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“I Never Tho’t I Would Do That!”
In the summer of 1896, Alice Drake left her home in Colorado and boarded a transatlantic liner for Europe. She was young, moneyed, and attractive enough to provoke the occasional ribald comment from the locals. She was also a serviceable pianist.
The Grand Tour was a rite of passage for many an upper-class American during the nineteenth century. Young aristocrats (and their entourage of cooks, servants, tutors, and hangers-on) would travel a careful itinerary of European historical and cultural sites, journeying for months, or sometimes years. In many countries the tradition endures to this day as the “gap year,” the “year abroad,” or, in some cases, “She’s still backpacking around Europe without a job? It’s been, like, a year!”
Most parents steered their progeny toward the museums of the Netherlands and the churches and ruins of Italy. Perhaps there would be a stay in Paris for dancing or fencing lessons, or studying at the local art academies. But Alice’s destination was not the ruins of Rome or the antiquities of Pisa. With her friend Gertrude by her side, she breezed through Belgium and on to Germany. Pausing only long enough to be homesick in Berlin, she made straight for the distant city of Weimar. There she located the home of composer Franz Liszt, who had died a decade earlier, and talked her way in.
It took two attempts. On the first try, Drake and some of her new friends arrived too late in the afternoon and were forced to content themselves with gawking at Liszt’s conservatory. Undaunted, they started again early the next morning. Drake tracked down the surprised caretaker, a “dear old man,” and slipped him three pfennigs to persuade him to unlock the door.
She played on Liszt’s pianos! She ogled his collection of gifts from the crowned heads of Europe! She prevailed upon the caretaker to autograph the back of a postcard for her (he’d lived with Liszt for twenty-seven years!).
In fact, she spent so long frolicking through the hallowed rooms that her happy little group almost missed their train, rushing from the house and catching it with only minutes to spare. They crowded into the compartment as it chugged out of the station, laughing and breathless, amazed that the caretaker had demanded such a small amount of money for access to such a treasure.
“I never tho’t I would do that!” Drake wrote that night in her diary.
Gaining access to home of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was less satisfying. Although it had been her top priority upon arrival in Salzburg, the neighborhood was of dubious repute, with narrow, crooked streets and badly worn stone stairs. At one point, she had already pushed her way through the front door and made it all the way upstairs before discovering she was in the wrong house. Unconcerned, she tried again, but the small third-floor apartment filled with Mozart’s birth cradle and family portraits failed to meet her expectations. Later she wrote, “I don’t enthuse over his music so naturally all this didn’t interest me as much. . . .”
At the house of the composer Wilhelm Richard Wagner, things were more difficult still. For the first time, the housekeeper proved reluctant to accept a bribe, and Drake was only allowed as far as the front yard. Later she fumed at how infuriating it was that this would be the one place in Germany where servants seemed immune to tipping.
“It is great fun to sit right next to some great artist and watch them,” she wrote in December. When not trespassing, Alice Drake spent her time in Germany seeking out musical performances. Her operas of choice were all Wagner, but when his music wasn’t available at the local Philharmonic, she was happy to settle for whatever was playing.
She carefully glued the remains of each concert into a scrapbook: playbills, tickets, and snippets of music. Also into the scrapbook went critiques of each production (“Sucha sang. Her voice is gone so she doesn’t charm me in any way whatever.”); gossip about the performers (“I think it is so strange we never heard of Alexander Petchnikoff in America. . . . He has recently married an American girl.”); opinions about the players (“This is the autograph of the director of the orchestra. He isn’t great.”); and descriptions of each opera house, diagrams of orchestral positioning, and a catalog of her mental state leading up to and following each production. The state of her handwriting makes it likely that the notes were meant for her own eyes only.
For a performance of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, she wrote: “The Nibelungen Ring commenced this morning. We have tickets for every night. I’m positively holding my breath to see who sings Brunhild. Later: Of all the things in this world, Frauline Revil is on for Brunhild. Well that makes me ill. And raised prices at that. Anyway, Reno and Libau are always fine and it is a treat to hear the orchestra so I guess I can stand it. It is a terrible ordeal though really. . . .”
While in Berlin, Drake was granted an audition with renowned teacher Karl Heinrich Barth. Though the maid was hesitant to admit her, Drake prevailed, and she soon found herself in Barth’s music room, hands trembling, gazing in awe at his two Bechstein grand pianos. The man himself arrived (“Golly! But he looked big!”). After playing a few movements (“Very musical,” he told her), she was informed she’d managed to secure a coveted spot as one of his students. She marched away from the house grinning, in her words, “from ear to ear.”
Yet when the time came for her first lesson a month later, she blew it off to see a performance of her favorite Wagner opera, Siegfried. The Kaiser himself was expected to attend.
A Musical Diagnosis
Musicomania, an excessive and uncontrollable love of music, was a real and serious pathological diagnosis for late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Americans. Young Alice Drake was not alone in her obsession; for everyone from clerks to society debutantes, industrialization brought a new approach to experiencing and enjoying what had previously been a relatively small-scale phenomenon. As the post–Civil War economy took hold, the country experienced massive social and cultural change. Urbanization! Railroads! A wage economy where people might spend their money on anything they wanted!
At the beginning of the century, music lovers might have contented themselves with gathering family around a piano after dinner, but now the growth of cities meant vast new concert halls. Whereas before they might attend their local church services, new transportation options such as streetcars and railways meant they could attend every church service in town. Preindustrialization, the only option for entertainment would have been local troupes of neighborhood players, provincial and familiar. But now a vast network of traveling virtuosos had become household names, introducing audiences to an entire planet’s supply of talent, exotic compositions, and the drama of celebrity culture.
It was a good time to listen to some Wagner! But many enthusiasts felt, why stop there? “They said, well that’s great, but we want more. We want the experience to last. So they start to do things on their own, outside of that established ‘one ticket for that performance’ framework,” says cultural historian Daniel Cavicchi. Listening to a concert was enjoyable, but why not collect its sheet music and programs, carefully mounted in scrapbooks? Or stand for hours below a soloist’s hotel balcony to catch a glimpse of her face? Or attend every performance of a show, returning again and again to critique how the music sounded from each part of the concert hall? Or travel to Weimar, Germany, to break into Liszt’s house?
Young ladies forsook their gentlemen callers for the opera. Office workers bankrupted themselves for just one more performance. Music teachers rushed the stage and hugged the musicians. Middle-aged women stood in their seats and screamed with delight. Obviously, something had to be done.
The close of the American Civil War also fomented a wave of social reformers intent on doing good. The crusade opposing musicomania, while never reaching the fervor of the temperance or abstinence movements, was still a force. Not enough, these activists felt, that a new wave of immigrant culture had already imperiled the purity of truly American music; this new breed of music lover also had no idea how to enjoy it properly. Music should be experienced with self-restraint and a carefully moderated intellectual response, if any at all.
“The concert room was crowded with people clinging to each other like bees,” complained one scandalized Victorian concert attendee. “We saw bonnets torn off,” gasped another. For the average Victorian, corseted into a tortuous letter B shape, then swathed in up to five layers of clothing, the unseemliness of the concert hall was abominable. It wasn’t that Mozart or Wagner was necessarily a bad influence, but the unbridled emotions they inspired were contrary to every dictate of propriety. In respectable society, where even the most chaste skin-on-skin contact was practically an offer of engagement, a crowd of sweaty musicomaniacs trampling their neighbors in their enthusiasm would have been horrifying.
As Cavicchi notes, by 1833 the term “musicomania” had appeared in the New Dictionary of Medical Science and Literature. In those afflicted, “the passion for music is carried to such an extent as to derange the intellectual faculties.”
And yet this excitement, this visceral freedom, may be a reason why so many Victorians found musical excess an effective outlet for their repressed longings. Music was rebellious. Music was pure, and good, and beautiful, even if (or perhaps explicitly because) outsiders didn’t understand it. Music gave fellow devotees something to discuss and a reason to congregate. Music was something interesting to do.
And in a culture that barely tolerated the concept, music—and the people who made it, and the activities surrounding it, and the audience who liked it—was “fun.”
To Fan Is Human
Humans have always experienced an urge to connect, with each other and with ourselves. It’s an instinct buried so deep in our brains that we do it naturally, scanning our surroundings, always on the alert for bits of culture that might help us become a “better” us. From an evolutionary standpoint, a group of protohuman hunters who could find something external to bond over were more likely to eat dinner that night, whether it was a shared love of the moon goddess or a shared disdain of those weird sun-goddess worshippers on the other side of the hill.
Fandom refers to the structures and practices that form around pieces of popular culture. It’s a very old, very human phenomenon; acting in fanlike ways is probably as ancient as culture itself. History is filled with tales of pilgrimages—traveling to a place, not for its aesthetic or economic value, but simply to feel close to something important. Chaucer’s fourteenth-century Canterbury-bound knight, cook, friar, physician, and other companions are traveling to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket. On the other side of the world, the Kii Peninsula of Japan is still crisscrossed with trails worn by pilgrims from a thousand years ago headed to the shrines of Kumano.
Margery Kempe is known today as the author of a large body of dramatic fiction: stories about family troubles, intrigue, trauma, and healing. Though generally described as autobiographical, her adventures weren’t entirely of her own making. Kempe’s writing was based on characters from the Bible—the best-known literary work of her time. By the time she died in 1438, she had amassed a novel-length tome of what today would be considered fan fiction, derivative writing that details the further adventures of Mary, Jesus, and other New Testament figures.
Sometimes she produced missing scenes to fill in time periods not present in the official text. Sometimes she imagined entirely original incidents. She pictures herself as a handmaiden to the Virgin Mary; she carries Joseph and Mary’s bags when they go to visit family; and she brings a cocktail of wine, egg, and gruel to Mary’s bedside to comfort her while she mourns Jesus. In other works Kempe incorporates her own pilgrimages into her stories; she imagines herself asking Mary for a swaddling cloth in which to wrap the baby Jesus, based on a trip Kempe took to Assisi, where she viewed a similar relic.
The late-medieval world was saturated with religious imagery. Church songs, food taboos, spiritual art and architecture, special clothing, festivals, and complicated rituals, all were rich fodder for a creative mind. Modern scholars interpret these stories as a way to bring Kempe closer to her favorite book, linking her to the characters she wrote about and incorporating herself into their lives. She hoped to be canonized by the Church for her devotion; by becoming a saint she would complete her own assimilation into the words of the text she loved so much.
Kempe was not the first to explore this type of literary fiction—Franciscan nuns had tried it two hundred years earlier, encouraged by a popular religious text of the time, Meditationes vitae Christi. But nuns were technically part of the official religious infrastructure. Kempe was most decidedly not.
Even though the late medieval period in England was characterized by a new emphasis on personal empowerment, like the anti-musicomania of Victorian reformers five hundred years later, with that new freedom came significant opposition from both the church and the surrounding community. Not everyone was happy with Kempe’s explorations.
Kempe, at least by her own account, faced scorn and public hostility for her behavior. Writing of herself in the third person, she said that at home in her village, “a reckless man . . . deliberately and on purpose threw a bowlful of water on her head.” At York, she claimed, “she had many enemies who slandered her, scorned her, and despised her.” Several times she was placed under what scholar Gail McMurray Gibson calls “casual house arrest” while the authorities decided what to do about her bizarre and disruptive emotional outbursts. Kempe even alleged that her enemies in the community wanted her burned at the stake, but that may have been hyperbole. It’s difficult to tell if her contemporaries viewed her as a dangerous holy woman or just wildly eccentric, since she herself seems to have taken a fair measure of pride in her own oppression.
The Democratization of Fandom
The difference between Margery Kempe, Alice Drake, and a modern-day fan camped outside a bookstore for the midnight drop of the next J. K. Rowling book isn’t a question of enthusiasm. It’s one of access.
It’s easy to attribute the modern explosion in fandom to the increased connectivity of a tech-savvy audience. In terms of scale, this is certainly true. But fandom is predigital. It’s also prephonograph. It’s even preliteracy. Margery Kempe, as a merchant-class woman in the fifteenth century, could neither read nor write. All of her stories were dictated to a scribe. By the 1800s, a fan like Alice Drake had significantly more opportunity to interact with the object of her affection—she could listen to music regularly as long as she had some spare change and a nearby orchestra. Each successive technological gain has made fandom both more accessible and more social, but it has been part of human cultural activity throughout recorded history.
Over the centuries, advances in transportation, personal wealth, leisure time, and autonomy have meant fans have gained incrementally easier and more frequent access to the things they love. The Internet removes the final barrier, reducing the effort required to almost to zero. For media lovers, most audio, video, or literary texts can be summoned with a finger tap. For fans of a brand, the Internet allows products to be discovered, compared, and ordered without a visit to the mall. For fans of an activity, finding instructions on how to do it (and others to do it with) is now trivial. For the celebrity-obsessed, the Internet provides a whole universe of access to the private lives of the famous—their creative process, daily routine, opinions, and the occasional naked picture.
Prior to the nineteenth century, there were a limited number of “texts,” the official canon of work available to an audience, that encouraged this type of multichannel approach. Religion provides one of the few examples—Kempe couldn’t read her Bible, but she could visit the locations mentioned in it, participate in rituals inspired by it, sing songs about it, and, of course, make up stories.
Broad cultural trends sometimes had the same effect. A fashionable French citizen who felt enamored of American culture in the late 1700s could travel to America and fight in the revolution against Great Britain, but many also wrote pamphlets supporting the cause; commissioned paintings about the glory of American principles; ate turkey, corn, and other New World foods; or wore tiny portraits of Benjamin Franklin in their hair. But these were exceptions in a world that placed little emphasis on such ancillary activities.
The modern term fan object is what we now call these centers of emotion and activity, pieces of culture that inspire both loyalty, and, more importantly, activity. When finding and being close to a fan object required so much energy, the result was a very limited range of audience engagement. Almost all of it relied on simple interactions: reading a book meant readers would travel to a bookstore or library, acquire it, bring it home, and then read it. Perhaps they talked to friends about it. They might read it again at some point. But unless they had access to their own printing press and a lot of spare time, few would try to add to it. The interaction was usually one-way. No matter how good the book might be, the barriers to joining in meant that it primarily inspired consumption, not participation.
Reading a book today can be as simple as clicking the Buy button in the Kindle app. As fans need less energy to acquire and experience fan objects, they have more energy to spend on finding new ways to express their love for them. They have responded to this extra time and energy by doubling down on supplemental activities. Any casual Red Bull fan can easily find and purchase the sugary caffeinated beverage they love, so very serious fans might display their ardor by attending an extreme sporting event sponsored by Red Bull while wearing a shirt with its logo. When fans of the Star Wars franchise have finished binge-watching, they have dozens of other points of access: books, toys, comics, fan conventions, drawings, amusement-park rides, video games, and costume contests. It’s not just a set of movies, meant to be viewed and perhaps later viewed again. This is a world in which audience members can become fully immersed, one that they can make their own.
Modern marketing has stumbled upon the benefits of fandom, not for fans’ ability to create worlds, but for their predictable buying habits. “Get the fans excited, and maybe they’ll also give you money,” so the wisdom goes. So much has been written about the need for audience engagement that it’s rare for a large-scale media campaign to launch these days without the matching social-media outreach, a video contest, a crowdsourcing initiative, a downloadable mobile game, book tie-in, street-team postering, a booth at Comic-Con, an appearance in a popular video game, and a whole stable of paid bloggers, Instagrammers, and YouTube celebrities to name-drop the product. And if there’s any budget left over, maybe there’s a TV commercial or magazine advertisement. It’s certainly a very literal interpretation of the idea of creating a “world” for fans to immerse themselves in.
It’s true that fans—that is, empowered fans, fans with spare time and energy—do want to engage on more levels and platforms than ever before. But it’s a mistake to take their enthusiasm as a license to push more product. Brands are used to thinking of their fan groups in terms of what’s in it for their bottom line: the social buzz that will be generated and the locked-in purchases they can count on. Very rarely do they consider what’s in it for the fan.
Fan enthusiasm is always predicated on the brand serving a very specific and very personal set of needs. Understanding these motivations and passions is the key to real and authentic fan interactions. These are the kind of interactions that lead to broader success for both the fan object and the participant. After all, both have significant investment in the fandom’s advancement. As we’ll see, the contributions of an active fan group, empowered by this newfound access, are worth far more than the number of their Instagram followers and the contents of their wallets.
Hatsune Miku: The Crowdsourced Superstar
Hatsune Miku is one of the most popular singers in Japan. She tops music charts and performs at venues around the country and internationally. She’s opened for Lady Gaga. She’s starred in commercials for Toyota, Domino’s Pizza, and Google Chrome. A YouTube search for her name returns over a million and a half results (by comparison, “Janet Jackson” only returns just above half a million). Miku has long turquoise pigtails, stands 158 cm (or a bit over 5'2"), weighs 42 kg (about 93 pounds), and her birthday is August 31. She is a Virgo. She’s sixteen years old. And she’s been sixteen since her birth in 2007.
Miku is a computer program, the mascot for a vocal synthesizer that allows users to write songs and listen to them performed in the software’s voice. An add-on piece of software creates music videos by animating a 3D form to go along with the songs.
The company that owns Miku, Japan’s Crypton Future Media, has been careful to provide almost no backstory for its mascot outside of matching her colors to the software interface that inspired her. Occasionally Crypton releases new clothing or a new vocal style (sweeter, perhaps, or more “vivid”), but her entire life has been created by fans.
Crypton has colonized a space that usually sits between the music industry and what’s called character merchandising. Both industries are infamous for vigorously protecting their trademarks; control over access to their media and brand symbols such as logos and other imagery is their most valuable asset. Yet Crypton goes out of its way to encourage its customer base to spread Miku and her music as far and wide as possible.
The result is a fan object created almost entirely by its fan base. Miku’s fans furnish her with stories, drawings, and, of course, songs, which number on Amazon and iTunes in the hundreds of thousands. Some of her fan-created repertoire is played during live concerts, where fans travel to watch her appear via preproduced video. Miku-licensed products, and appearances in video games and other media, allow for collections and engagement, and Miku websites allow fans to communicate among themselves.
When Crypton released the Miku synthesizer software, the company made a key decision. “[They said] you make the music; it’s your music,” explains Ian Condry, a cultural anthropologist who studies pop culture in Japan. “Theories are espoused within entertainment companies that you need a professional to create these characters, and Miku shows that’s not true. People used to say that in order to have fans of movies, it was the story that was important. With comic books, they say you need great characters. With video games, you’d say you need a great world. What’s interesting about Miku is that she has none of that.”
Miku was originally a marketing ploy—a mascot on the cover of Crypton’s synthesizer software to help make it more approachable for a mainstream audience. “We were surprised by the speed and scale with which Hatsune Miku was adopted,” explains Crypton’s US/EU marketing manager Guillaume Devigne. “We had to decide quickly how to deal with a huge number of songs, drawings, and videos that were popping up all over the Internet.”
Rather than risk the unpleasant prospect of fighting for legal control against a significant percentage of Japan’s population, the company adopted an unexpected policy of “nonrestrictive use for noncommercial purposes,” which allowed fans to create and distribute their creations for free. In American terms, it would be the equivalent of Disney saying to the world: go ahead and make Mickey Mouse do whatever you want him to do, as long as you don’t charge for it. By coincidence, Crypton’s decision coincided with a crackdown on copyrighted videos on the Japanese website Nico Nico Douga (now Niconico), a cross between YouTube and VH1’s Pop Up Video. Record companies and production studios were demanding the removal of their copyrighted videos, and Niconico was desperate for material to fill the gap. Miku did the job nicely, first with songs fronted by fan illustrations and later with fully animated videos.
Niconico has since become the eleventh-most-visited website in Japan, and Miku videos dominate. Crypton Future Media has also opened its own sharing site, piapro.jp, and started a record label called KARENT to allow fans to distribute and sell their Miku-inspired work (while taking a cut, of course). Piapro.jp currently lists more than 5,000 songs.
Miku is a map for what interactions would look like if a celebrity had infinite time and reach, and her fans had infinite access: a fan object who is herself constantly re-created by fan tributes. That Miku is digital is almost incidental—if a popular singer such as Taylor Swift had the ability to produce every single song written for her by her own teenaged fans and to make them instantly available to other fans, it’s easy to imagine the craze that would follow. The activities of her fans have made Miku one of the most recognizable Japanese celebrities worldwide. And even though it was the original impetus behind her creation, sales of the Vocaloid software for which she was created are only one of Miku’s many revenue streams.
At most Miku concerts, a large projection screen takes up much of the stage, and she is shown performing in 2D rather than as a full hologram. During her 2016 North American tour 36,000 of her most devoted fans crowded into arenas to wave green light sticks at the stage. At shows like this, there is no effort at realism. The dancing figure has a jerky, cartoony look, and she’s twice as large as a real person. When Miku sings, there’s no confusing her with a human singer; her vocal pitch is higher, and her pronunciation has an awkward, metallic edge. Still, all the trappings of a concert are observed: the live backing band, the Jumbotron close-ups, the antiauthoritarian feel. One of her most popular songs is “Secret Police,” about a government agency that spies on its citizens; often the crowd is on its feet, shouting and cheering for the entire song.
At the end of the show, the audience’s applause seems a bit like clapping at the end of a movie; it expresses a real appreciation, but the celebrity isn’t on stage to appreciate it. It’s just as much for the fans themselves, and for the creators who make the show possible. A journalist who attended a packed Miku performance at Hammerstein Ballroom in New York in late 2014 later wrote, “It wasn’t Hatsune Miku that was impressive. It was the vibe, the environment—the fans.”
“It just looks quaint and silly and ridiculous, but in fact, people are using it to explore very serious and deep issues,” explains Condry. One of Miku’s more famous songs involves a sixteen-year-old girl coming to terms with dying of cancer. Others deal with universal themes of loss, loneliness, self-esteem, and first love.
“She remains a close and familiar figure people can relate to, maybe more than the ‘normal’ human pop-stars. Since the fans create the content for Hatsune Miku, they live and express their imagination and feelings through her,” says Devigne.
Fans seem to appreciate her unchangeable nature, the very inhumanity an outsider might find odd. Miku is a safe role model. Amy, a thirteen-year-old fan, put it well in a 2012 interview with Wired: “She’s not going to die. She’s not going to turn into Miley Cyrus, where she gets drunk or something.”
In late 2014, Miku performed on The Late Show with David Letterman. A screen was set up in the area usually reserved for musical guests, and the lights dimmed to make the projected video clearer. She shimmied and kicked her way through “Sharing the World,” a song that is technically in English although it takes some listening. At the end of the prerecorded performance, Letterman walked over to where she was taking her prerecorded bow. She waved and disappeared in a puff of digital smoke. Letterman took it all in stride. “Hatsune Miku, Ladies and Gentlemen. There she is. All right, that’s fun. It’s like being on Willie Nelson’s bus.”*
Having Fans Means Needing Fans
It’s fashionable to tout the advantages of surrendering brand ownership to the audience. In theory it’s a wonderful idea: give the most influence to those who are most likely to pay if they are satisfied. The greater their control over the object, the more it will resemble their wants and needs when it comes time for them to buy.
In reality, the interaction isn’t so straightforward. The 2012 Creative Commons license for Miku’s image includes the following caveat: “You must not distort, mutilate, modify or take other derogatory action in relation to the Work which would be prejudicial to the Original Author’s honor or reputation.” The company makes it much clearer on the website, directly prohibiting the use of Miku’s image “in an overly violent context or in a sexual context.”
Pornographic images and videos of Miku have flooded the Internet as her popularity has grown, ranging from the titillating to the downright dark. One fan-animated video of Miku’s “World Is Mine” song features enough animated softcore to scandalize even the most open-minded of censors (it has more than a million You-Tube views). Other works are significantly more brutal and bloody. Hentai sites, which specialize in manga-style porn, often have entire sections devoted to X-rated Vocaloid graphic novels. Both eBay and Amazon carry a number of unofficial body pillows showing the sixteen-year-old in various stages of undress and dishevelment. Crypton is not amused, but it’s important to note that, as of yet, they haven’t succeeded in forcing retailers to remove the listings.
As we will explore, relinquishing the reins of brand control comes with a nest of hidden issues. Fan expectations tend to skew one of two ways: either they are deeply conservative, making fans hostile to the changes required to keep a brand current, or they may demand the most extreme alterations to cater to their own, sometimes very particular, whims. The latter can mean trampling the qualities that made their fan object special in the first place. A media brand like Hatsune Miku can weather an unexpected porn storm or even thrive on it. An insurance company might not. A children’s TV show could be ruined.
Nonetheless, fan objects and their fans can live happily in a state of friendly codependence if expectations are managed. Even with the risk of an occasional body pillow, today’s audiences are encouraged to experience closer and closer levels of engagement with their fan object, on so many more levels than the basic, linear text. And this has caused an unexpected consequence. A fan object that builds on its audience needs its audience.
The Star Wars experience would be greatly diminished without the participation of the fans; few of us would go to an empty Star Wars convention. Monday Night Football is far more fun when the audience members use the official #MNF hashtag to discuss the game with each other. Miku does not exist at all without her fan group; she has no songs to sing, no music videos to show, no advertising clout with which to sell Toyotas, no backstory to help connect with potential customers. Her audience is creating for itself, and in doing so, they create the very materials that attract more of itself.
In a world-based story, the audience is as much a part of each other’s experience as the fan text itself. Without the audience’s participation in the story, there may be very little story.
As a culture, we’re used to looking down on fandom. Our biggest critique, like that of the Victorian social reformers, is often a question of quantity. Fans love what they love too much. They watch too much TV. They play too many video games. There’s a proper and improper way to enjoy a Coke: drinking a bottle of Coke is all right; collecting a million Coke bottle caps and using them for elaborate dioramas is not.
And yet, brand owners are increasingly reliant on these very people to support their businesses.
At the moment, fan objects and their fans still occupy two distinct roles within the world of consumption. There are makers, and there are buyers. The two rarely overlap. But as audience experience shifts away from mere consumption of a fan text and toward influencing, or even adding to it, the space between the audience and the fan object is narrowing.
What will happen as these two finally meet? When materials created by a fan group begin to smoothly feed back into the fan object, without the age-old barriers to entry and access?
We won’t have to wait very long to find out. We are entering a period of convergence, of fandom singularity, where the distinction blurs between fans and fan object, between who is the creator and who is the consumer. This is a future in which the lines of communication between product and buyer go both ways.
This is a future in which everything is part of the canon.
* Disclosure: We were so intrigued by the Hatsune Miku phenomenon after researching it that our company, Squishable, is now a licensee of Crypton Future Media and makes a Squishable Hatsune Miku.