Paweł Frelik
(American Studies Center, University of Warsaw)
Abstract:
The arrival of digital technologies of production has dramatically changed the ways in which audiences in general and fandoms in particular engage cultural production. The conceptions of immaterial labor and affective labor have been especially useful in describing the forms of fan activity, while terms such as prosumption and “playbor” have been deployed in analyses of specific industries and medial forms. Given the multiplicity and ubiquity of forms in which fans perform labor that directly benefits producers, it seems impossible to engage with cultural products without performing immaterial labor, a diagnosis which is depressing in its inevitability of involuntary exploitation. In my presentation, I would like to complicate this seemingly dystopian scenario by focusing on several fan practices which are perceived as outright illegal or whose legality is questionable. Most of these are lumped under the common rubric of media piracy. However, particularly with respect to video games, films, and music (but also, to a lesser extent, magazines, books, and television shows), some of these initiatives cannot be reduced to the activity of illegal file-sharing. Major among them are underground archiving projects whose goal is to catalog, organize, annotate, and preserve bodies of cultural texts in various media. Curated by private online communities and invite-only torrent trackers, such initiatives can be analyzed from several perspectives. In the context of work/labor discussions, they demonstrate the limitations of thinking of immaterial labor as inherently exploitative but also highlight the insufficiency of current copyright laws and official archival projects.
Paweł Frelik is Associate Professor and the Leader of Speculative Texts and Media Research Group at the American Studies Center, University of Warsaw. His teaching and research interests include science fiction, video games, fantastic visualities, digital media, and transmedia storytelling. He has published widely in these fields, serves on the boards of Science Fiction Studies, Extrapolation, and Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds, and is the co-editor of the New Dimensions in Science Fiction book series at the University of Wales Press. In 2017, he was the first non-Anglophone recipient of the Thomas D. Clareson Award for Distinguished Service presented by the Science Fiction Research Association for outstanding service activities.