Hereby I will give my final outline for my research-project which I’m about to begin with for the course Participatory Culture. I will make this outline with the help of the famous “schijf van vijf” made by mister Eggo Muller. My research will focus on the official websites (because there are more of them) and fan sites of the TV-show “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”.
Motivation:
First of all I would like to motivate the choice of my research paper. I’m a big fan (and consumer) of P2P programs as KaZaA and Emule. At one point I became aware of particular short movies-compilations of a lot of TV-shows and movies, which appeared to be produced by fans. Fans compiled fragments of their favourite scenes and of their favourite characters of particular TV-shows in such a way that it became a sort best-of-movie. On top of that they also put a song during the fragments which they thought suited best for those fragments. Fans had actually made their own movie.
Object:
As mentioned above, there are a lot of TV-shows which could be picked for this research. I decided to go with a tv-show that is very popular, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This show has a lot of fans and therefore a lot of (fan)websites. Those websites intend to create a sort of community. You can make a quiz to see which character from the show suits you most, you can talk to other fans through chat rooms and forums, you can buy shirts, games, DVD’s, comic books, regular books, music (soundtracks) etc. of Buffy. It doesn’t stop with the tv-show, no it seems to begin with the websites. The TV-show tends to be just a sort of reference for the websites where the actual marketing takes place.
Theory:
With examining these (fan)websites I will focus on a few aspects. First of all, at the advertising-aspect. What’s very remarkable is that the official websites aren’t even full of references to other products and institutions etc. The fan sites on the other hand are full with advertising and free marketing for Ebay, Amazon and other online-shops. This reminded me of the question ‘is it still leisure time that is filled, or could this actually be seen as labour time?’. Second, I will focus on the aspect of the blurring of the boundary between producers and consumers. Fans make their own movies, they write their own script. Josh Whedon has already admitted that he was fully aware of the wishes of the fans through the fan sites and therefore reacted on them, which is a good example of the blurring of the boundary between producer and consumer. Through p2p programs like KaZaA it is also very easy to distribute episodes from Buffy. You don’t have to actually buy a DVD, you can easily download them on fan sites or on KaZaA.
Method:
I will examine a few websites of Buffy the Vampire slayer very thoroughly. The choice of my websites will be based on the comprehensiveness of the sites. Wit this text-analysis of the websites I will focus on the advertising aspects, marketing aspects and participatory aspects.
Relevance:
With this research I would like to contribute something to the discourse concerning media fans where Henry Jenkins already wrote about in his article “Interactive audiences? The collective intelligence of media fans”. I would also like to contribute something to the discussion whether internet-users should get paid for there free marketing-actions as mentioned earlier like the free references to Amazone and Ebay on the fan sites.
Sources:
http://www.slayage.com/index.html
http://www.upn.com/shows/buffy/