{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7","title":"DIGITAL LABOR THE INTERNET AS PLAYGROUND AND FACTORY","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780415896948","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7","id":"a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7","uuid":"a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7","title":"DIGITAL LABOR THE INTERNET AS PLAYGROUND AND FACTORY","normalized_title":"digitallabortheinternetasplaygroundandfactory","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780415896948","isbns":["9780415896948","9780415896955","9780203145791"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":267,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/DIGITAL%20LABOR%20THE%20INTERNET%20AS%20PLAYGROUND%20AND%20FACTORY","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7/search"},"page":{"printed_page":108,"pdf_page":115,"physical_index":115,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"bf6298ec193bd6564342caa051b5d0b5adace1f44a2ff9bd6d2ed2e18cf7afaa"},"chapter":"DIGITAL LABOR","content":"Fan Volunteerism\n\nWe can now postulate several reasons for fans' refusal to labor under anything other than a model of volunteerism.\n\nAs mentioned at the start of this chapter, the concept of fandom has, for a long while, borne connotations of madness, social marginalization, and abnormality, and inherent in those connotations is the assumption that fans are possessed— psychologically and emotionally enslaved—by particular objects and texts. This definition of fandom as a state of passive reception verging on, or tippinginto, insanity has undoubtedly set a low bar for what fans hope to define as their rights vis-à-vis larger society. When a group is categorized as deviant or subnormal, it typically strives for no more than the right to exist and to operate without interference. Moral panics have arisen around a number of medía fandoms, from comic book fans in the 1950s to rap and hip-hop fans in the 1990s, and social censure has been applied to a far greater range of fandoms, from Trekkies to soap opera viewers to video gamers; because so many fan groups have experienced rejection and criticism for their enthusiasms over the course of the last century, an integral part of fan sensibility is knowing when to conceal one's fannish interests and when to out oneself as a fan. The pseudonymity of online communication permits people to operate as fans discreetly, and this can be thought of as a form of closeting, for many people rarely discuss their Internet fan activities in their face-to-face social interactions. The Internet permits individuals to hide their fan identities, or rather, to protect their “real\" identities and social spheres from any associations with fandom. A group that is largely closeted is usually far from eager to publicly organize and issue economic demands.\n\nThe notion of fandom has become a more accepted and privileged term in marketing and consumer circles—companies understand that their products need fans, followers, and friends online and in the real world—but even when considered a worthwhile use of time and money, fandom is regarded as a marginal, recreational, just-for-fun activity, not as central to a person's professional development or as a legitimate foundation for a career in the creative industries\n\nIn addition to the fact that fandom is widely categorized as pure leisure and completely outside the “serious\" realms of people's lives, such as work, fans perception that what they do is explicitly anticommercial prevents them from considering what they do as warranting pay.Subcultures often organize in opposition to social norms, as Hebdige points out, and their members remake, rework, and find new uses for ordinary objects partly to defy those objects' advertised uses as a methodof disrupting society's habitual flows. Style can be a signal of disturbance, of breaking with the behaviors and beliefs that characterize the mainstream, and infusing commodities with nonnormative meanings to define a subculturalstyle is one way to reject capitalism's proclivity for treating everybody as exactly the same as everybody else, reducing all to equivalent, interchangeable consumers.\n\n108\n\nInterrogating Modes ofDigital Labor","previous_page":107,"next_page":109}