persecution of fan activities has been helpful or harmful to the media properties, we must first define what exactly we mean by fans, and what we mean by “fan activities.” In a research study by C. Lee Harrington and Denise D. Bielby, and documented in their article “Global Fandom/Global Fan Studies,” participants were asked to define the difference between fans and ordinary consumers. The results were that most participants agreed that fans are a subset of consumers, but ones that have a greater “emotional, psychological, and/or behavioral investment in media texts,” (186) and whose level of active engagement with a text is substantially greater than average consumers, who are generally passive in their consumption. This jibes with Henry Jenkins’ definition of fans from the introduction of his book, Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture, in which he describes fans as “active, critically engaged, and creative.” (1) Jenkins goes on to say that digital technology is allowing fan cultures to thrive and grow, by providing people who may have, in the past, only been passive consumers, the opportunity to “archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content.” (1) By this definition, even the simple act of “recirculating,” – posting a video clip of a TV program onto YouTube or a blog – constitutes fan behavior. Taking clues from these two definitions, we can safely define fans as anyone who has an affective relationship with a media text beyond passive consumption, and ‘fan activity’ as the active engagement with that media text such as sending it to a friend or sharing a segment of it online. However, there are a number of fan activities that have gone beyond these simple acts of engagement, one of which is fan fiction, which I will discuss in a moment, in which fans create entire alternative narratives based on the objects of their fandom. [continue reading this post...]
Tagged as:
copyright,
media,
piracy,
Television
