EXTREMELY rough draft of thesis Ch 6.
(so julie can see where her ideas ran off to)
Chapter 6
Conclusion
Not Just the Headlamp of an Oncoming Train
Ultimately, the primary discourses in circulation with respect to Xena fans, across genres, speakers, and audiences, are antagonistic; though there are (crucial) moments of positivity, the implications of which I will discuss at the end of this chapter, these never fully escape the shadow of negativity. Beginning with the dominant discourse, we see that an overwhelming majority of the content derides fans, and that this is frequently reinforced by rhetorical Othering. For their part, Xena’s makers, though frequently indicating a good opinion of fans, are nevertheless uneasy about fandom and move in and out of stereotyped discourses when speaking about and (especially) representing fans. Even fans themselves, who would be expected to have a completely positive attitude toward their group, have been interpellated into the cultural devaluation of “fan”; they resist this, but do so only as far as their own subjectivity, deploying anti-fan discourses uncritically against other fans in a way that points to fandom as a melancholic space of the loss of “proper” media consumerhood.
Anti-fan Discourse in Perspective
Though this hostility seems gratuitous, it serves a purpose. The fan’s intense relationship to mass media violates our culture’s valuation of both detached, intellectual enjoyment over intimate engagement and “high” art over popular culture, which are themselves intimately related. As Bourdieu, in a reading reminiscent of both Barthes and Marx, points out, this set of values comes from the elite but is passed off as universal “good taste.” Transgressions against “taste” generate so much outrage because they are transgressions of “everyone’s” values; consequently, fans can never escape antagonism. Importantly, however, neither would the dominant culture ever want them to, for fans are the constitutive outside of acceptable media consumption. This is true both at the micro level, where the “excess” of the fan lets non-fan media consumers justify their own practices, and with respect to maintaining the current power structure-the specter of the fan keeps non-fans in line.
This role of fandom leads almost inevitably to stereotypes. On one hand, these function as a shorthand for the fan menace, condensing all that is inappropriate about fandom into easily digestible bites (and bytes). On the other hand, stereotypes, like visual representation, have a sheen of obviousness to them that keeps anyone from looking too closely at fandom, and in this way, too, they help to perpetuate the structure that produces fandom as Other. These representational tropes become the baseline for understanding fans, such that mentions of fans must engage with them to ensure intelligibility. In exactly the same way that generic constraints shape what can be said and by what means in the forums of mainstream media interviews or television shows, discussions of fans come with certain expectations as to the form (a disapproving tone) and content (extensive descriptions of extreme behavior).
However, it would be a mistake to consider intelligibility as a purely repressive phenomenon. Certainly, it is a relatively closed system, for what we “know” about fans defines what it is possible to say about fans, which then reinforces the “knowledge” that was its own genesis, but at the same time code is the condition of possibility for communication. For there to be meaning, there has to be an interpretive framework, such that current representational modes with respect to fans are what makes it possible to talk about fans at all; this is to say that the legibility of “fan” (despite the form it currently takes) is the foundation from which it becomes possible for fans to have effects, as demonstrated by the existence of counterdiscourses of fans as normal or good. Though fans may seem impossibly outside the mainstream, “fan” is nevertheless a knowable subject-position; consequently, what fans have to say has a chance to matter.
The Fan/Queer Intersection and its Implications
Throughout this project, I have returned to the idea of Xena’s lesbian appeal. In the mainstream media-and, by some estimations (including, at times, their own), in the eyes of the show’s makers-its purpose is purely titillation: it kept people talking about the show, it got people to start watching, and, importantly, it kept (some) people watching in hopes of an explicit denouement. To many fans, however-and, at other times, to the makers-“subtext” is a fact, a clear hint of an objectively existing love that just happens to dare not speak its name. Ultimately, the sexual orientation of Xena and Gabrielle cannot be definitively classified, and it’s not even the right question to ask; rather, it is essential to understand the ways in which the practice of Xena fandom is inextricable from queerness.
At a basic level, there is a sense that it takes lesbian eyes to see the show in this fashion-only they could turn the innocent homosociality of a female-buddy show into something erotic. However, though this is certainly a discourse in circulation, it is equally clearly oversimplified, because show makers sometimes exempt lesbian fans from the negativity they apply to “fans” as a whole or even explicitly consider the lesbian point of view; crucially, the existence of subtext, regardless of whether the purpose was titillation or a genuine nod toward lesbian viewers, points to lesbians as an important audience to be cultivated. Moreover, there were lesbian fans, and the show was important to them for a number of reasons: as a way to come out, as a way to see people like them on television, or even just as a fun weekly round of decoding. The instantiation of fan/queer as queer-as-fan, then, points to the ways in which Xena and its queer fans are fundamentally interdependent.
The other side of fan/queer is “fan” as queer. On one hand, this is literal; dominant discourses around fandom, and Xena fandom in particular, are intimately bound up with a certain set of anxieties about gender and sexuality. Representing male science fiction/fantasy fans as inappropriately gendered and sexualized is as old and common as representations of male science fiction/fantasy fans; discourses around Xena break with this, but only insofar as male fans of the show are, at times, described as inappropriately, immaturely sexual rather than solely afraid of girls (as is the norm). Similarly, female fans are frequently classified as big, scary, inappropriately gendered women, which is seen as essentially coextensive with lesbianism. Both iterations point to the complete inextricability of sexuality from gender in our cultural constructions of these items: to deviate from one set of norms means transgressing the other. This merges with an uneasiness about the confluence of television and sexuality in general; this intersection is positioned as a “failure” of “healthy, normal, adult” sexualities as the virtual takes the place of the “real,” kink replaces “normal,” and, most importantly, homosexual supplants heterosexual.
On the other hand, “fan” as queer is a structural relation. Fandom is, as The Last noted, something one might “be in the closet” about, akin to queerness in that it violates norms, is culturally devalued, and makes people who aren’t part of the group anxious about the possibility of their slipping into it; consequently, like homosexuality, one’s fandom is something one may not want to disclose widely. Moreover, as Julie Levin Russo perceptively notes, fandom’s omnivorous appetite and transgression of boundaries make “queer,” in a queer theory/academic sense, a valuable means to articulate its “menagerie of hybrid forms populating and copulating in today's convergent mediasphere - from the status of internet video (a ‘queer’ intermixture of broadcast and broadband) to the position of the fan (a ‘queer’ cyborg who inhabits the liminal spaces within texts and industry).” Russo argues that “there is an affinity between more explicitly queer fan activities and the increasingly perverse and compound strategies of media reproduction, one that goes beyond the purely geometric homology of their shared hybridity,” such that the mechanisms of “queering” might be one means of understanding subversion of dominant cultural control of the media.
What Xena Teaches: Strategies for the End of the Media as we know them
One thing is at least relatively certain: Xena fans were able to affect the show, and in so doing achieve a form of lesbian representation. If we’re interested in challenging the current structures of power with respect to the media, determining what it is about this particular group of fans that brought this about, when so many other fandoms have not had this success, is essential. First, and most obviously, Xena fandom differed from what went before it because its rise coincided with the rise of the internet; suddenly, fans had new technological means of connecting and giving a more unified voice to their desires, and this made them easier to hear. Of course, any show that was Xena’s contemporary or came along later also had these means at their disposal, so this is not a complete explanation.
Another piece of the puzzle can be found in the conditions of the show’s production. Xena was produced for syndication, which provided something of a buffer from the normal network-oriented system of television distribution; it was filmed half way around the world from the studio, also increasing the makers’ freedom; finally, many of the people making the show, particularly the executive producers, had more film than television experience, and in particular had worked on many independent films, such that they would have a different sense of what would be appropriate. To determine how much this contributed to fan influence, and in what ways, Xena would have to be compared to other shows whose constraints of production differed, but its atypical means of production is certainly a good candidate for having encouraged the type of producer-consumer relationship we see with Xena.
Perhaps most importantly, and certainly most counterintuitively, fan influence on Xena seems to be inextricable from discussion of fans in the mainstream media. The very forum which would seem to undermine the possibility of fan agency helps make it possible because, as I’ve suggested, media representation produces a feedback loop. The fans do something, the media reports on it, and this brings attention to the fan activity, such that more fans do it, makers learn about it, and future news stories have to address it. In light of this economy of representation, there is a sense in which the more sensational the representation, the better it is for fan power, provided that, along with the lurid elements, fan ideas and accomplishments are also in circulation.
What we learn from the case of Xena fandom, then, is that it is possible to change our culture’s structures of power as they currently exist by working within them. Fan activities led to the birth of a lesbian superhero, and they did it by participating on television’s own terms, getting television makers to give them what they wanted in a mainstream space. Some of those with an interest in challenging hegemony call for refusing to participate in our culture’s primary institutions-such as the mainstream media-but this is both impractical, given the saturation of media in our quotidian lives, and amounts to ducking the problem, as those people who “drop out,” to use Timothy Leary’s phrase, may end up better off, but they are leaving the larger problem for someone else. Instead, it is important not to shy away from the mechanisms of power currently in operation, for these can themselves be used to intervene in power; certainly, the way things are is entrenched, and this has to be a gradual process, but achieving institutional change means providing a better baseline for the next attempt at shuffling power, and the next.
The stumbling block to this vision of change is the strictures imposed by our culture’s current structures of intellectual property; it is generally agreed that intellectual property has been subject to increasing restriction. On one hand, as Henry Jenkins points out, in the past corporations might have had a vague sense that their IP was circulating outside their control, but with the advent of the internet “those transactions came out from behind closed doors” and consequently “represented a visible, public threat to the absolute control the culture industries asserted over their intellectual property,” such that corporations could take action against them without “busting into people’s homes at night.” On the other hand, this is perhaps an inevitable consequence of moving to an information economy; as Simone Murray notes, the majority of what large media companies own is “intangible intellectual property holdings,” and when “any circulation of a property outside the control of the corporate rights holder not only fails to generate revenue for the corporation but furthermore risks damaging the property’s public associations, thus also jeopardizing future revenue streams,” it begins to make sense that they would take action.
This also perhaps sheds light on when corporate rights holders choose to act to curtail uses of their IP and when they do not. From the corporate point of view, the Napster controversy, as the beginning of the intellectual property wars, set the tone for future discussions, such that corporations approach IP from the perspective of piracy. Thus, they are already on guard against any real or perceived theft, such that they will prosecute even non-commercial uses of their intellectual property and “trademarks have predominantly eclipsed copyright as the basis for such actions, given trademark law’s narrower fair use provisions and its lack of emphasis on the rights of the creator, in contrast to copyright law.” However, there are times when companies choose not to sue or issue cease-and-desist orders. Playing off of Jenkins’s metaphor of the fan as poacher, Murray terms this “the turning of the gamekeeper’s blind eye, rather than the legitimating of poaching per se,” noting that it is “a conditional agreement [by the corporation] not to enforce its IP rights for the precise period during which fan activities further its commercial interests.” Fan activities “further commercial interests” when fans provide highly effective word-of-mouth marketing, and this leads some companies to enter into quasi-friendly relations with fans, sharing exclusive information with them and letting them circulate it; this model discourages fans from poaching intellectual property by giving it to them and establishing a relationship, such that, as Murray suggests, “IP policing may be more effective when couched in the collegial language of fan community.” In this way, then, it is clear that both legal action and lack of action stem from the profit motive.
People are generally aware of intellectual property as representing a legal impediment to fan engagement with dominant-cultural texts; indeed, as Jenkins notes, some fans have put together a compendium detailing “how a range of different media franchises and individual authors have responded to fan fiction, identifying those who welcome and those who prohibit participation. The site’s goal is to allow fans to make an informed choice about the risks they face in pursuing their hobbies and interests.” The other restrictions imposed by current models of intellectual property, however, go unnoticed. These are the structural constraints, built into what Mia Consalvo, following Lawrence Lessig, terms “code.” Consalvo argues that “the rhetoric of the Internet as ‘naturally free’ from regulation and control is false. Rather, the Internet has been built through code, and specific decisions and values all went into that architecture,” which include the values of the male engineers who designed it and the national ideologies of the United States, where it was developed. Moreover, she points out, the internet has become increasingly privatized, which closes down possibilities “as code becomes more proprietary in its development and use”; the best example of this is the rise of video formats that “circumvent the easy ‘copy and paste’ usability of older standards,” thus keeping digital properties more fully under corporate control-and doing so in a more invisible way. The restrictions imposed by these technical specificities go unnoticed because they are constructed as highly specialized knowledge, known only to experts who, by virtue of their expertise, legitimately “decide the structure of the Internet. However, that leaves the nonprofessional with little or no voice in determining such future directions.”
Due to this aspect of the fan-media intersection and others, more research needs to be done. First, as I have already suggested, it is important to compare Xena to other shows whose fans’ activity produced different results, in the interest of identifying the characteristics of Xena that made fan influence possible. Similarly, it would be valuable to examine other success stories of fans influencing shows; between these two endeavors it might be possible to develop a taxonomy of influence. Additionally, the changing relationship of traditional media to the internet must be taken into account. Web-savvy corporations have, in recent years, begun to attempt to produce the kinds of content formerly under the purview of fandom, to domesticate this threat. Moreover, as suggested above, the corporate grip on intellectual property has been tightening since the passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and the scope and effect of such control is still evolving. Thus, there are many more pieces to this puzzle than I have been able to trace here, but I hope that this preliminary look serves to raise interesting questions and establish a few key premises from which democratizing the media can proceed.
sorry about the formating. LJ ate it.
Chapter 6
Conclusion
Not Just the Headlamp of an Oncoming Train
Ultimately, the primary discourses in circulation with respect to Xena fans, across genres, speakers, and audiences, are antagonistic; though there are (crucial) moments of positivity, the implications of which I will discuss at the end of this chapter, these never fully escape the shadow of negativity. Beginning with the dominant discourse, we see that an overwhelming majority of the content derides fans, and that this is frequently reinforced by rhetorical Othering. For their part, Xena’s makers, though frequently indicating a good opinion of fans, are nevertheless uneasy about fandom and move in and out of stereotyped discourses when speaking about and (especially) representing fans. Even fans themselves, who would be expected to have a completely positive attitude toward their group, have been interpellated into the cultural devaluation of “fan”; they resist this, but do so only as far as their own subjectivity, deploying anti-fan discourses uncritically against other fans in a way that points to fandom as a melancholic space of the loss of “proper” media consumerhood.
Anti-fan Discourse in Perspective
Though this hostility seems gratuitous, it serves a purpose. The fan’s intense relationship to mass media violates our culture’s valuation of both detached, intellectual enjoyment over intimate engagement and “high” art over popular culture, which are themselves intimately related. As Bourdieu, in a reading reminiscent of both Barthes and Marx, points out, this set of values comes from the elite but is passed off as universal “good taste.” Transgressions against “taste” generate so much outrage because they are transgressions of “everyone’s” values; consequently, fans can never escape antagonism. Importantly, however, neither would the dominant culture ever want them to, for fans are the constitutive outside of acceptable media consumption. This is true both at the micro level, where the “excess” of the fan lets non-fan media consumers justify their own practices, and with respect to maintaining the current power structure-the specter of the fan keeps non-fans in line.
This role of fandom leads almost inevitably to stereotypes. On one hand, these function as a shorthand for the fan menace, condensing all that is inappropriate about fandom into easily digestible bites (and bytes). On the other hand, stereotypes, like visual representation, have a sheen of obviousness to them that keeps anyone from looking too closely at fandom, and in this way, too, they help to perpetuate the structure that produces fandom as Other. These representational tropes become the baseline for understanding fans, such that mentions of fans must engage with them to ensure intelligibility. In exactly the same way that generic constraints shape what can be said and by what means in the forums of mainstream media interviews or television shows, discussions of fans come with certain expectations as to the form (a disapproving tone) and content (extensive descriptions of extreme behavior).
However, it would be a mistake to consider intelligibility as a purely repressive phenomenon. Certainly, it is a relatively closed system, for what we “know” about fans defines what it is possible to say about fans, which then reinforces the “knowledge” that was its own genesis, but at the same time code is the condition of possibility for communication. For there to be meaning, there has to be an interpretive framework, such that current representational modes with respect to fans are what makes it possible to talk about fans at all; this is to say that the legibility of “fan” (despite the form it currently takes) is the foundation from which it becomes possible for fans to have effects, as demonstrated by the existence of counterdiscourses of fans as normal or good. Though fans may seem impossibly outside the mainstream, “fan” is nevertheless a knowable subject-position; consequently, what fans have to say has a chance to matter.
The Fan/Queer Intersection and its Implications
Throughout this project, I have returned to the idea of Xena’s lesbian appeal. In the mainstream media-and, by some estimations (including, at times, their own), in the eyes of the show’s makers-its purpose is purely titillation: it kept people talking about the show, it got people to start watching, and, importantly, it kept (some) people watching in hopes of an explicit denouement. To many fans, however-and, at other times, to the makers-“subtext” is a fact, a clear hint of an objectively existing love that just happens to dare not speak its name. Ultimately, the sexual orientation of Xena and Gabrielle cannot be definitively classified, and it’s not even the right question to ask; rather, it is essential to understand the ways in which the practice of Xena fandom is inextricable from queerness.
At a basic level, there is a sense that it takes lesbian eyes to see the show in this fashion-only they could turn the innocent homosociality of a female-buddy show into something erotic. However, though this is certainly a discourse in circulation, it is equally clearly oversimplified, because show makers sometimes exempt lesbian fans from the negativity they apply to “fans” as a whole or even explicitly consider the lesbian point of view; crucially, the existence of subtext, regardless of whether the purpose was titillation or a genuine nod toward lesbian viewers, points to lesbians as an important audience to be cultivated. Moreover, there were lesbian fans, and the show was important to them for a number of reasons: as a way to come out, as a way to see people like them on television, or even just as a fun weekly round of decoding. The instantiation of fan/queer as queer-as-fan, then, points to the ways in which Xena and its queer fans are fundamentally interdependent.
The other side of fan/queer is “fan” as queer. On one hand, this is literal; dominant discourses around fandom, and Xena fandom in particular, are intimately bound up with a certain set of anxieties about gender and sexuality. Representing male science fiction/fantasy fans as inappropriately gendered and sexualized is as old and common as representations of male science fiction/fantasy fans; discourses around Xena break with this, but only insofar as male fans of the show are, at times, described as inappropriately, immaturely sexual rather than solely afraid of girls (as is the norm). Similarly, female fans are frequently classified as big, scary, inappropriately gendered women, which is seen as essentially coextensive with lesbianism. Both iterations point to the complete inextricability of sexuality from gender in our cultural constructions of these items: to deviate from one set of norms means transgressing the other. This merges with an uneasiness about the confluence of television and sexuality in general; this intersection is positioned as a “failure” of “healthy, normal, adult” sexualities as the virtual takes the place of the “real,” kink replaces “normal,” and, most importantly, homosexual supplants heterosexual.
On the other hand, “fan” as queer is a structural relation. Fandom is, as The Last noted, something one might “be in the closet” about, akin to queerness in that it violates norms, is culturally devalued, and makes people who aren’t part of the group anxious about the possibility of their slipping into it; consequently, like homosexuality, one’s fandom is something one may not want to disclose widely. Moreover, as Julie Levin Russo perceptively notes, fandom’s omnivorous appetite and transgression of boundaries make “queer,” in a queer theory/academic sense, a valuable means to articulate its “menagerie of hybrid forms populating and copulating in today's convergent mediasphere - from the status of internet video (a ‘queer’ intermixture of broadcast and broadband) to the position of the fan (a ‘queer’ cyborg who inhabits the liminal spaces within texts and industry).” Russo argues that “there is an affinity between more explicitly queer fan activities and the increasingly perverse and compound strategies of media reproduction, one that goes beyond the purely geometric homology of their shared hybridity,” such that the mechanisms of “queering” might be one means of understanding subversion of dominant cultural control of the media.
What Xena Teaches: Strategies for the End of the Media as we know them
One thing is at least relatively certain: Xena fans were able to affect the show, and in so doing achieve a form of lesbian representation. If we’re interested in challenging the current structures of power with respect to the media, determining what it is about this particular group of fans that brought this about, when so many other fandoms have not had this success, is essential. First, and most obviously, Xena fandom differed from what went before it because its rise coincided with the rise of the internet; suddenly, fans had new technological means of connecting and giving a more unified voice to their desires, and this made them easier to hear. Of course, any show that was Xena’s contemporary or came along later also had these means at their disposal, so this is not a complete explanation.
Another piece of the puzzle can be found in the conditions of the show’s production. Xena was produced for syndication, which provided something of a buffer from the normal network-oriented system of television distribution; it was filmed half way around the world from the studio, also increasing the makers’ freedom; finally, many of the people making the show, particularly the executive producers, had more film than television experience, and in particular had worked on many independent films, such that they would have a different sense of what would be appropriate. To determine how much this contributed to fan influence, and in what ways, Xena would have to be compared to other shows whose constraints of production differed, but its atypical means of production is certainly a good candidate for having encouraged the type of producer-consumer relationship we see with Xena.
Perhaps most importantly, and certainly most counterintuitively, fan influence on Xena seems to be inextricable from discussion of fans in the mainstream media. The very forum which would seem to undermine the possibility of fan agency helps make it possible because, as I’ve suggested, media representation produces a feedback loop. The fans do something, the media reports on it, and this brings attention to the fan activity, such that more fans do it, makers learn about it, and future news stories have to address it. In light of this economy of representation, there is a sense in which the more sensational the representation, the better it is for fan power, provided that, along with the lurid elements, fan ideas and accomplishments are also in circulation.
What we learn from the case of Xena fandom, then, is that it is possible to change our culture’s structures of power as they currently exist by working within them. Fan activities led to the birth of a lesbian superhero, and they did it by participating on television’s own terms, getting television makers to give them what they wanted in a mainstream space. Some of those with an interest in challenging hegemony call for refusing to participate in our culture’s primary institutions-such as the mainstream media-but this is both impractical, given the saturation of media in our quotidian lives, and amounts to ducking the problem, as those people who “drop out,” to use Timothy Leary’s phrase, may end up better off, but they are leaving the larger problem for someone else. Instead, it is important not to shy away from the mechanisms of power currently in operation, for these can themselves be used to intervene in power; certainly, the way things are is entrenched, and this has to be a gradual process, but achieving institutional change means providing a better baseline for the next attempt at shuffling power, and the next.
The stumbling block to this vision of change is the strictures imposed by our culture’s current structures of intellectual property; it is generally agreed that intellectual property has been subject to increasing restriction. On one hand, as Henry Jenkins points out, in the past corporations might have had a vague sense that their IP was circulating outside their control, but with the advent of the internet “those transactions came out from behind closed doors” and consequently “represented a visible, public threat to the absolute control the culture industries asserted over their intellectual property,” such that corporations could take action against them without “busting into people’s homes at night.” On the other hand, this is perhaps an inevitable consequence of moving to an information economy; as Simone Murray notes, the majority of what large media companies own is “intangible intellectual property holdings,” and when “any circulation of a property outside the control of the corporate rights holder not only fails to generate revenue for the corporation but furthermore risks damaging the property’s public associations, thus also jeopardizing future revenue streams,” it begins to make sense that they would take action.
This also perhaps sheds light on when corporate rights holders choose to act to curtail uses of their IP and when they do not. From the corporate point of view, the Napster controversy, as the beginning of the intellectual property wars, set the tone for future discussions, such that corporations approach IP from the perspective of piracy. Thus, they are already on guard against any real or perceived theft, such that they will prosecute even non-commercial uses of their intellectual property and “trademarks have predominantly eclipsed copyright as the basis for such actions, given trademark law’s narrower fair use provisions and its lack of emphasis on the rights of the creator, in contrast to copyright law.” However, there are times when companies choose not to sue or issue cease-and-desist orders. Playing off of Jenkins’s metaphor of the fan as poacher, Murray terms this “the turning of the gamekeeper’s blind eye, rather than the legitimating of poaching per se,” noting that it is “a conditional agreement [by the corporation] not to enforce its IP rights for the precise period during which fan activities further its commercial interests.” Fan activities “further commercial interests” when fans provide highly effective word-of-mouth marketing, and this leads some companies to enter into quasi-friendly relations with fans, sharing exclusive information with them and letting them circulate it; this model discourages fans from poaching intellectual property by giving it to them and establishing a relationship, such that, as Murray suggests, “IP policing may be more effective when couched in the collegial language of fan community.” In this way, then, it is clear that both legal action and lack of action stem from the profit motive.
People are generally aware of intellectual property as representing a legal impediment to fan engagement with dominant-cultural texts; indeed, as Jenkins notes, some fans have put together a compendium detailing “how a range of different media franchises and individual authors have responded to fan fiction, identifying those who welcome and those who prohibit participation. The site’s goal is to allow fans to make an informed choice about the risks they face in pursuing their hobbies and interests.” The other restrictions imposed by current models of intellectual property, however, go unnoticed. These are the structural constraints, built into what Mia Consalvo, following Lawrence Lessig, terms “code.” Consalvo argues that “the rhetoric of the Internet as ‘naturally free’ from regulation and control is false. Rather, the Internet has been built through code, and specific decisions and values all went into that architecture,” which include the values of the male engineers who designed it and the national ideologies of the United States, where it was developed. Moreover, she points out, the internet has become increasingly privatized, which closes down possibilities “as code becomes more proprietary in its development and use”; the best example of this is the rise of video formats that “circumvent the easy ‘copy and paste’ usability of older standards,” thus keeping digital properties more fully under corporate control-and doing so in a more invisible way. The restrictions imposed by these technical specificities go unnoticed because they are constructed as highly specialized knowledge, known only to experts who, by virtue of their expertise, legitimately “decide the structure of the Internet. However, that leaves the nonprofessional with little or no voice in determining such future directions.”
Due to this aspect of the fan-media intersection and others, more research needs to be done. First, as I have already suggested, it is important to compare Xena to other shows whose fans’ activity produced different results, in the interest of identifying the characteristics of Xena that made fan influence possible. Similarly, it would be valuable to examine other success stories of fans influencing shows; between these two endeavors it might be possible to develop a taxonomy of influence. Additionally, the changing relationship of traditional media to the internet must be taken into account. Web-savvy corporations have, in recent years, begun to attempt to produce the kinds of content formerly under the purview of fandom, to domesticate this threat. Moreover, as suggested above, the corporate grip on intellectual property has been tightening since the passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and the scope and effect of such control is still evolving. Thus, there are many more pieces to this puzzle than I have been able to trace here, but I hope that this preliminary look serves to raise interesting questions and establish a few key premises from which democratizing the media can proceed.
sorry about the formating. LJ ate it.