Repackaging fan culture: The regifting economy of ancillary content models | Scott | Tr... - 1 views
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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.
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My concern, as fans and acafans continue to vigorously debate the importance or continued viability of fandom's gift economy and focus on flagrant instances of the industry's attempt to co-opt fandom, is that the subtler attempts to replicate fannish gift economies aren't being met with an equivalent volume of discussion or scrutiny.
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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
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at the heart of this anticommercial requirement of fan works is fans' fear that they will be sued by producers of content for copyright violation"
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Thus, there is both a legal and social imperative to view fandom as transforming the objects of commodity culture into gifts, a transformative process "where value gets transformed into worth, where what has a price becomes priceless, where economic investment gives way to sentimental investment" (Jenkins et al. 2009b), and where bonds of community are formed and strengthened.
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For other scholars, who foresee the commercialization of fandom's gift economy as an alternately unnerving and empowering inevitability, the possibility of fans monetizing their own modes of production is posed as an alternate form of preemptive "protection."
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though monetizing fan practice to preserve the underlying ideals of fandom's gift economy might seem counterintuitive,
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Richard Barbrook, reflecting back on his 1998 essay "The Hi-Tech Gift Economy" in 2005, acknowledges that constructing commodity culture and gift economies in binary terms is problematic.
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commodity economies and gift economies are always already enmeshed,
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Although De Kosnik asserts that "the existence of commercial markets for goods does not typically eliminate parallel gift economies"
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Media producers, primarily through the lure of "gifted" ancillary content aimed at fans through official Web sites, are rapidly perfecting a mixed economy that obscures its commercial imperatives through a calculated adoption of fandom's gift economy, its sense of community, and the promise of participation.
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The regifting economy that is emerging, I argue, is the result of the industry's careful cultivation of a parallel fan space alongside grassroots formations of fandom.
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regifting economy is meant to synthesize the negative social connotations tied to the practice of regifting with a brief analysis of why acafans and existing fan communities should be aware and critical of these planned communities and their purpose as a site of initiation for the next generation of fans.
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Henry Jenkins and others (2009a), adopting the term moral economy from social historian E. P. Thompson and questioning its applicability to the exchange of digital media, state that the moral economy is "governed by an implicit set of understandings about what is 'right' or 'legitimate' for each player to do."
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the social stigmas attached to regifting are rooted in the act's inherent subterfuge, breaking the rules of the moral economy by masking something old as something new, something unwanted as desirable. If "the cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange [is] that a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two people" (Hyde 1983:57), then "we cannot really become bound to those who give us false gifts" (70).
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This construction of men as agents of capitalism with no understanding of the (frequently feminized) gift economy or its functioning continues to be evoked in anxieties surrounding the masculine/corporate exploitation of female fan communities and their texts.
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media producers pushing these ancillary content models as the "white man keepers" of online fan culture who have failed to understand that it is the reciprocity and free circulation of fan works within female fan communities that identifies them as communities.
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restricting the circulation o
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its unrestricted movement.
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Positioned precariously between official/commercial transmedia storytelling systems (Jenkins 2006:93–130) and the unofficial/gifted exchange of texts within fandom, ancillary content models downplay their commercial infrastructure by adopting the guise of a gift economy, vocally claiming that their goal is simply to give fans more—more "free" content, more access to the show's creative team. The rhetoric of gifting that accompanies ancillary content models, and the accompanying drive to create a community founded on this "gifted" content, is arguably more concerned with creating alternative revenue streams for the failing commercial model of television than it is with fostering a fan community or encouraging fan practices.
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By regifting a version of participatory fan culture to a general audience unfamiliar with fandom's gift economy, these planned communities attempt to repackage fan culture, masking something old as something new
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Although it could be argued that fandom also polices its boundaries and subjects, its motivations for doing so are ultimately about protecting, rather than controlling, the ideological diversity of fannish responses to the text. As Hellekson (2009) notes, "learning how to engage [with fandom and its gift economy] is part of the initiation, the us versus them, the fan versus the nonfan."
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Although fandom responds to its own mainstreaming within convergence culture by fortifying its borders and rites of initiation, ancillary content models are opening their doors to casual viewers unfamiliar with what fandom has historically valued and how it functions
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Whether or not ancillary content models are being actively deployed as a device to rein in and control fandom, they are serving as a potential gateway to fandom for mainstream audiences, and they are pointedly offering a warped version of fandom's gift economy that equates consumption and canonical mastery with community.
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As this example suggests, ancillary content models offer few incentives for fans already enmeshed in grassroots creative fan communities to contribute, and there is consequently less opportunity for participants to be exposed to and initiated into those fan communities.
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More frequently than not, fannish participation is restricted to enunciative forms of fan production (Fiske 1992:38), such as posting to message boards and the collaborative construction of the show's wiki.
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The result, according to Kristina Busse (2006), is that "certain groups of fans can become legit if and only if they follow certain ideas, don't become too rebellious, too pornographic, don't read too much against the grain."
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Perhaps one of the central reasons why fans continue to cast a wary eye at these planned communities and their construction of a "legitimate" fandom is because they recognize the gifts being given mass audiences as their own.
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spectacular case that potentially overshadows more covert examples.
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male fans have historically sought professional status or financial compensation for their creative works more frequently than their female counterparts
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media producers shape their definition of an ideal fandom, it is increasingly one that is defined as fanboy specific, or one that teaches its users to consume and create in a fanboyish manner by acknowledging some genres of fan production and obscuring others.
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ancillary content models
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Given the long, gendered history of fan communities and their relationship with producers, and the frequent alignment of gift economies with "feminine" forms of social exchange