Research Methods Project

I accidentally deleted all my tags when I opened the journal articles in Windows

Yeah updating here is a serious time-drain

Date completed: 1 Aug 2016

Womanthology: Heroic and Veronica Mars are our case studies. Each successful campaign framed their fans’ financial, emotional and creative investments properly and fulfilled their transformative capacity and ideas of fan participation. Even though the creative process is still one-way, fans feel better when they are explicitly courted as a project’s primary backers, leading to the moral economy growing.

Fans support each other by financing each others’ works sometimes, through fan art, fan fiction or cosplay commissions. Big companies doing this can be offloading the risk and financial burden onto fans, but fans may be rewarded that they will have more if the project succeeds.

Date completed: 1 Aug 2016

Affective economics in relation to crowdfunding focusses on fan-ancing, where media fans are targeted by crowdfunding campaigns. Veronica Mars’ fan-consumers as ‘crowdfunding poachers’ who made the Kickstarter meaningful in relation to their own fan identities were doing so willingly to commodify their fandom. 

Affective economics does not merely allow media producers to exploit fan engagement, it also calls upon producers to perform the ongoing emotional labour of a coherent ‘social front’ where fan-like identities and decommoditising discourses are mobilised. There is still fan agency being displayed though, rather than these being process occurring behind their backs, and the fans ‘poach’ the kickstarter crowdfunding process by negotiating how this is meaningful to them.

Rob Thomas was still the writer, the fans only produced the money, so technically the fans weren’t creating anything creatively, only creating the opportunity to get their sequel film. So there wasn’t any fan creativity happening. By tactically poaching from the crowdfunding campaign, fans engaged with it personally and socially via different agendas, experiences and emotions, which actually challenges the idea that there was no fan input at all. 

Kickstarter campaigns can be designed to value the emotional investment of fans’ use and interaction with the media and then exchanging it for monetary gain and production capital, such as offering experiences and products that feel personal rather than the standardised commodities. Fans may poach from a crowdfund by interpreting it not only as securing symbolic proximity to the showrunner/production, but also as offering limited edition or time sensitive merchandise.

Date completed: 1 Aug 2016

This one was about Kindle Worlds, which is definitely about trying to get money from the fans. While some fans might contribute to it, most people I’ve encountered in fandom have the opinion that that would be totally selling out and very disrespectful to the spirit of fandom, i.e. the moral economy. You can’t even have explicit content there, so what’s the point; honestly xD But this is a good experiment from Amazon to see if:

fanfiction harms the canon or not

whether canon actually benefits from fan fiction

how much (financially and other wise) does fan fiction benefit canon

Date completed: 1 Aug 2016

This paper argues that media producers are purposefully cultivating fans out of their young audiences in order to satisfy their own capitalist desires (interesting! Continue). The existing youth consumer culture in the USA has fostered a strong connection in children believing their material objects define their social status, leading to huge spending by parents as their children become the company’s guerilla marketers (LMAO Learn to say no to your kids though). There also continues an infantilisation ethos where adults are encouraged to ‘remain young’ and children wish to grow up faster. Nickelodeon even has a virtual city called Nicktropolis where children can play in this MMORPG, training them for future interaction and methods of play. 

As fandom becomes less about being situated in the margins and more about the mainstream and commercialised practices, the line between fandom and consumerism will disappear and the social and political implications of being a fan may be resituated as characteristics of being an engaged national citizen. Yet it is unclear if the fan is being more commercialised or if the consumer is appropriating the fan experience.

Adults may also become fans of kids shows as they follow the infantilisation ethos or rely on cartoons to bring back nostalgia (e,g. adult fans of SpongeBob Squarepants)

Date completed: 1 Aug 2016

Some quotes:

“While fan work has become more visible as a social practice in recent years, fans’ creative practices remain contested and debated. Fan work challenges traditional notions of authorship, ownership and labor practices around creative production.”

“Stigma around romance and fan writing is part of a long legacy of public concern around women’s writing and reading practices...Scholarship examining the relationship between fan fiction and commercial romance has a tendency to either rapidly align the two modes of writing and move on or position them in opposition to each other.”

“Moving away from the metaphor of the ever-exapnding archive, Mafalda Stasi describes slash fan fiction instead as an ‘intertextual palimpsest’ connecting ‘the various types of intertextuality in slash... to other textual strategies in different genres, styles and periods’. Stasi uses the palimpsest - a surface that has been cleared for new work, but still contains traces of what came before - as a metaphor for fans’ use of existing characters and story-worlds as archetypal tools with which fan writers test new possibilities and variant histories.”

Date completed: 30 July 2016

Using Bruce Sterling’s technosocial concept of the Spime as a means of investigating the relationship between crowdfunding and effect on particular audiences, through examples of the Veronica Mars film, Wish I was here film and Darci’s Walk of Shame, we find that this ecosystem is a technosocial system, and fan participation in this requires a more procedural examination of the relationship between fandom and technology.

Spime is a mix of the words ‘space’ and ‘time’, expressing the idea that objects exist not only physically but in moments of time. The object becomes a lifecycle of technological transformation and uses time as another dimension an object can be measured. Spimes are individual and unique, and a Spimatic fandom sees the PROCESS of fan activity as key to fan affect through participation. Since every fandom is special, so is every fan unique. Their individual interaction creates a temporal exploration of crowdfunding and fandom. The spimatic effect of a kickstarter campaign means that even if a product fails to materialise, the overall process continues to exist. (The HanFree) As a product, it is nowhere, as a Spime, it is everywhere.

Different fans embrace different aspects of the web for different purposes, hence not everything can be summarised in broad sweeping terms about whether fans are being exploited or not. Some fans are aware, while others might not be.

In the Digi-Gratis economy, monetary, social and cultural values for products are interchangeable. Each element is a node in a networks of value and exchange within an affective media environment, and fan productivity isn’t always sanctioned by the industries but continues anyway.

Date completed: 30 July 2016

This article focussed on how the fans create items for their fandom to show their love and when it gets too popular, it gets commercialised by the original owners of the creative content and fans get exploited and told to step down or out of the market they created. This means risk gets shifted to fans and the large media companies take little or no risk throughout the whole commercialising or creation scheme.

When customers, viewers and users get rebranded as fans, the companies mimic fannish passions as user-generated content, using the existing infrastructure that fans have created for free. 

Date completed: 30 July 2016

This paper was mostly in the music/independent record making fandom where people used a crowdfunding platform called MegaTotal to support musicians and artists directly, sometimes getting a share of the profits when the label was successfully released.

Notable parts from the paper:

“the unstable nature of today’s entertainment industries, in conjunction with the mergence of the social networking sites, creates new phenomena that call for attention on the part of researchers... Crowdfunding can be defined as ‘the act of informally generating and distributing funds, usually online, by groups of people for specific social, personal, entertainment or other purposes”

“crowdfunding is a viable alternative for artists who are interested in financing their works but do not have the necessary resources or proposals from record labels, publishers, or other institutions... this new business model... could show how the relationship between project initiators and contributors is shaped and how the legal system affects the effectiveness of crowdfunding.”

“Fans’ creative expression adds new contexts to the act of consumption, transforming it into production, which results in the circulation of fan-written texts, fan-made movies and recordings, etc.”

“Three types of productivity by fans: semiotic, enunciative, and textual productivity”

“Crowdfunding is a very special case of the social networking phenomenon. It combines the advantages of Web 2.0 with the dynamism of fan communities”

Date completed: 31 July 2016

Not 100% the information I needed, but raises good thoughts about fandom within a few frameworks, notably the Alternate Reality Game (ARG) and fandom-as-carnivale. Also, spoilers and being forerunners of the text/fandom gives you cultural capital to show off among your fellow fans (probably why we ask “Are you up to date yet” ALL THE DAMN TIME)

An ARG is a game-like narrative played both off- and online, which uses multiple modes of mediation to immerse the player in the game’s narrative. players often roleplay and act with non-players in the real world. Examples include: writing fanfiction for fellow readers and lurkers, or running a RP account on social media.

Date completed: 31 July 2016

Long-term implications must be monitored since crowdfunding has only been around less than a decade in its current iteration

Out of successful projects, many of them are delayed 

Most crowdfunded projects seek to raise small amounts of capital, often under $1000, in initiate a particular one-time project (e.g. event) and capital is usually provided by friends and family 

Reward-based crowdfunding: the generally accepted model where funders receive a reward for backing a project 

This study eliminated the following:

extreme fundraising goals (over $1m in goals)

foreign Kickstarter projects (to focus on US ones)

Social networks and crowdfunding have a huge relationship

Herding and bystander effect definitely occur amongst funders

86% of projects had videos while 17% provided rapid updates

Date Completed: 31 July 2016

Early stage creative projects and ventures usually use local visions and community ties to overcome high risk and uncertainty, but crowdfunding is busting that preconception

JOBS Act: Jumpstart Our Business Startups (2012)

legalises crowdfunding for equity by relaxing various restrictions concerning the sale of securities

Crowdfunding started in arts and creativity-based industries (recorded music, film, video games)

Research on non-equity crowdfunding found:

Funding is not geographically constrained

Funding is highly skewed, eg 1% of projects net 70% of all money

Funding propensity increases with accumulated capital and may lead to herding

Friends and family are a big early role

Funding follows existing agglomeration (doesn’t trickle down to industries that don’t actually have money, instead going to ones that do)

Funders and creators are overoptimistic

Crowdfunding capital may substitute for traditional sources of financing, such as home equity loans, shown when house prices rose, letting businesses use home equity more, entrepreneurs turning to crowdfunding decreased

Crowdfunding can act as cheap funds through:

Better matches with most willing customers

Bundling with goods that are otherwise difficult to trade (e.g. recognition, early access)

Information through communication with investors and creators

For funders, the benefits are:

Access to investment opportunities at all ranks of investing

Early access to new products

Community participation

Support for a product, service or idea

Formalisation of contracts, previously social or informal financing from family and friends can be tracked and held accountable for

Creator risks are:

disclosure agreement, as it opens one up to imitation

loss of bargaining power, Quest problem with suppliers

Oversubscription draining a small team’s energy and ability to deliver the actual product

Inability to prevent funders with different visions and strong personalities from joining and adversely affecting the dialogue

Funder risks are:

creator incompetence

fraud

project risk

The free-rider issue is such a problem because most funders wait for other people to do the research

Date completed: 31 July 2016

Important pointers:

Crowdsourcing =/= crowdfunding

The mass psychology/internet psychology of crowdfunding

“Crowdfunding in Europe” - actual research topic section

crowdsourcing: the process of outsourcing tasks to a large, often anonymous number of individuals (usually on the internet) and drawing on their assets, resources, knowledge or expertise.

Delimiting terms such as:

crowd donations

crowd sponsoring

crowd pre-selling/pre-ordering

crowd lending

crowd equity/investing

Crowdfunding platforms are intermediaries (like an investment bank underwriting the initial public offering)

Classification of commercial background:

Not-For-Profit (charity, common pool)

For Profit (commercial)

Intermediate (art, entertainment, music, films)

Original organisational embeddedness: (how institutional it is)

Independent and single (people only)

Embedded (run by a company, NGO, etc)

Start Up (starts individual may grow into firm)

Intrinsic rewards are better for crowdfunding, like:

personal identification with project goals

contribution to societally important mission

satisfaction in community and success

being engaged in and interacting with the team (hence the $1 reward to keep updated I reckon)

chance to expand one’s work

chance to attract funders in return for own project

Threshold pledge model: all or nothing

predominant model

good for all involved

Microlending models

Investment or equity models (usually in music business)

Holding model (sort of investment)