Fandom, Participatory Culture and Cultural Value - A Critical Review

如果我们试图理解文化的价值，我们首先需要了解那些对文化的某些方面最重要的人：粉丝和狂热者。成为粉丝已经成为一种越来越普遍的观众体验，大多数媒体消费者通过他们的情感偏好来协商数字时代提供的大量内容-电视节目，电影，小说，运动队，艺术家，漫画，戏剧，音乐家，流派，诗人或作曲家，我们特别喜欢，经常回来，经常收集大量的信息。反过来，这些扇形物品是一种享受，有时是纯粹的快乐，但也是一种归属感和自我表达。在一个快速变化的世界里，它们向我们自己和他人表明我们是谁，从而沟通和保持一种认同感。然而，粉丝不仅是媒体和文化的消费者，他们也是文化的积极参与者，在很多情况下成为文化的生产者。在数字媒体时代，大多数媒体消费者很容易获得媒体制作技术，例如，拥有高清视频和录音功能的智能手机，免费的视频编辑软件随处可见，互联网通过YouTube、LiveJournal或社交网站等门户网站提供了简单的分发途径，用户生成的内容是我们媒体领域日益重要的一部分——其中大部分是由粉丝的热情和兴趣驱动的。同样，粉丝通过评论或维基类型的网站协同工作来创造价值，对许多消费者来说，这些网站成为构建他们文化消费的同伴信息的重要空间。然而，在当代公民和消费者面临着前所未有的艺术、文化和娱乐选择的环境中，我们通过粉丝的情感立场来选择构建我们与文化的接触；从而倾向于选择我们已经喜欢，已经享受和已经熟悉的东西。因此，问题出现了，在我们的文化遭遇中，热情和狂热是否也可能有助于侵蚀未知的挑战，幻想和“难以理解的”，在一些文学和文化理论家看来，这些构成了艺术和文化的真正价值，因此它们有可能改变我们生活的世界，让我们生活得更好。该项目考察了这些相互冲突的立场，并通过对过去在文化、媒体和艺术领域对粉丝和热情形式的研究进行全面回顾，回答了我们如何在数字时代概念化参与性文化和粉丝的文化、社会、经济和政治价值的问题。本综述比较了不同研究的实证结果，确定了跨研究的更广泛趋势，批判性地检查了当前研究结果所基于的方法及其理论结论的合理性，并指出了未来需要研究的领域，以便更全面地描绘出粉丝和参与性文化的挑战和好处。

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.