"Digital Devotion: The Evolving Landscape of Fan Labor in a Post-Twitter World

Guerrero-Pico’s article describes the labor of fans to continue the show Fringe as another tool of self-commodification and exploitation, despite fans getting the outcome they desire, which is the renewal of their beloved show Fringe. This article brought to mind two key themes to discover further. One, I immediately recognized a concept we discussed last week: audience commodification. The dichotomy between being both a consumer and producer of media, despite earning no monetary gain for their efforts, ties closely to fan labor. However, the difference here is in fan labor, one finds value in the work itself, and that is considered the output of the work. For example, fancasts, fanfiction, fan trailers, fan art, etc. all derive value from the creation of the work itself as well as the contribution to the fan community (Tiffany, 2024). One could argue there is Habermas’ communicative rationality in fan groups, in which the subject matter must be focused on sincerity and truth (Feteris, 1999). It can be argued that fan audiences and fan labor must rely nearly exclusively on an agreed-upon set of truths beyond the source material for the system to thrive.

This brings me to the second point noted in Guerrero-Pico’s work. Twitter’s community was the catalyst for the resurgence of Fringe many years ago, yet due to recent ownership and policy changes of X (formerly Twitter), the same social media community could very well ruin the fan space due to geopolitical strife. In particular, Brazil and the United States refused to come to any censorship agreement regarding X’s content, and as a result, Brazil has blocked X from the app store (Deshler, 2024). Brazilians are responsible for a vast majority of “stan Twitter” accounts, which are accounts dedicated to promoting public figures, celebrities, etc. With the loss of Brazilians as members of the X community, the entirety of fandoms will suffer and have to resort to other social media channels, such as TikTok. And despite many Twitter alternatives vying for succession, no social media channel has been able to attract the unique sauce of Twitter’s algorithm and community (Peters, 2024).

Will the shifting sands of social media channel stardom hurt fandoms? Will fandoms pivot even further to short-form vertical videos found on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram? As the media channel changes, so to will the agreed-upon truths the fandom is built on, and it is up to the fan’s labor once more to redefine the world-building of their communities due to larger politics and business. This is another classic example of instrumental rationality trumping communicative rationality.

References

Deshler, Kira. “Brazil’s X Ban Delivers Devastating Blow to Online Fan Communities.” The Daily Dot, 12 Sept. 2024, www.dailydot.com/pop-culture/decoding-fandom-brazil-fan-accounts-x-ban/. Accessed 17 Sept. 2024.

Erin Mikail Staples. “Fans, at Their Core, Are Producers. What Does This Tells Us about the Ethics of Fan Labor? — Fandom Communities 002.” Erin Mikail Staples, erin mikail staples, 28 Sept. 2021, www.erinmikailstaples.com/fans-at-their-core-are-producers-what-does-this-tells-us-about-the-ethics-of-fan-labor/. Accessed 17 Sept. 2024.

Feteris, Eveline T. “Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Rationality.” Argumentation Library, 1 Jan. 1999, pp. 62–72, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9219-2_7. Accessed 17 Sept. 2024.

McNutt, Myles. “Week-To-Week: How SAG-AFTRA’s Call for Solidarity Became a Morality Test for Fans and Content Creators.” Substack.com, Episodic Medium, 18 July 2023, episodicmedium.substack.com/p/week-to-week-how-sag-aftras-call. Accessed 17 Sept. 2024.

Peters, Jay. “The Hunt for the next Twitter: All the News about Alternative Social Media Platforms.” The Verge, 17 Apr. 2023, www.theverge.com/23686584/twitter-alternative-social-media-platforms-mastodon-bluesky-activitypub-protocol.

Tiffany, Kaitlyn. “The Atlantic.” The Atlantic, theatlantic, 5 Sept. 2024, www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/09/brazil-x-ban-stan-accounts/679721/. Accessed 17 Sept. 2024.

Turk, Tisha. “View of Fan Work: Labor, Worth, and Participation in Fandom’s Gift Economy | Transformative Works and Cultures.” Journal.transformativeworks.org, 2014, journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/518/428.

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