Fandom, Participatory Culture and Cultural Value - A Critical Review

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If we try to understand the value of culture, we need to first understand those to whom certain aspects of culture matter most: fans and enthusiasts. Being a fan has become an increasingly universal audience experience with most media consumers negotiating the vast range of content that has become available in the digital age through their affective preferences - the television shows, films, novels, sports teams, artists, comics, plays, musicians, genres, poets or composers whom we hold particularly dearly, return to frequently and often gather a large amount of information on. In turn these fan objects serve as a source of enjoyment, sometimes outright pleasure, but also of belonging and an expression of ourselves. In a quickly changing world, they indicate to ourselves and others who we are and thus communicate and maintain a sense of identity. However, fans are not only consumers of media and culture, they are also active participants in culture who in many cases become cultural producers. In the era of digital media in which technologies of media production are easily accessible to most media consumers with, for instance, smart phones boasting HD video and sound recording, free video editing software being widely available, and the internet offering easy distribution routes through portals such as YouTube, LiveJournal or social networking sites, user generated content is an increasingly important part of our media landscapes - much of it driven by fans' enthusiasm and interests. Similarly, fans create value by working collaboratively through review- or wiki-type sites that for many consumers become important spaces of peer information that structure their cultural consumption.Yet, in an environment of unprecedented choice of arts, culture and entertainment that confronts contemporary citizens and consumers, we make the selections that structure our engagements with culture through the affective position of the fan; and thereby tend to choose what we already like, already enjoy and already are familiar with. Hence, the question emergences whether enthusiasm and fandom might also serve to erode the challenges of the unknown, the fantastic and the 'hard-to-make-sense-of' in our cultural encounters, which in the eyes of some literary and cultural theorists constitute the true value or art and culture - and hence their potential to change the world in which we live for the better.This project examines these conflicting positions and answers the question of how we can conceptualise the cultural, social, economic and political value of participatory culture and fandom in the digital age by conducting a comprehensive review of past research on forms of fandom and enthusiasm across the spectrum of culture, media and arts. This review compares empirical findings of different studies and identifies broader trends across studies, critically examines the methodologies on which current findings are based as well as the soundness of their theoretical conclusions, and indicates areas of future research that will be required in order to more fully map the challenges and benefits of fandom and participatory culture.