Good evening and welcome to Fanthropology. Tonight's post is brought to you by Samara Morgan. She never sleeps and neither do I. Tonight we're reading Simone Murray's article “Celebrating the Story the Way It Is: Cultural Stories. Corporate Media and the Contested Utility of Fandom” from Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies. Sometimes you just get a feeling about an article. You know that it's going to be a challenge but that you'll be the better for it. This was one of those times. Murray's article focuses on finding a middle way between the textual poaching fan-friendly semiotically-resistant model of fan studies and the crushing fatalism of the Frankfurt School which – correct me if I'm wrong – emphasizes the power in the hands of the producer and the consumer's tragically-misguided claims to the contrary. In short. Murray wants to drain off some of the celebratory nature of fan studies in the wake of Jenkins and others and get down to brass tacks. As an example of her new perspective. Murray points to the interaction between Peter Jackson (and by extension. New Line Media) and Harry Knowles at Ain'tItCoolNews com (AICN) and other fan-sites. Rather than simply pandering to Lord of the Rings fans or pretending to listen says Murray. New Line and Jackson paid attention did their homework and tried their best to produce a trilogy of films that would be faithful to fannish vision while still turning a profit. Murray says that this model is not simply about fan gullibility either – New Line was engaged in a tight little tango with Tolkien fans. Fans continued to push the boundaries of intellectual property while entering a new relationship with New Line. Murray contrasts this relationship with that between Harry Potter fans and New Line's fellow Time Warner subsidiary. Warner Bros. a relationship which has remained fraught and tense and full of legal threats. Murray wants to question how much power fans truly have and she wants to do so out of a suspicion that cultural studies (as of 2004) gave fans slightly too much credit. After all. Murray seems to say fans are changing the meanings of works not the works themselves. Murray wants cultural studies to be more reasonable about the way it celebrates fandom because she also suspects that cultural studies is simply not keeping up with the times and hasn't a grasp of the way new media and Internet technologies has influenced the game nor of the way media conglomerates actually work. Murray goes on to say that intellectual property law is circumbscribing fan freedom on the Internet slowly but surely. To explain her position. Murray launches into an explanation of multi-platform “content streaming,” wherein a major media corporation catapults a franchise into public life across many different media: film games toys television specials websites. ARG's etc. Murray says that corporations paint themselves into a corner this way: on the one hand they must reach out into the digital world to maximize profit but on the other every step they take is an opportunity for “poachers” to take control of the media on offer. Murray calls this an “irresolvable tension that gives rise to multiple fronts of fan/producer antagonism.” Murray then chronicles a few examples of tangles between IP lawyers and fans before reaching the statement from Jim Ward vice-president of marketing for Lucasfilm that gives her article its title:
But if in fact someone is using our characters to create a story unto itself that's not in the spirit of what we think fandom is about. Fandom is about celebrating the story the way it is.
Murray then asks whether fan activity is simply powerless activism. She calls Jenkins and Fiske's reading of de Certeau “idiosyncratic,” and references McGuighan's critique of the “active audience” model as too closely linked to the “consumer sovereignty” movement wherein consumers are told what they want so as to then feel happy upon achieving it. Murray's goals it should be said are broader than individual fandoms and cases. She wants a model of fan studies that will acknowledge the reality of intellectual property law and the weight that media conglomerates like to throw around. Your normal female interest in men bonking and your performative identities are all well and good she seems to be saying but what are they really accomplishing? How do they effect what actually gets shown on tv? What power do fans really have?Moreover. Murray's analysis critiques the “poacher” model for approaching media giants as homogenous monoliths that are free of internal dynamics. Big companies are mostly made up of small companies and those small companies are made up of individuals – when fans receive C&D notices they receive them from lawyers on retainer not from the CEO of Warner Bros. And then Murray lets loose with what is probably the most damning – and also the most brilliant – bit of her article:
Is cultural studies' residual attachment to the contrarian nature of fan identity a necessary price to pay for legitimating fandom as a site of academic inquiry? Analysis of contiguous streams of academic research proves such an assumption false. The decision on the part of much cultural studies work to discount material concerns isolates its analyses from often broadly sympathetic research in adjacent fields of political economy and critical legal theory sections of which have demonstrated interest in active audience concepts and in instances of fan campaigning.
In other words: No it doesn't have to be How Special Slash Is – at least not all the time. And no research into how fans change the semiotics of a media property doesn't have to go away. But we don't have to do it on our own either says Murray. There are whole fields within academia that are similarly interested because they have stake in how law gets written and enforced and how that impacts culture over time. There's a whole copyfight movement out there and it's waiting for fan energy. Murray moves on to a chronicle of the “PotterWars” or “Defense Against the Dark Arts” movement when Warner Bros attempted to get fans to hand over their HP-themed domain names. Jenkins examines this in greater detail elsewhere in this course so I'll just gloss it now but suffice it to say that Warner was shocked (shocked!) to find out not only how many fans there were but how they could mobilize and how perfectly fine they were with boycotting merchandise. The fight came to an uneasy truce when Warner began offering Terms of Use agreements at the HP film website for “amateur webmasters,” and the C&D notices halted. But. Murray stresses this did not secure fans any actual legal protection. Fans simply benefitted from Warner's embarrassment and fear of poor publicity. Case law did not change. They could still be sued. Murray contrasts this against the decision on the part of New Line to hire Peter Jackson best known for his independent genre work as a director to direct the LotR trilogy adaptation. Jackson was chosen as a method of “risk management,” because he could interface with fans and because his art-house and horror cred would go over well thus increasing profit margins by mobilizing fans in favour of the films. New Line also increased the lead-time on online publicity publishing the LotR film website a full five months before filming even began. But that lead-time and the fan-friendly interactions between New Line and certain high-profile fans and webmasters is not without its price: Murray examines the web marketing for LotR and finds a “brand coccoon” concept that keeps fans steadily digesting “authentic” New Line content across several websites while tracking their activities online. Fans were sometimes-unwittingly made part of New Line's viral marketing strategy. I doubt many fans are so naive as to not see their own involvement in the corporate goals of a license-holder – many anime fans know that BitTorrent is watched by distributors and license-holders alike and the most recent issue of Wired features an article by Daniel Pink saying that major Tokyo publishers do their homework by attending Comic Market twice a year. This is part of the reality of living inside the Panopticon. We all get to watch each other and watch each other doing so. I'll conclude with a segment from Murray's conclusion which I think not only summarizes her point but brings to bear an incredibly important issue to fan studies that I personally cannot emphasize enough:
Less remarked upon but no less pertinent is the question of whether scholarly study of media fandom is out of touch with the contemporary lineaments of the phenomenon it seeks to analyze. Cultural studies work on fandom is notable for its reluctance to investigate rigourously the commercial utility of fan communities to corporate marketing and publicity structures and especially for its disinclination to investigate how recent Internet developments may be shifting the parameters of this relationship. A worrying trend is the tendency to conflate highly conditional granting of fan access to media properties with a legally enforceable right to comment creatively. Stripped of its communitarian rhetoric. New Line's novel willingness to cultivate fan communities is merely a conditional agreement not to enforce its IP rights for the precise period during which fan activities further its commercial interests.
The chilling effect of increasingly-draconian IP law is something that neither fans nor fan studies can ignore. Fans don't have rights. At least not legally-enforceable ones. One part of the “does fanfiction make us poor?” debate is whether or not fans can ever be forced to pay a settlement to a license holder despite that license holder's pro-fan rhetoric. These are things that everyone on the internet should be thinking about because they're all part of the same game: C&D notices rely on surveillance. It's part of convergence culture but it's also part of life in the Panopticon.
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Related article:
http://fandrogyny.livejournal.com/37137.html
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