Fandom: Realizing True Needs?

I know we've since moved on from our discussion of Fandom a few weeks ago, but I've been thinking about the subject a lot recently and had a few ideas I'd like to add to our debate.

While surfing the hundreds of fan-made Harry Potter videos on YouTube, it dawned on me just how much the Internet and similar digital technologies have completely revolutionized the culture producing industry. While the vast majority of creative content today is controlled by an increasingly limited number of multinational media conglomerates, the Internet represents a democratized space where users can easily manipulate, reproduce, and produce their own content and upload it to a mass audience. In this regard, the Internet empowers the "receivers" of culture in a way that wouldn't have been possible at the beginning of the 20th century, say for the Frankfurt School scholars who viewed the mass culture industry as essentially a vehicle for propaganda and brainwashing.

The myriad of electronic tools that have been designed for the very purpose of re-imagining or manipulating pre-existing content, Adobe Photoshop being one obvious example of many, have essentially changed the landscape of Fandom forever. I want to cite Stuart Hall's essay "Encoding Decoding" where he describes the creation and reception of pop culture as a cyclical process of distinctive but linked "moments" that are discursive, or shifting, in nature. It seems to me that the empowered Fandom encouraged by the Internet represents a complication of this traditional cycle. Culture Producers still encode pop culture with meaning for audiences to decode; but thanks to the Internet, fans are able to repeat this cycle by re-encoding the original product with an entirely new set of meanings meant to be endlessly decoded and the re-encoded by other users. One example of this is the phenomenon of YouTube users posting endless "response" videos as offshoots from an original video. In this newly democratized cycle, consumer-fans use pop culture as the raw materials to start an entirely new cycle of production, distribution, and interpretation.

This is a pleasantly surprising phenomenon, and perhaps reinforces aspects of Adorno's concept of false vs. true needs. According to Adorno, people have real needs to be creatively autonomous individuals, which are masked by the false needs of consumerism that capitalism fosters in order to survive. In this respect, the newly liberated realm of online Fandom represents a way for consumers to actually participate in culture rather than simply being brainwashed by it. For this reason, I think that there needs to be some kind of legal protection for amateur-generated content. As the "Studio Executive" from our class role-play, I understand that this kind of legislation will be difficult to pass due to strict copyright laws. However, I feel optimistic that this Fandom phenomenon might encourage people to become more critically discerning consumers of pop culture.