Social Informatics and Media Studies

I've never heard of The Escapist before, but they have put out a "Fanfiction issue" whose biggest problem seems to be that they assume everyone understands what that is without ever really examining the topic.

A good example is the article titled Corporate Fanfic, which discussed the case of The Watchmen and how corporations are capitalizing on fans by putting what they want to see on screen, regardless of how it skews the original. This seems like a rather interesting discussion idea, not unlike some posts I saw in the past months on metafandom that complained about how all the increasing slashiness in media properties could be as harmful to normalizing the depiction of gays and lesbians as making them invisible. However, not only is the author mixing the issue of serialized storytelling with fan fiction, he can't decide who it’s targeted to. He says, for example, that corporations are including fanfic themes in works to appeal to a general audience:( Read more... )

Some interesting stories about media products around today. First, this aptly titled article, Book Publishers Go Stupid, discusses Simon and Schuster's decision to release e-books 4 months after hardcovers. I thought the author made some good points about how this is another case of large institutions clinging to old revenue models, but then I also think that $10 for an ebook makes no sense. If I can get a paperback for $8 or less then that should be the maximum cost for the ebook which doesn't have the same associated expenses. (Plus, shouldn't we be encouraging people to use less paper?) What's more with the Apple Tablet coming out next year, which can only serve to boost e-reading, this market will only grow.

The foot-dragging music industry is trying its version of Hulu with Vevo. Since I was around for the launch of MTV there's a certain nostalgia to the idea of Vevo, especially if it comes with VJs and music news, but I'm not clear how it's going to be that different from sites like Yahoo!Music, or, you know, MTVmusic.com. Articles like this are suggesting that it's going to be a music portal with everything in HQ and eventually streaming concerts. Hulu has done really well for itself in its first year so if Vevo can market itself well it could build a good slice of the pie. I just think from what was said it's too little, too late.

That may also be the case with many Media Studies programs. ( Read more... )

In Rethinking the Long Tail I thought there was an interesting challenge to the idea that niche sales are the way to go for businesses. The authors argue that actually there is a greater concentration of popular entertainment now than there used to be. I was also interested to read this discussion of how ads tend to appeal to people through Time vs. Money and to think about how this related to fan activities.

Henry Jenkins' post on the Future of TV surprised me by not mentioning what I consider the most important change to TV in the last five years -- shortening seasons.( Read more... )

I took a look at Participate: The Revolution of Fan Culture (which made me wish that, as in most cases where "revolution" is used, people used the more appropriate "evolution.") About 16 minutes in, it discusses fanfic and references LJ. However it gives only a passing nod to the vast amount of participation in places such as FFN and LJ, to focus instead on fan films and the fans who have become part of the entertainment industry (all the interviews are with people who make a living or make money from fans). This odd skew was perhaps most apparent in one interview segment where Lucas is referenced as the fanboy who changed things by being a geek and making a geek film. I thought an even better argument for Lucas being a fan and a revolutionary was what Lucas did for the technical side of filmmaking, not to mention the financial side by demonstrating the incredible empire-building power of merchandising. What troubled me is how "Participate" skewed the definition of fan, and also suggested that the "revolution" in question was in fact the commercialization of fandom.
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This news about the spread of institutional repositories struck me as a real contrast to the other recent news about Elsevier and Merck. It seems to me that institutional repositories for academic work are a much better alternative, both for preservation and access, than commercial publishing today. What I also wonder is if they wouldn't be a more legitimate source of material than for-profit publishers who don't seem to offer any great benefit compared to non-profit outlets. (Just as an aside, take a look at the tactics Merck is employing during the court case that inadvertently revealed the campaign Elsevier helped Merck produce.)

Of course, libraries have long been under a terrible crunch from the escalating cost of periodicals, so open source publications are simply a must in the future. But just as there is current discussion about the necessity for print journalism, and what its unique and important qualities are, it seems to me the same discussion needs to be going on about academic publishing. One difference, of course, is that news is a prized commodity to the recipients but spread in many ways, of which print is only one. But academic publishing is a must for the producer for indirect reasons that have less to do with distribution than prestige. It seems to me in the discussions I'm reading, that the people most objecting to the loss of print journalism are …print journalists. And while I can understand the upset over the loss of a steady paycheck versus the job insecurity of freelancing (this article pointed out how people make more money in larger corporations than small businesses) this doesn't really tell us anything about the value of the end product based on its form of production. It seems to me that rushed deadlines and competitive urges are as likely to skew news reporting as the lack of resources hampering independent journalists. And then there's the motivation factor. In the same program that discussed how local bloggers had already been covering news neglected by Seattle's two daily newspapers, was the story of how the NY Times may have had a major lead on Watergate before anyone else, but did nothing about it. As a commenter pointed out " Media scholars have long observed that because the Post's reporters weren't part of the sometimes cozy relationships between reporters and officials, they were better able to follow the story. The administration wasn't going to provide the everyday leaks and "background" briefings that so much Washington journalism depends on to this day."

All of which is to say, can institutional repositories provide not just better access and lower costs for academic publications, but perhaps provide other benefits in terms of the quality and reliability of research? In what ways are for-profit publishers needed?

I've mentioned in my personal blog that I think 2009 is the year when fan fiction has become, if not a mainstream pastime, at least a term understood by many in the media and requiring less explanation in the press. What interests me though, is how this term is being re-interpreted by a wider audience to become, less about actual fan fiction, than about what the speaker sees as related issues. In some cases we may agree with them, in others, the usage seems a little nebulous.

For example, this blurb in the L.A. Times discusses trailer vids as part of the "fan fiction universe." While I personally feel trailer vids aren't nearly as similar to fanfic as, say, AU vids, or commentary vids that do interesting things with POV, I would agree with the title which slots creative fan work in visual form along with its written form. In a similar vein, Jon Stewart's use of the term to describe FOX news' creative reinterpretation of facts, grasps the spirit of fanfic (even though I doubt much political fanfic has actually tread that particular ground).

On the other hand, this post about the accurate imagineering of a car seems to be using the title to describe creative speculation. While this certainly describes some forms of fanfic, it's a bit of a stretch to apply it to car design specifically. More importantly, while fanfic is certainly speculative, this seems to put a certain emphasis on anticipating canon which seems to be very typically male to me – as if the purpose of fic is to guess (correctly) where canon will go and "winning" if one guesses right.

Whereas it seems to me that most fanfic I read seems to take a very different POV about canon, in exploring areas it's not expected to go, or reworking areas where it's been. Whether with characters or storylines, the fanfic focuses on reopening doors that have been closed off, or blazes new trails, sometimes ones where the creators were unable or unwilling to go.

All of which is to say, in what ways do we see the wider media grasping the elements of fan fiction in its more traditional sense, and where is it being broadened or applied in rather different ways?

A classmate passed on a link to the Chronicle of Higher Education's brief write-up of a study done by Noah Wardrip-Fruin, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He ran an experiment with his latest academic book comparing the peer review provided to his book on a public blog compared to the peer review commissioned by his publisher. His results were, I thought, unsurprising (although good to have some evidence for). "Blog commenters tended to focus on discrete paragraphs and points, and rarely compared ideas in one chapter to those later in the work. But the blog readers offered more detailed input than the anonymous reviewers solicited by the press."
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