Fandom, Participatory Culture and Cultural Value - A Critical Review

If we try to understand the value of culture, we need to first understand those to whom certain aspects of culture matter most: fans and enthusiasts. Being a fan has become an increasingly universal audience experience with most media consumers negotiating the vast range of content that has become available in the digital age through their affective preferences - the television shows, films, novels, sports teams, artists, comics, plays, musicians, genres, poets or composers whom we hold particularly dearly, return to frequently and often gather a large amount of information on. In turn these fan objects serve as a source of enjoyment, sometimes outright pleasure, but also of belonging and an expression of ourselves. In a quickly changing world, they indicate to ourselves and others who we are and thus communicate and maintain a sense of identity.

However, fans are not only consumers of media and culture, they are also active participants in culture who in many cases become cultural producers. In the era of digital media in which technologies of media production are easily accessible to most media consumers with, for instance, smart phones boasting HD video and sound recording, free video editing software being widely available, and the internet offering easy distribution routes through portals such as YouTube, LiveJournal or social networking sites, user generated content is an increasingly important part of our media landscapes - much of it driven by fans' enthusiasm and interests. Similarly, fans create value by working collaboratively through review- or wiki-type sites that for many consumers become important spaces of peer information that structure their cultural consumption.

Yet, in an environment of unprecedented choice of arts, culture and entertainment that confronts contemporary citizens and consumers, we make the selections that structure our engagements with culture through the affective position of the fan; and thereby tend to choose what we already like, already enjoy and already are familiar with. Hence, the question emergences whether enthusiasm and fandom might also serve to erode the challenges of the unknown, the fantastic and the 'hard-to-make-sense-of' in our cultural encounters, which in the eyes of some literary and cultural theorists constitute the true value or art and culture - and hence their potential to change the world in which we live for the better.

This project examines these conflicting positions and answers the question of how we can conceptualise the cultural, social, economic and political value of participatory culture and fandom in the digital age by conducting a comprehensive review of past research on forms of fandom and enthusiasm across the spectrum of culture, media and arts. This review compares empirical findings of different studies and identifies broader trends across studies, critically examines the methodologies on which current findings are based as well as the soundness of their theoretical conclusions, and indicates areas of future research that will be required in order to more fully map the challenges and benefits of fandom and participatory culture.

Studying, analysing and reflecting on cultural values is widely seen as the prerogative of actors, institutions and organisations concerned with the administration, funding and evaluation of culture, which alongside Higher Education scholars include policy makers and government, and the publicly and charitably funded arts and culture sector. Where value is defined more narrowly in economic terms, commercial cultural and media industries can be added to this list.

This project will offer a detailed overview and critical evaluation of the findings of existing research on how cultural value is shaped and transformed by the rapid emergence of participatory culture, driven by fandom, to all four of these constituencies and thereby offer important insights how fans' productivity can be utilised as an important contributions in processes of cultural production and distribution in the digital economy as well as in cultural planning and governance. As open access publication the outcomes of this project will be readily accessible to the different actors in these fields.

However, this project is also aimed at a second, much broader group: the study of fans and fan objects is naturally concerned with the one area of the citizens' cultural consumption they most treasure and enjoy: their fan objects and how and why they matter to them. Studying fandom means studying an aspect of cultural life that matters immensely to many beyond academia. Being often highly engaged in the context of both their fan object and their own fandom, fans not only share a remarkable number of traits with professional scholars such as an interest in research, exploration and knowledge creation, they also commonly take a particular interest in scholarly work about fandom, with fans frequently attending academic workshops and conventions on topics of their interest. The open access publication will therefore provide a wider public the opportunity to engaged with and reflect upon their own fandom, patterns of fan productivity and their role within participatory culture. This project thus actively engages in and advances forms of reflective citizenship and the public engagement in science. Specifically, it encourages citizens and consumers to reflect upon questions of cultural value.

In disseminating the outcomes of this project to a wider public, two further groups are important. Firstly, reflecting public interest in the topic of fandom, broadcast and print media often report on academic studies of fan cultures. Having built many contacts with journalists who have interviewed me for newspapers or magazines or radio (including a recent feature on Radio 3), I will use these contacts to circulate publication details to a list of media professionals with an interest in the study of fan audiences.

Secondly, modules dedicated to the study of fandom have become widely taught and highly popular at many UK universities. The open access monograph will be a valuable learning resource to a the substantive Media and Cultural Studies undergraduate population in the UK and internationally, thus further facilitating a wider public engagement with the question of the cultural value of fandom and enthusiasm in a digital world. Details of the publications will be circulated to lecturers and instructors of these modules via the Fan Studies Network Mailing list.