1. I Can Make You a (net) Celebrity Overnight: Fan Production & Participatory Culture in Online Reality Shows Alice E. Marwick Dept of Culture & Communication November 10, 2006

2. What is Participatory Culture? Patterns of media consumption have been profoundly altered by a succession of new media technologies, which enable average citizens to participate in the archiving, annotation, appropriation, transformation and recirculation of media content. Participatory culture refers to the new style of consumerism that emerges in this environment… Media consumers want to become media producers, while media producers want to maintain their traditional dominance over media content. Source: Jenkins 2003

3. What is Participatory Culture? New cultural forms and products –Blogs –“User-contributed content” –Mashups –Fan films, fic –Mods New ways of interacting with traditional media products –Discussion –Collaboration –Influence over media producers

4. Fandom Media Effects: Fans are dupes, slavish consumers of media content. Fandom as pathology Frankfurt school Cultural studies: Fans are resistive, progressive, activist Jenkins, Fiske

5. Fan production Production is not only possible, but typical Source: John Fiske : The Cultural Economy of Fandom

6. Fandom McGuigan (1992): Must interrogate relationship between fans and consumer culture Murray (2004): Must analyze the political economy of fandom –Role of corporation –Relationships between fans / producers

7. Sites of Study Online Reality Contests

8. Global Media Formats Source: YouTube These videos were removed b/c they made the file size too large for my FTP server to handle. They were examples of the “Idol” franchise in different countries to show how widespread and resonant these media formats have become.

9. Global Media Formats We talk about these formats in terms of profitability, franchises, decreased risk They also become shared resources, narratives, cultural stories Frameworks for creativity Source: Magder 2004

11. Google Idol WebcamMusic Video Site also includes short films, original songs, corporate-sponsored contests Categories: Pop, Rock, Original, Kids, Producers Source: http://www.googleidol.com

12. LiveJournal’s Next Top Model Source: Top Model franchise

13. Source: http://communities.livejournal.com/ljstopmodel

18. What do these texts show us? Creative! Participatory culture > fandom New type of hybrid media form Wide, diverse audience Low barrier to entry

19. What is Television? Images in circulation Infrastructure of broadcast & transmission A material object Sources: Dienst 1994; Levin Russo 2006

20. Limitations Participation is limited No political advocacy Interplay with commercial products –Copyright –Big New Media –Fan Labor –Defines “people” as “consumers” Lack of media legitimacy Reproduction of dominant media narratives

23. Who are Audiences? Active, interpretive communities of practice (Radway, Mankekar) Taking into account realities of economic production (Dornfeld, Sotamaa) Discard old consumer/producer binary (McKee)

24. Questions?