The following essay was written as part of my MLitt Film & Television Studies. I also gave a talk based on this essay at Glasgow School of Art for a symposium alongside Dr David Sweeney.
Should fan labour be paid and if so, how?
Fan creativity plays a central role in every fan community. Before they found their home online, fans would swap handmade fanzines at conventions and perform ‘filk’ songs together. Now these can be expressed in places like Tumblr and YouTube, where they are all the more accessible to those outside of the community. Within online fan culture remix plays a central role in fan creation. Fan fiction, gif sets, vlogs, art and songs all take the characters or subject of an original text and express them in new ways. As Lawrence Lessig says: “If the twentieth century made culture generally accessible, the twenty-first will make it universally accessible” (Lessig, 2008, 42).
In the age of Web 2.0 where collective intelligence plays a vital role in the spread of information, there has become an imbalance between grassroots production and mass media corporations. Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford and Joshua Green describe this in Spreadable Media (2013) where they discuss the differing value systems each faction has. On one side we have the large mass media corporations who consider monetary value the driving force and on the other the grass roots collective intelligence who see the worth of creations in non-monetary terms (Jenkins, Ford, Green, 2013, 55). There becomes a problem here as in order for Web 2.0 to be a wonderful collaborative space these two factions need to be able to work together. How do media corporations approach controlling fan creations and how do they attempt to harness their success through monetisation and fan labour? Should they be attempting to make money from fans or is there another way to make this difficult relationship work?
This essay will focus on three key areas of mass media interaction with fan creation. The first being attempts to monetise existing fan content, through staking claims to copyrighted material in fan remixes and issuing ‘cease and desist’ letters. The second is taking steps to encourage fans to create through official avenues, by establishing sites that direct revenue straight back into the corporation pocket. And thirdly the most direct way, of actually employing individual skilled fans to become part of the creation process of the media object be it films, TV shows or games. The question needs to be asked, should fan labour be paid and how?
