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n particular, recent work on online gift economies has acknowledged the inability to engage with gift economies and commodity culture as disparate systems, as commodity culture begins selectively appropriating the gift economy's ethos for its own economic gain.

There are a number of important reasons why fandom (and those who study it) continue to construct gift and commercial models as discrete economic spheres. This strategic definition of fandom as a gift economy serves as a defensive front to impede encroaching industrial factions. H

Information is particularly suited to gift economies, as information is a nonrival good and can be gifted at practically no cost.[18][19]

Traditional scientific research can be thought of as an information gift economy. Scientists produce research papers and give them away through journals and conferences.

In his essay "Homesteading the Noosphere", noted computer programmer Eric S. Raymond opined that open-source software developers have created "a 'gift culture' in which participants compete for prestige by giving time, energy, and creativity away".[22]

Fan community clearly cannot be constituted by anyone other than the fans themselves. This tenet remains central to the constitution of fan culture, just as it is continually renewed by the exchange of symbolic gifts.

they exchange personally charged aspects of themselves in a gift culture whose field of value specifically excludes profit, further separating their community from the larger (male-gendered) community of commerce.

To engage is to click, read, comment, write, make up a song and sing it; to hotlink, to create a video, to be invited to move on, to come over here or go over there—to become part of a larger metatext, the off-putting jargon and the unspoken rules meaning that only this group of that people can negotiate the terrain. Within this circle of [End Page 113] community—and in media fandom, women overwhelmingly make up this community1—learning how to engage is part of the initiation, the us versus them, the fan versus the nonfan.

This situation deserves scrutiny, especially because fan fiction is becoming [End Page 118] increasingly visible to non-initiates through major media outlets in the United States and the United Kingdom, indicating that the genre is moving away from the margins of American and British culture

The mainstreaming of an alternative form of cultural production is nearly always synonymous with commercialization;

Over the past decades of sharing their transformative works, fan fiction readers and writers have generally felt wary of commodifying a form of cultural production that is essentially derivative and perhaps subject to copyright infringement lawsuits.

In economics, a good or service is said to be excludable when it is possible to prevent people who have not paid for it from having access to it, and non-excludable when it is not possible to do so.

An architecturally pleasing building, such as Tower Bridge, creates an aesthetic non-excludable good, which can be enjoyed by anyone who happens to look at it. It is difficult to prevent people from gaining this benefit (although people have tried, by forbidding amateurs from taking photographs of certain sites [1]).

The ease and availability of file sharing technology has made many forms of information, especially music, films and ebooks non-excludable, often to the disagreement of the content producers.

In economics, a good is considered either rivalrous (rival) or nonrival. Rival goods are goods whose consumption by one consumer prevents simultaneous consumption by other consumers[1]

Most goods, both durable and nondurable, are rival goods.

A hammer is a durable rival good. One person's use of the hammer presents a significant barrier to others who desire to use that hammer at the same time. However, the first user does not "use up" the hammer, meaning that some rival goods can still be shared through time. An apple is a nondurable rival good: once an apple is eaten, it is "used up" and can no longer be eaten by others. Non-tangible goods can also be rivalrous. Examples include the ownership of radio spectrums and domain names. In more general terms, almost all private goods are rivalrous.

These fans feel a deep sense of community and are engaged in a complex subcultural economy—using work time to write about copyrighted characters, teaching one another how to use complex technological equipment to create zines for free, and so on

fan vids address many of the issues raised during my search for a perfect cover image: each draws from a variety of sources that may be familiar to a particular community of media fans but often are more obscure to other TV viewers. Explaining how and why a particular scene resonates for a fan may indeed rely on the shared knowledge of a story, vid, or central fan discussion.

The story of media fandom is one steeped in economic and gender concerns, from the beginning, when women began creating the narratives commercial media wouldn't offer—dominated as it is by male producers—

Some possible pitfalls of crowdsourcing include the following: Added costs to bring a project to an acceptable conclusion. Increased likelihood that a crowdsourced project will fail due to lack of monetary motivation, too few participants, lower quality of work, lack of personal interest in the project, global language barriers, or difficulty managing a large-scale, crowdsourced project. Below-market wages[20] or no wages at all. Barter agreements are often associated with crowdsourcing. No written contracts, non-disclosure agreements, or employee agreements or agreeable terms with crowdsourced employees. Difficulties maintaining a working relationship with crowdsourced workers throughout the duration of a project. Susceptibility to faulty results caused by targeted, malicious work efforts. Though some critics believe crowdsourcing exploits or abuses individuals for their labor, studies into the motivations of crowds have not yet shown that crowds feel exploited. On the contrary, many individuals in the crowd experience significant benefits from their participation in crowdsourcing applications.[21][22][23][24] Further authors discuss both risks and rewards of using crowdsourcing as a means of balancing global inequalities.[25]

The term has become popular with businesses, authors, and journalists as shorthand for the trend of leveraging the mass collaboration enabled by Web 2.0 technologies to achieve business goals. However, both the term and its underlying business models have attracted controversy and criticisms.

What, given these circumstances, was a "high culture" author to do as his/her books piled up unsold in boxes at the press? As Martha Woodmansee shows in her very insightful and elegantly written account of the history of eighteenth-century German aesthetic theory, The Author, Art, and the Market, they set out to exorcise these ghosts from the sphere of "true" or "fine" art. Turning to the material conditions that underlie and prompt the re-evaluation of art by these theorists, Woodmansee details

Mendelssohn, writing in mid-century, argued that the singular purpose of a work of art was to have an effect on its audience and hence ought to be evaluated by its ability to move us. Three decades later Mendelssohn's pupil, Moritz, broke away from his teacher's enormously influential theories, removing art from the constraints of affectivity to which it had been subjected and arguing instead for its existence sui generis, responsible only for being a "coherent harmonious whole" (quoted on p. 18). Woodmansee explains this remarkable shift from Mendelssohn's theory of artistic instrumentality to Moritz's theory of artistic autonomy through an examination of the "far-reaching changes in the production, distribution, and consumption of reading material that marked the later eighteenth century" (p. 32).

too many readers . . . reading too many of the wrong books for the wrong reasons and with altogether the wrong results" (p. 90). Moritz responds to this problem by "rescuing" art from the market and making a virtue of necessity: bad sales become the hallmark of "good" art.