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Spreadable Media in Transformative Works and Cultures
A range of scholars writing for the online journal Transformative Works and Cultures have built on material from the Spreadable Media project over the past several months. Find their work here:
- Rose Helens-Hart’s recent piece for Transformative Works and Cultures 15, “‘Promoting Fan Labor and ‘All Things Web’: A Case Study of Tosh.0” uses Spreadable Media’s distinction between “stickiness” and “spreadability” as the primary way to examine how Tosh.0 blend these strategies to promote its media texts and promotional material via its website.
- Bertha Chin uses the book’s call for acknowledging the complexity of relations between fandoms and media producers to help frame her study of the relationships between fan sites and TV properties in her Transformative Works and Cultures 15 piece, “Sherlockology and Galactica.tv: Fan Sites as Gifts or Exploited Labor?”
- In her Transformative Works and Cultures 15 piece, entitled “Fan/dom: People, Practices, and Networks,” Katherine Morrissey draws on Spreadable Media’s focus on “networked culture” to help distinguish the need for keeping fan studies from shifting too heavily from fandom toward individual fans.
- Matthias Stork’s Transformative Works and Cultures 15 piece, “The Cultural Economics of Performance Space: Negotiating Fan, Labor, and Marketing Practice in Glee’s Transmedia Geography,” uses Spreadable Media essays from Alex Leavitt and Abigail De Kosnik in an exploration of the mix of transmedia fan practices surrounding the TV show Glee.
- In “The Media Festival Volunteer: Connecting Online and On-Ground Fan Labor” for Transformative Works and Cultures 15, Robert Moses Peaslee, Jessica El-Khoury, & Ashley Liles draw on De Kosnik’s work for the Spreadable Media project in examining the conceptualization of fan labor as volunteerism.
- Also, Mel Stanfill and Megan Condis draw on De Kosnik’s work in their insightful editorial at the head of Transformative Works and Cultures 15, entitled “Fandom and/as Labor.”
- Matt Hills’ 2014 piece for Transformative Works and Cultures, entitled “From Dalek Half Balls to Daft Punk Helmets: Mimetic Fandom and the Crafting of Replicas,” draws on the consideration of affirmational and transformational fan practices, as laid out by obsession_inc, in Spreadable Media (and other fan studies pieces) and seeks to challenge that binary, as well as the implicit assumption too often the case that “fan works that are not self-evidently transformational are simply of no interest, that they have nothing new or exceptional to tell us, as fans or scholars.” Hills also references the book’s concern about how traditionally feminized activities might be left out in a charge toward transmedia franchises.