Today's technology hooks all those monkeys up with all those typewriters. Except in our Web 2.0 world, the typewriters aren't quite typewriters, but rather networked personal computers, and the monkeys aren't quite monkeys, but rather Internet users. And instead of creating masterpieces, these millions and millions of exuberant monkeys—many with no more talent in the creative arts than our primate cousins—are creating an endless digital forest of mediocrity.2
But fans' profuse contributions to the Internet can be regarded otherwise: as labor, Online fan productions constitute unauthorized marketing for a wide variety of commodities—almost every kind of product has attracted a fandom of some kind. This chapter will argue that fan activity, instead of being dismissed as insignificant and a waste of time at best and pathological at worst, should be valued as a new form of publicity and advertising, authored by volunteers, that corporations badly need in an era of market fragmentation. In other words, fan production is a category of work.
To date, the vast majority of fans' work has been unpaid. Like many creative activities that produce content for the Internet, fandom is a form of what Tiziana Terranova calls free labor. Terranova writes:
We call this excessive activity that makes the Internet a thriving and hyperactive medium “free labour"—a feature of the cultural economy at large, and animportant, yet unacknowledged, source of value inadvanced capitalist societies.... Far from being an “unreal", empty space, the Internet is animated by cultural and technical labour through and through, a continuous production of value which is completely immanent in the flows of the network society at large.3
At the start of the second decade of the 21st century, asthe question of pay for creative online labor is becoming critical for a wide variety of industries, including journalism and higher education, and as creative workers' organizations such as the Writers Guild of America and the Freelancers Union loudly campaign for more recognition of online production as deserving of payment, we are at a ripe moment for establishing the fact that fandom is a form of free labor and for calling uponfans, scholars, and the corporations that benefit from fan activity to seriously consider the question of whether fans should be compensated for their work.
Hebdige: Subcultural Style
This chapter's primary objective is to make clear that fan activity constitutes a kind of work. To that end, we will review key works in cultural studies, particularly scholarship on subcultures and fan communities, which argue that fandom is a form of active production, not passive reception.
In his landmark book Subculture, Dick Hebdige points out how queer subcultures and youth subcultures (teddy boys, punk rockers, biker gangs)transform ordinary objects into signifiers of style—style that marks the difference, the distinction, of the subculture's members from (what constitutes in the subculture's view) normative, homogeneous, dominant society. Hebdige writes:
Fandomas Free Labor
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