Posted by fanhackers-mods

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Fannish communities feel a sense of ownership over their media, but this feeling does not make them powerful in a sense.

Like the poachers of old, fans operate from a position of cultural marginality and social weakness. Like other popular readers, fans lack direct access to the means of commercial cultural production and have only the most limited resources with which to influence entertainment industry’s decisions. (…) Within the cultural economy, fans are peasants, not propreitors, a recognition which must contextualize our celebration of strategies of popular resistance.

Jenkins, Henry. 1992. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge.
This cultural marginality appears in the definition of fandoms and in the past few posts, I was looking at fandoms through the lens of ‘save our show’ campaigns with Savage (2014).

First, we discussed how viewing communities and a sense of ownership develops which enables these campaigns. This affection also appeared in what viewers wrote in their letter campaigns but was far from the only or even most effective tool they used.
Savage (2014) describe a variety methods. One way was to prove to be valuable as an auidance despite the Nielsen ratings which is possible through highlighting certain characteristics of the community: their demographic attributes or their loyalty.

Niche marketing (for example, gay programming) or strategic diversity values demographic attributes, particularly attributes that – in advertisers’ eyes – are connected to purchasing power or potential interest in certain particular products.
Sender, Katherine. 2007. “Dualcasting: Bravo’s Gay Programming and the Quest for Women Audiences.” In Cable Visions: Television beyond Broadcasting, edited by Sarah Banet-Weiser, Cynthia Chris, and Anthony Freitas, 302–18. New York: New York University Press.
Patterson, Eleanor. 2018. “ABC’s #TGIT and the Cultural Work of Programming Social Television.” In “Social TV Fandom and the Media Industries,” edited by Myles McNutt, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 26. http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2018.1147.

Audience loyalty is an emotional investment that can translate to longterm planning and, also, purchasing power.
Abbott, S. 2010. The Cult TV book: From Star Trek to Dexter, New Approaches to TV Outside the Box. Soft Skull Press.
In other cases, audiences looked for sponsors and advertisers themselves or the already existing viewing community advertised the show to potential new viewers or educated each other in how to watch the show the right way (through broadcast, cable, streaming etc.), the right way here being the ones that generates the best data.
Data fandom is something we have discussed before in this post. Just like then, no matter if we see these cases as the producers guiding the behaviour of fandom or fandom behaving in a way that makes it so that the producers will find beneficial to make certain decisions, at the end of the day, it is the logic of the market that is behind these behaviours. We would have to say: everything is for sale, including…
Savage, Christina. 2014 “Chuck versus the Ratings: Savvy Fans and ‘Save Our Show’ Campaigns.” In “Fandom and/as Labor,” edited by Mel Stanfill and Megand Condis, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 15. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2014.0497

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