More on Henry Jenkins

Jenkins argues that much prosumer activity on

YouTube and Vimeo is fan-based. He says that fans
have always been early adapters of new media
technologies and had been creating short films and
other similar products long before the spread of the
Internet. What the Internet, and specifically sites
such as YouTube and Vimeo, provides is a powerful
new distribution channel for amateur cultural
production. The movies that these fans have been
making for decades are now going public thanks to the Internet.

As Jenkins says:

“This new participatory culture has its roots in practices that

have occurred just below the radar of the media industry throughout
the twentieth century and the web has pushed that hidden layer of
cultural activity into the foreground, forcing the media industries to
confront its implications for their commercial interests”.

With the Web as an exhibition outlet, and digital editing far simpler,
the space for amateur artists has opened up. They are producing
commercial – or near-commercial-quality content on very small
budgets. The Web gives them an opportunity to experiment and be
innovative, testing the water and developing new practices.

Who are these amateurs?

Jenkins has focused a lot of his research on prosumer fans of Star

Wars in particular as there are rather a lot of them out there. In
1999, Joe Nussbaum directed a fan film called ‘George Lucas in
Love’, which is considered the best known of the fan-film parodies.
It was directed by a student and was released onto DVD. It
became so popular that it outsold Star Wars Episode 1: The
Phantom Menace in the Amazon DVD chart in its opening weekend.
This is obviously an early example of a fan-film made and
distributed before the birth of web 2.0, but its long continued
success is as a result of the Internet. In fact this film is an excellent
example of The Long Tail (a theory coming up in a couple of weeks).
Off the back of this film Nussbaum eventually forged quite a
successful film career. Kevin Rubio, another fan-film producer
(Troops, 1998) attracted the interests of Hollywood producers and
was employed by George Lucas to write for the Star Wars comics.

How does do Media Institutions feel about this growing fan

prosumer culture?
Once upon a time, participatory culture (prosumers) and
commercial culture (industries/institutions) lived happily side by
side. No-one really minded if you photocopied a couple of pages out
of a book, or copied a few songs and put together a mix tape for one
of your friends (if you were born in the 70s!), or even recorded the
entire top 40 on your tape player (again, if you were born in the
70s…). Institutions would have known that people used to do this
every day, but they didn’t know exactly who was doing this, and
even if they did they weren’t going to burst through your front door
and arrest you. But as these sorts of activities have changed, with
the advent of Web 2.0, and become more open they now represent
a visible threat to the Industry and copyright in particular.

The ‘Media Industry’ has always been a little unsure of fan-films and
products from prosumers. On the one hand, many industries like to
rely on their audience/consumers to spread the word about their
products which would then increase the potential profit in the
product, and in some ways seeking ways of channelling the film-fan
prosumer products as a way of lowering their own production costs
(think about some of the mash-ups online of films that do a really
good job of advertising the original product but don’t cost the film
production company a penny!). But, on the other hand they are
quite frightened of losing control of their ‘product’ as once
something goes online it cannot be fully contained or channelled by
them.

Adapted from Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media

Collide, Henry Jenkins.