Both referring to de Certeau,
Jenkins and Andrejevic address the idea that “Readers are travelers; they move
across lands belonging to someone else, like nomads poaching their way across
fields they did not write, despoiling the wealth of Egypt to enjoy it
themselves.” While Jenkins uses it as part of a demonstration of the
empowerment marginalized groups derive from their involvement in fandoms,
whether in the form of fanzines, online forums, or fan fiction writing,
Andrejevic, focusing on the phenomena surrounding writings on the online forum
Watching Television Without Pity, comes to much grimmer conclusions. For him,
if the traditional gender hierarchy is challenged online as women finally find
a chance to be heard, this happens within the confines of a new and
exploitative kind of economy whereby “the result is not necessarily an
emancipatory privileging of decentralized networking but the universalization
of forms of exploitation associated with unpaid labor” (Andrejevic, 42). In
other words, the newfound online expressive outlet is inscribed within in a new
economy which, instead of creating a space for expression by women and marginalized groups, is enlisting
all participants in a newly ubiquitous standard form of unpaid labor. Furthermore,
he states that “the lure of interactivity loses some of its luster. Rather than
a progressive challenge to a nonparticipatory medium, it offers to divert the
threat of activism into the productive activity of marketing and market
research” (Andrejevic, 40). Where Jenkins observes producers in the 70s and 80s
feeling threatened by fan fiction and ready to prosecute editors of resistant fan
content (475), in 2008 Andrejevic writes about producers’ growing interest in
the fandoms’ capacity as both marketing strategy and as sites to off-load market
research onto voluntary viewer-posters. Now the producers encourage fandoms
both as transmedia market expansion opportunities and as loci where the
producers are the ones doing the poaching.
In recent years we’ve seen a surge in
cinematic, quality TV, which materializes through calculated risks by producers.
In a speaking engagement for a class I took last semester, Damon Lindelof, creator
of Watchmen, spoke to the idea of channeling users’ online engagement as a
springboard for a creative edge in the show. He said that the many enigmatic/confusing
elements about the show would normally work against the show’s success for the
medium of TV – because you can’t trust audiences to keep watching something
they found cryptic. He found it pitchable only if balanced with strategies to
keep audiences engaged. One of the main strategies is… reliance on online discussion boards. Audiences
go online and share their thoughts, speculate, remain engaged between episodes,
and rely on other viewers to validate their confusion. This way, they develop
an interest in getting through the series “together.” While Lindelof saw the
show as a form of cutting-edge, challenging, quality content that relies on
viewers’ intelligence rather than on repetitions and conditioning of the TV of
the olden days, Andrejevic would probably say that this is another case of TV’s
creativity at work to dupe the consumers into taking “pleasure in identifying with
the insiders” (40).
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