(it's sort of a live-from-tape blog, because I typed it up offline during the session and am posting it at the end)

MIT: Futures of Entertainment
Fan Cultures panel

Diane Nelson
Molly Chase
danah boyd
(NB: three women. all other panels at this conference were composed of either three men + one woman or three men.)

"when the product is transformed from commodity to culture you have to cede control" -Josh Green

how are we defining fans? (question of mainstreaming)
---> Kristina Busse's interventions (with MY comments)
[and as long as I'm linking to that, let me add a piece that I posted elsewhere under flock:
what's interesting to me is the various registers on which one could posit a continuum:

individual <----> community
consumer <----> producer
corporate <----> grassroots (or whatever word you want to use)
fanboy <----> fangirl
passtime <----> lifestyle/orientation/identity
plots/puzzles <----> porn romance
(and we could probably go on)

part of the problem with conceptualizing this seems to be that these continuums only partially map onto each other, so it's different to keep all of them in the frame at once.]

Diane: feeling a sense of ownership over a property

Molly: producers/industry folks (her cartoon networks colleagues particularly) are ALSO fans

danah: feeling a sense of agency (appropriation)

Jenkins: web2.0 = fandom without the stigma

danah: history of social networks
friendster launched to replicate sixdegrees -- goal of creating a better dating site
early adopters = geeks, freaks (san francisco) and queers (new york)
they did the opposite of what the site was conceived/designed to do
june 2003: hit the village voice --> urban 20/30somethings, hipster culture
at the same time bands realized that social networking was a gold mine
friendster cracked down and killed off "fakesters" like band profiles ("fakester genocide")
THEN myspace launched
early adopters: koreans in koreatown, specific group of hipsters in silverlake, indie rock bands in LA
myspace decided to deliberately support bands
web2.0 allows dedicated fans to engage in the same space as casual fans

danah: web1.0 = going TO an interest-driven space
this is not how our social lives work -- they have overlapping groups, and online you had to compartmentalize those into separate groups
web2.0 allows ego-based (around ME) groupings to overlap with interest-based groupings (traditional fandom)
so you can draw people into the latter through the former

changing relationships between media producers and fans?
Diane: it's about control
it's impossible to have trust without dialogue -- and you might not like what the other person is saying
(some stuff that was said yesterday about how creators can be resistant to giving up control over the auteurist process)
and yet you don't want to turn off fans' sense of ownership if you're going to be successful
slash fiction and HP! the kids issue
managing rather than cracking down on the audience

danah: who is trying to gain what from which phases of control?
myspace kills profiles too, hatespeech profiles for example, but not ones that are productive and connected
etc.
myspace initially tried to ban youtube because they thought it was a porn site
fans reacted badly, and myspace ANNOUNCED when they unblocked it, thus for all intents and purposes creating the YT phenom

Jenkins: how do fans increase the value of properties?
Diane: it's virtually impossible for fans to DEvalue a property
danah: challenges of having a diverse fanbase in a single space -- for example some fans (e.g. slash fans) may alienate advertisers which are necessary to support it
also fans don't other approve of other fans' activites, and they can be vicious to each other

Jenkins: how do you incorporate fans into your marketing strategies?
Diane: fan-driven marketing has to be (feel?) "authentic" -- usually re: the sincerity of a dialogue with the creator(s). if it feels manufactured/manipulated it's going to fail.
Molly: tells a funny story about how they're marketing dept. put some promos on YT and then unbeknownst to them the legal dept. sent C&D letters to have them pulled down
danah: after having killed off all the fans' fakesters, friendster sold the rights to companies to create their own official fakesters, which pissed people off. myspace used different strategies that enabled it to be a more successful marketing tool (e.g. selling top-24 feature to X-Men, so that you had to befriend the X-Men myspace and get its bulletins it order to enable it) -- of course this only worked for like the first 100 companies who figured this out, before it got saturated. myspace is in a precarious position, because parents' and marketers (markets and pedophiles, ha!) are flooding the system with their agendas so that it stops feeling like a user-driven system.

Jenkins: global context? e.g. Doctor Who (piracy issues)
Diane: forcing media companies to better appreciate consumers, and not assume that they're stupid/unsophisticated. beginning to understand that fans will consume a product in multiple media
danah: assumption that your product will be global instantaneously (the flipside) -- what do you do when you envision an audience of 6 million and you get an audience of six? "who are the agents of information flow?" viral growth is very powerful, but also really slow. tags are dumb and irrelevant, but they (re)enable navigation as random "surfing" -- so how the hell do you harness that?

finally: Q&A!

WWE guy: what kinds of controls can/do you use to control fan activity?
danah: myspace pissing off fans with controls (e.g. allowing the labels to control the band sites)
Jenkins: ? of the line between fake and real coming from pro wrestling, haha

fangirl corner: our (the older) generation is resistant to commercialization -- is it different with youth (gen z)?
Molly: kids are incredibly savvy consumers -- they ask "what's the catch?"
danah: kids just tune out the ads, because they're not relevant. revver has a totally different ad-supported model. also, advertising is mostly US-based and not global -- Asia for example has a totally different model

DC comics guy: (um?)
Diane: deeply personal connection to the property
danah: austistic social software, question of signalling, and how you "prove" that you're a friend/fan and how people develop the language to interrogate that. everything becomes performative.

MY QUESTION: there's been much discussion of the mainstreaming and monetization of fan activity (but also the challenges of that). I'm wondering if you talk more about some of these counter-tendencies. either on the side of the underlying structural tensions of late capitalism -- that is, is it a happy marriage between legally and economically authorized corporate ownership and fans' "sense" of ownership, or can you see some limit point on the horizon where those agencies are going to come into open conflict (if they haven't already!) -- or on the side of contradictory philosophies in practice -- that is, the commitment to the community basis of fan activity (what is sometimes identified as a "gift economy"), and also to the elements of fandom that are "queer" in a broad sense and thus less palatable to a capitalist mainstream (so, slash has been mentioned, but also a queer sort of intercourse with texts that are promiscuous and open to appropriation). do you think there are any aspects of (what is admittedly a very diverse group of engagements lumped under the term) fandom that are ultimately resistant to being reincorporated into a corporate economy, and what are the implications of that? [OK, that was maybe 3 BIG questions]

danah: GooTube! battles between fans and corporations!
• copyright issues (ownership, literally)
• net neutrality issue (corporations being unhappy with their channels being used to distribute anti-corporate content)
• queer issue (the boundaries between spaces used to be much more clear [YES])

Molly: fans are comfortable with the advertising-supported model, but basically we can't compensate them for their labor and that's the limit

Diane: fans do respect the creators -- they're willing to accept some limits as long as they're not too draconian (allow "legitimate forms of expression" such as slash [OK so who decides what's legitimate?])

danah: characteristics of mediated environments = persistence, searchability, replicability, invisible audiences
[ARCHIVE]

[uhhhhhh another question]

danah: problem of filtering. users do virtually no searching/surfing unless 1. they happen to be bored. 2. direct marketing (which can kill the popularity of a SN site). 3. phishing (#1 thing sites are trying to stop -- but this is literally just companies trying to keep up)
friendster handled this by cracking down and removing features, myspace handled this by accepting the anarchy and sticking bandaids on it, which is also difficult

[yet another question, from somebody in Vancouver, apparently about mobile phones and tailoring content to the medium]
danah: US problem with mobile content is the carriers, which are SO proprietary and limiting. nobody can actually put innovative social software on the phone in this country. Asia is beating us. "ability to repurpose these things is central to fandom."

corporate guy: "is community and fandom part of the same continuum?" // trying to interface directly with consumers rather than through intermediaries: "are there lessons to be learned from fandom in terms of creating community?"

danah: "community is probably one of the most problematic words in all of social media"
often content creators had very little access to their fans before these sites

soap opera lady: has anybody actually looked at the triggers that convert someone from casual to dedicated fandom?
[psychoanalysis!]

they address this to Jenkins: he doesn't think we're much closer to answering that question, although he has a bibliography about it [I reapeat: psychoanalysis! it's all about sex desire, as far as I'm concerned]

danah: media lab experiments in measuring people's brains and stuff [that sounds so sinister! shout out to _plasticity_] ("galvactic response" ?!)
"surfacing up traces" (I didn't get what that means)

THE END