This article elaborates a theoretical case for considering new media as productive power, viewing web interfaces as both reflecting and reinforcing social logics. It then details an analytic method for websites -discursive interface analysis -which examines functionalities, menu options, and page layouts for the structures at work within them. The piece concludes with a short, illustrative examination of several official media company websites, articulating the productive constraints of their interfaces and the norms that they construct. Ultimately, the essay offers a tool for the new media research kit to improve our understanding of how norms for technologies and their users are produced and with what implications.

This special issue explores the intersection of reactionary politics and fandom. Fandom has traditionally been thought of as progressive, but this has been limited and limiting. Moreover, considerations of the relationship between politics and fandom have especially focused on democratization and new media–enabled participation. However, it is important to expand our understanding to other aspects of politicization. This introduction situates the issue in relation to foundations of fan studies, examinations of political fandom and fannish politics, and growing recognition of inequality and conflict in fandom. These considerations are important in an era in which fandoms have increasingly overtly embraced reactionary politics and reactionary politics has increasingly taken fannish forms. It is this intersection of the reactionary and the fannish that this special issue seeks to unravel.

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Editorial providing an overview of the topic of fan studies and labor; and outlining the special issue's contents.

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