#istuffedup

As a bit of background, The Shefrin article sorts Creator involvement with it’s audience/ fans into two different ends of a spectrum. For instance, Peter Jackson is described as a Creator/ Producer who embraces fan involvement and uses momentum from fan involvement to help fan the flame of fan sharing and co-producing and therefor increase the symbolic capital as well as the economic capital and of course, equity of his media. Conversely, however, George Lucus is shown to be “arrogant” towards fans, and in some ways alienating fans and trying not to allow members of the Star Wars fandom to “co-produce” the Star Wars Universe, using his own prestige and power to make his series economically viable. We can use this spectrum to look at other producers, and their fandoms, such as the recent outburst of Shrek fanfiction.

Although the success of the Shrek Cult and fandom base isn’t a massive spike, one of the main YouTube accounts uploading much of this content, for example has had a consistently slightly bell shaped growth curve of subscribers over the last 6 months. Shrek has exploded through our news feeds and onto YouTube channels, and the way DreamWorks dealt with the situation is reminiscent of Lucus Arts and 20th Century Fox’s reactions towards fan involvement as the custodians of the Star Wars universe (Shefrin, 2004). Specific examples of this are the original upload of Shrek is Love, Shrek is Life ( (YouTube Inc/ AirplaneRandy, 2014) which has been removed for two reasons, alleged copyright infringement, and infringing the community standards of YouTube by being inappropriate because of the sexual references contained in the video. This seems to fit fairly consistently with the “illegal pirates” interpretation of the fan fiction, and to me raises the question of where is the line drawn with consumer co-production (Shefrin, 2004).

Looking at the infrastructure of social media like YouTube, we can see why it is so easy for the line to be crossed in a big way, such as with Shrek is Love. YouTube is an easy way for fans to remix, and recreate media in ways they like, both in ways where the media is changed, and exact replicas of the media. Because YouTube is a great tool to broadcast (Burgess, 2009), it explains why this fan fiction caught fire because of its novelty value. YouTube also changes things because it allows for discussion about the media (in this case the fan fiction) and allows the audience to respond and interact with it by creating more fan fiction of a similar theme i.e. erotic fan fiction (Burgess, 2009).

This combination of factor led to this going viral and a large amount of clutter on our news feeds on Facebook and really raises the question about what extent we can use intellectual property in parody and fan fiction.

REFERENCE LIST

Burgess, l. a. (2009). Chapter Two : YouTube and the Mainstream Media. In l. a. Burgess, Youtube : digital media and society series (p. Cambridge). 15-37: Polity Press.

Shefrin, E. (2004). Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Participatory Fandom: Mapping New Congruencies between the Internet and Media Entertainment Culture. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 261–281.