The Evolving Consumer Behavior: Fan Culture in Online Community (original) (raw)
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Social Media at the Service of Fandoms - the process of users involvement in the prosumption culture
Nowadays, it is impossible to talk about any culture product without mentioning its fans. The Internet has changed the role of fans in the production process. Formerly, the fans’ choice was almost as simple as the question “to buy or not to buy”, “to watch or not to watch”, and so on, but these days, with such a powerful tool as the Internet, fans have gained a way to express their desires and hopes and their voice cannot be disregarded, because it often means “to be or not to be” for many companies. But the issue of the income is only a small part of the vast topic that fan communities (fandoms) are. The article analyzes the way the fans are using social media , the communication context and fans involvement in prosumption culture.
The Dynamics of Fandom: Exploring Fan Communities in Online Spaces
Studies of fan groups in recent years have increasingly focused on the internet as a locus of communal activity for participants. Certainly this is not an unexpected paradigm shift. Prior to the advent of the internet, and its subsequent adoption by fan communities, being a fan was largely a proposition that required participants to engage in physical encounters where culture was transmitted on a personal, often individual level. However, as the internet collapses barriers of time and space fandoms have become a well connected global village capable of coordinated and immediate worldwide participation. As involvement in these mediated cyber modes of community formation and maintenance increases one must wonder what is at stake for these newly minted online fandoms. In this work the author will take the position of arguing that these groups form not only as a means of expressing communal identity but also as a method of asserting their hegemonic control over a collective ‘base text.’ This essay explores the formation of online communities around specific cultural artifacts and seeks to define what is meant in describing these mediated cultures as a ‘group.’ Much of the argument will center on the power dispute over hegemonic control between fans of a cultural artifact and the original producers of that text, situating this conflict in the fan experience. This dispute between cultural producers and consumers will bring sharply into focus the capabilities of online media and expose one of the myriad reasons why fandoms create and function in virtual spaces.
Fan Studies: Research Popular Audiences
This open-access volume brings together a variety of critical perspectives in the emerging field of fan studies. Fan Communities and Fandom. We have engaged with multiple disciplines and theorists in order to explore the various methods of fan production and research. Whether fans engage in the real-world, online, or define themselves by their lack of engagement, the ability of fans to participate and share their enthusiasms with one another is one of the most striking and intriguing features of the fandom phenomena. Fan communities have directed their remarkable fervour towards charitable causes, bringing television shows and book characters back from the dead, and honing their creative skills before persuing fandom-worthy material of their own. We explore fandom as a social space and constructed identity, fuelled by talented creators and enthusiastic consumers, and building on the global connectedness born from the digital age. Originally published at Inter-Disciplinary.net, this volume contains essays from different fan scholars on topics such as celebrity fandom, pop-culture tourism, cosplay, fan activism, and YouTube fandom.
Serious leisure in the digital world: exploring the information behaviour of fan communities
This research investigates the information behaviour of cult media fan communities on the internet, using three novel methods which have not previously been applied to this domain. Firstly, a review, analysis and synthesis of the literature related to fan information behaviour, both within the disciplines of LIS and fan studies, revealed unique aspects of fan information behaviour, particularly in regards to produsage, copyright, and creativity. The findings from this literature analysis were subsequently investigated further using the Delphi method and tag analysis. A new Delphi variant – the Serious Leisure Delphi – was developed through this research. The Delphi study found that participants expressed the greatest levels of consensus on statements on fan behaviour that were related to information behaviour and information-related issues. Tag analysis was used in a novel way, as a tool to examine information behaviour. This found that fans have developed a highly granular classification system for fanworks, and that on one particular repository a ‘curated folksonomy’ was being used with great success. Fans also use tags for a variety of reasons, including communicating with one another, and writing meta-commentary on their posts. The research found that fans have unique information behaviours related to classification, copyright, entrepreneurship, produsage, mentorship and publishing. In the words of Delphi participants – “being in fandom means being in a knowledge space,” and “fandom is a huge information hub just by existing”. From these findings a model of fan information behaviour has been developed, which could be further tested in future research.
Introduction to the Ashgate Research Companion to Fan Cultures
Fans constitute a very special kind of audience. They have been marginalized, ridiculed and stigmatized, yet at the same time they seem to represent the vanguard of new relationships with and within the media. ‘Participatory culture’ has become the new normative standard. Concepts derived from early fan studies, such as transmedial storytelling and co-creation, are now the standard fare of journalism and marketing text books alike. Indeed, usage of the word fan has become ubiquitous. The Ashgate Research Companion to Fan Cultures problematizes this exaltation of fans and offers a comprehensive examination of the current state of the field. Bringing together the latest international research, it explores the conceptualization of ‘the fan’ and the significance of relationships between fans and producers, with particular attention to the intersection between online spaces and offline places. The twenty-two chapters of this volume elucidate the key themes of the fan studies vernacular. As the contributing authors draw from recent empirical work around the globe, the book provides fresh insights and innovative angles on the latest developments within fan cultures, both online and offline. Because the volume is specifically set up as companion for researchers, the chapters include recommendations for the further study of fan cultures. As such, it represents an essential reference volume for researchers and scholars in the fields of cultural and media studies, communication, cultural geography and the sociology of culture.
This thesis deals with the emergence of fan communities around user-generated content. I will examine two case studies dealing with users and their transition to productivity through the use of contemporary technology, and characters and events from popular culture. More specifically, I will analyze the Twitch Plays Pokémon stream as a case study for the ‘streaming’ category, and the DEATH BATTLE! series as a case study for the ‘original content’ category. The main questions of the thesis are how communities emerge around freely distributed, user-generated material on the Internet, what are their characteristics, and how platforms allow and encourage them to do so. This essay’s methodology includes a) a platform and protocol analysis to analyze how technology allows the communities to come into being, and b) an institutional analysis in terms of community and content to analyze the social aspects of these communities. In this analysis, I will research how my two case studies (DEATH BATTLE! and its subsequent works, and the Twitch plays Pokémon stream) were appropriated in their platforms by their makers to enhance the sense of belonging in communities. For the technological part, I will use José van Dijck’s ‘platform dissasemblage’ to examine how the platforms used by the creators of DEATH BATTLE! and Twitch plays Pokémon function in regards of community building, shaping and spreading, since her work on social media platforms offers an extensive analysis and useful insight into them. Then, for the social part, I will analyze how these communities produce their content in an open, collaborative environment, in the light of Axel Bruns’s research on produsage cultures, which is very helpful because it deals with social aspects in online communial environments. Finally, I will conclude my analysis with an examination of the way that content itself changed fan communities on matters of reception and evaluation, by using John Fiske’s tripartite model of fan productivity, a model that is still discussed and used in fan studies, along with critiques and suggestions by Matt Hills.
FANS AND PARTICIPATORY CULTURE - HOW THEY SHAPE MODERN MEDIA AND MEDIA CONSUMPTION
2018
Media industry in the digital and technological era is a combination of two contradictory trends: While there has been an alarming concentration of the ownership of mainstream commercial media by some big media companies, consumers now see themselves become parts of the process of distributing and creating media products. The shift in position of media consumers and producers has no doubt
The Intermedial Practises of Fandom
The article 1 discusses formations of fan cultures in terms of intermediality. It examines the construction and consumption of media in three different Finnish fan groups: the fans of Xena: The Warrior Princess (XWP), fans of Ally McBeal and the fans of Finnish TV-host Marco Bjurström. The construction of intermedial relations of each fan group interestingly reveals the institutional and technological spaces of shaping the pleasures of media.