Fandom and/as labor

Stanfill, Mel; Condis, Megan

doi:10.3983/twc.2014.0593

Cited by 43 publications

(31 citation statements)

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“…On the Internet, users spontaneously produce affect and culture with unqualified intrinsic passion and enjoyment, while the users' production is exploited by Internet platforms (Terranova, 2000). Fans' pleasure and the industry's exploitation happen simultaneously in fan labor (Stanfill & Condis, 2014). Milner (2009) argues that fans work for the contents instead of the company.…”

Section: K-pop Fans: Consumption and Prosumptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

K-pop fan labor and an alternative creative industry: A case study of GOT7 Chinese fans

Sun

2020

Global Media and China

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Korean popular music or K-pop has achieved popularity among global audiences. The uniqueness of K-pop fan culture has helped to shape the success of the K-pop industry. Through a case study of Chinese fan labor vis-à-vis K-pop male idol group GOT7, the author notes three types of K-pop fan labor: specialized labor, managerial labor, and unskilled labor. This research argues that fan labor transforms the K-pop industry into an alternative creative industry because fan labor as creative labor is an indispensable part of the K-pop industry. Fan labor is utilized to distinguish fans from non-fans, and to draw boundaries between the grateful, more enthusiastic fans and the casual self-proclaimed fans who do not contribute to fandom or their idols’ success. These Chinese K-pop fans comply with the K-pop industry’s commodification of culture, are exploited by the K-pop industry, and seek empowerment in the K-pop production and distribution process. This paper’s exploration of fan labor, based on the author’s participant observations and in-depth interviews, will thus contribute to studies on the creative industries, creative labor, fandom, and the transnational flows of popular culture.

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Section: K-pop Fans: Consumption and Prosumptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

K-pop fan labor and an alternative creative industry: A case study of GOT7 Chinese fans

Sun

2020

Global Media and China

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“…As in other fields of digital culture (e.g., Terranova, 2000), critical arguments reflect on the "exploitation" (a difficult horse to catch, of course, with its semantics of forced action) of fans' "free labor " (e.g., De Kosnik, 2012;Stanfill & Condis, 2014) ranging from inspiration for professional cultural industries to analysis of user content and user profiles (e.g., for enhanced definition of target groups and marketing strategies) to the revenues that archive sites are able to achieve through advertising or paid accounts. Therefore, some scholars who have foreseen attempts to monetize fanfiction (e.g., Scott, 2009) posed (self-)critical questions regarding the participation of fans in profits, and on fannish control and power of influencing emerging business models.…”

Section: Discourse and Perspectivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fan (Fiction) Acting on Media and the Politics of Appropriation

Reißmann

Stock

Kaiser

et al. 2017

MaC

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Fanfiction is the creative appropriation and transformation of existing popular media texts by fans who take stories, worlds and/or characters as starting points and create their own stories based on them. As a cultural field of practice, fanfiction questions prevalent concepts of individual authorship and proprietary of cultural goods. At the same time, fanfiction itself is challenged. Through processes of mediatization, fanfiction grew and became increasingly visible. Third parties, ranging from the media industry (e.g., film studios) and copyright holders to journalism and academia, are interested in fanfiction and are following its development. We regard fanfiction communities and fan acting as fields for experimentation and as discursive arenas which can help understand what appropriating, writing and publishing in a digital culture and the future of writing might look like. In this paper, we outline important debates on the legitimacy and nature of fanfiction and present preliminary results of current research within Germany.

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“…Copyright regulation, originally aimed to protect printing-shops from illegal printers (Lessig, 2004; Rose, 1993), represents a complex array of struggles over content. However, with the rise of a new participatory culture, the ‘bardic role’ (Hartley, 2009) went global, often free from market constraints: setting an outlaw territory of free-labour and open concurrency that confronts the rights-free, volunteer-driven fandom work with the lowered wedge professional creative sector resulting in an increase in its precarity (Banks and Deuze, 2009; Gill and Pratt, 2008; Stanfill and Condis, 2014). Ordinary users became public performers, producers of cultural tales and bearers of aesthetic values.…”

Section: Regulating the Bardsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Defining authorship in user-generated content: Copyright struggles in The Game of Thrones

Sarikakis¹,

Krug

Rodríguez-Amat

2015

New Media & Society

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The notion of authorship is a core element in antipiracy campaigns accompanying an emerging copyright regime, worldwide. These campaigns are built on discourses that aim to ‘problematize’ the issues of ‘legality’ of content downloading practices, ‘protection’ for content creators and the alleged damage caused to creators’ livelihood by piracy. Under these tensions, fandom both subverts such discourses, through sharing and production practices, and legitimizes industry’s mythology of an ‘original’ author. However, how is the notion of authorship constructed in the cooperative spaces of fandom? The article explores the most popular fandom sites of A Song of Ice and Fire, the book series that inspires the TV-show Game of Thrones and argues that the notion of authorship is not one-dimensional, but rather consists of attributes that develop across three processes: community building, the creative and the industrial/production process. Here, fandom constructs a figure of the ‘author’ which, although more complex than the one presented by the industry in its copyright/anti-piracy campaigns, maintains the status quo of regulatory frameworks based on the idea of a ‘primary’ creator.

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Fandom and/as labor

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

Cited by 43 publications

References 0 publications

K-pop fan labor and an alternative creative industry: A case study of GOT7 Chinese fans

K-pop fan labor and an alternative creative industry: A case study of GOT7 Chinese fans

Fan (Fiction) Acting on Media and the Politics of Appropriation

Defining authorship in user-generated content: Copyright struggles in The Game of Thrones

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