Suzanne Scott: Repackaging fan culture : The regifting economy of ancillary content models.

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1. Protecting fandom's gift economy/Fandom's gift economy as protectorate

[1.1] Studies of fan culture have been returning with increasing frequency to Lewis Hyde's 1983 anthropological study The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property in an attempt to reaffirm the gift economy's central role in the construction and maintenance of online communities (Jenkins et al. 2009a; Hellekson 2009). In particular, recent work on online gift economies has acknowledged the inability to engage with gift economies and commodity culture as disparate systems, as commodity culture begins selectively appropriating the gift economy's ethos for its own economic gain. As "Web 2.0 companies speak about creating communities around their products and services, rather than recognizing that they are more often courting existing communities with their own histories, agendas, hierarchies, traditions, and practices" (Jenkins et al. 2009a), media fandom is rapidly being constructed as a fertile battleground where the territory between online gift economies and commodity culture will be negotiated. The oft-cited harbinger of such a conflict is FanLib (De Kosnik 2009; Hellekson 2009; Jenkins 2007b), a short-lived fan fiction archive that sought to monetize fan production in exchange for prizes and proximity to the participating shows' producers.

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Alissa Quart: What Does Free Culture Cost?

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One evening in February 2009, the artist Shepard Fairey spoke at the New York Public Library. He was discussing his famous silkscreen poster Hope, which bore Barack Obama's face, shadowed by swirling red and blue patterns. At the event, Fairey sat with legs akimbo, artfully slouched before the gilded, packed room, still retaining his old skate-punk persona. Speaking in a skater's staccato pidgin, he said he was "stoked" about the poster and had "diligently perpetuated" the image on his own dime, putting it up on Facebook and MySpace and e-mailing it far and wide.

Fairey had been an haute graffiti artist for two decades. He borrowed from existing images in order to create silkscreens that mocked American corporate culture or extolled rock stars.

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