20
AdAptAtion in the Age of MediA ConvergenCe
One instance where adaptation studies can clearly benefit from fan studies
are cases in which audience participation generates new forms and means of
expression, which can then re-enter commercial culture, as the very different
examples of E.L. James and Cassandra Clare, mashup novels, and The LEGO
Movie discussed by Soller, Voigts, and Goggin make clear. Yet again, context is
essential. Whereas participatory culture introduces new modes and forms of
interaction, their integration into commercial culture sometimes reduces them
merely to a simulation of a participatory ethos, gestures of participation ironically broken, decontextualized, and fed into a marketing machine that makes
them fall short of the more flexible and processual aspects of fan creations. Such
examinations hint at an aesthetic and economic entanglement of commercial
and fan culture that is also the focus of some recent work in fan studies.
Fan studies has significantly complicated the view of fans as a resistant
community operating against those in power or a wholly independent field
operating according to its own subcultural capital. Instead, scholars now
examine fandoms as intricately, and often contradictorily, interwoven with
economies of production and distribution that partly question and partly
contribute to major media companies’ economic mechanisms. Moreover, fan
communities uphold the social status quo in some areas while questioning
it elsewhere. 28 A perspective that treats as its subject matter fannish or
“audience-driven adaptations” 29 therefore needs to take into account the
multiple and sometimes contradictory layers of legal, technological, economic,
and cultural dynamics that order and regulate the dialogue and exchanges
between fan culture and the media industries.
Finally, the third major direction for adaptation studies in a convergent
environment is related to and overlaps with the two tendencies already
outlined. Over the last few years, a number of what Siobhan O’Flynn calls
“multiple, transmedia adaptations” have emerged. She refers to texts that
have been adapted into multiple media in rapid succession. O’Flynn uses
Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass as an example, but the list can easily
be expanded to include the countless products in the Star Wars, The Lord of
28 Sophie Einwächter’s insightful dissertation follows this process of regarding fans as economic
actors, Sophie G. Einwächter, Transformationen von Fankultur: Organisatorische und ökonomische
Konsequenzen globaler Vernetzung, PhD, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, 2014. Other
examples can be found in Vol. 15 (2014) of the journal Transformative Works and Cultures that
examines “Fandom and/as Labor” and specifically raises questions of free labor and the exploitation of fan work, cf. Mel Stanfield and Megan Condis, “Fandom and/as Labor,” Transformative
Works and Cultures 15 (2014).
29 Meikle, “Pornographic Adaptation,” 130. Cf. also Simone Murray, The Adaptation Industry:
The Cultural Economy of Contemporary Literary Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2011), 189.
AdAptAtion in the Age of MediA ConvergenCe
One instance where adaptation studies can clearly benefit from fan studies
are cases in which audience participation generates new forms and means of
expression, which can then re-enter commercial culture, as the very different
examples of E.L. James and Cassandra Clare, mashup novels, and The LEGO
Movie discussed by Soller, Voigts, and Goggin make clear. Yet again, context is
essential. Whereas participatory culture introduces new modes and forms of
interaction, their integration into commercial culture sometimes reduces them
merely to a simulation of a participatory ethos, gestures of participation ironically broken, decontextualized, and fed into a marketing machine that makes
them fall short of the more flexible and processual aspects of fan creations. Such
examinations hint at an aesthetic and economic entanglement of commercial
and fan culture that is also the focus of some recent work in fan studies.
Fan studies has significantly complicated the view of fans as a resistant
community operating against those in power or a wholly independent field
operating according to its own subcultural capital. Instead, scholars now
examine fandoms as intricately, and often contradictorily, interwoven with
economies of production and distribution that partly question and partly
contribute to major media companies’ economic mechanisms. Moreover, fan
communities uphold the social status quo in some areas while questioning
it elsewhere. 28 A perspective that treats as its subject matter fannish or
“audience-driven adaptations” 29 therefore needs to take into account the
multiple and sometimes contradictory layers of legal, technological, economic,
and cultural dynamics that order and regulate the dialogue and exchanges
between fan culture and the media industries.
Finally, the third major direction for adaptation studies in a convergent
environment is related to and overlaps with the two tendencies already
outlined. Over the last few years, a number of what Siobhan O’Flynn calls
“multiple, transmedia adaptations” have emerged. She refers to texts that
have been adapted into multiple media in rapid succession. O’Flynn uses
Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass as an example, but the list can easily
be expanded to include the countless products in the Star Wars, The Lord of
28 Sophie Einwächter’s insightful dissertation follows this process of regarding fans as economic
actors, Sophie G. Einwächter, Transformationen von Fankultur: Organisatorische und ökonomische
Konsequenzen globaler Vernetzung, PhD, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, 2014. Other
examples can be found in Vol. 15 (2014) of the journal Transformative Works and Cultures that
examines “Fandom and/as Labor” and specifically raises questions of free labor and the exploitation of fan work, cf. Mel Stanfield and Megan Condis, “Fandom and/as Labor,” Transformative
Works and Cultures 15 (2014).
29 Meikle, “Pornographic Adaptation,” 130. Cf. also Simone Murray, The Adaptation Industry:
The Cultural Economy of Contemporary Literary Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2011), 189.