Core Response 3: I Hated the Andrejevic Reading

Should we really be thinking about fan production in terms of labor and exploitation? I'm unconvinced that such productions should be categorized as labor. Yes, they are being productive, but that productivity is spent to serve personal interests and is presumably fulfilling on the audience member's own terms. Why, then, suggest such production exists in an industrial economic model: that of labor vs company, exploitation? His suggestion that fan sites inadvertently offload from industrial process market research labor implies that such research could be obtained in a pre-Web market or in a Web environment constructed totally by industry (i.e. Official Websites): 

“[I]t is productive not just in the sense that it facilitates the consumption of an increasingly technologically sophisticated array of media products and services but also insofar as it allows producers to, as one business futurist put it, 'save costs by off-loading some of the duties of consumer interactions onto consumers interactions onto consumers themselves' (Mougayar 1998, 174)." (Andrejevic, p. 28) 

I would approach this topic with a fractal conception of audience production. It is my belief that the cultural production occurring on sites like TWoP could not have existed before or without the convergence of the internet and the mass audience. Fan-producers carve out their own space, on their own terms, for their own production. This approach privileges audience production as independent of any particular media franchise or television show and suggests that any fruits of their production could not be replicated under a traditional employee/employer economic structure.

Even so, Andrejevic asserts that fan productions add a certain value to the core media text. I would append this by saying: While there is a certain value added by fan production, that value is not lumpted with the inherent value of the original media. That value, to hail McLuhan, is an extension of value only available to those that consume the fan production. An original episode of Star Trek is made no more valuable by a fan fiction to the average viewer. For the fan-fic’s added value to be effective, one must seek out said fan fiction, thereby acknowledging that the value comes not from the producers of the source of the media text but from another viewer’s productive interpretation of the source. 

It is apparent that the author approached his research with the intention to apply a interpretive Marxist superstructure on this developing site of audience productivity, electing to frame such producers as exploited labor in line with traditional Marxist ideology. However, any attempt made by the author to bind audience productivity in a Marxist framework may be deconstructed by means of logic or hindsight. All around, I think Professor Jenkins' chapters in Convergence Culture, "Spoiling Survivor" and "Quentin Tarantino's Star Wars" cover the same issue with far more nuance and gravitas.