Crackers Matter!

: Online Fan Activism in the Save Farscape Campaign

Abstract

This paper provides a theoretical foundation for a systematic study of activism among online fans involved in the Save Farscape campaign. Online fans of the science fiction series Farscape have created the campaign with the goal of returning this cancelled show to production. Participants in the campaign are employing forms of online communication such as e-mail and World Wide Web pages as tools for mobilizing collective resources in what might best be called online fan activism. Prior research has depicted media fandom as a form of media consumption but has failed to explore the ways in which material structures the non-virtual world may affect the social and discursive resources at play in online communities. A political economy of online fandom activity is advocated, one that would take into account the ways that online fan groups tend to be productive media consumers, the way these groups may threaten to liberate these texts from the authority imposed by the media industries, and social nature of online fan groups involved in goal-centered social action.

Crackers Matter!: Online Fan Activism in the Save Farscape Campaign

Introduction: The Show Must Go On The end was not really an ending. As the story drew to a close, two lovers, one, John Crichton, a male from Earth, and the other, Aeryn Sun, a female from an alien race, sat together in a tiny wooden boat on a deceptively placid lake. Drifting away from their massive living spacecraft, Moya the Leviathan, the lovers talked quietly about themselves, and about a possible future together. Words of affection passed between them, as another spacecraft aggressively swept into view. Another alien, race unknown, bore down upon them, allowing only an instant for calm expressions of love for one another. The beam from the alien craft hits them, freezing Aeryn and John for an instant before they shattered into millions of fragments. As the cries of their friends on the Leviathan fade out, three letters fade up on a black video background: To Be Continued. The adventure isnt over, even though the television series, Farscape, has just ended. The story, however, wasnt supposed to end this way. Back in September 2001, the cable television network The SCI FI Channel, a subsidiary of Vivendi Universal, contracted with Farscapes producers, the Henson Company, to finance for both a fourth and a fifth season (Scodari, 2003). On September 6, 2002, however, after a rumor appeared on the Aint It Cool News website (http://www.aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=13209), Farscape producers David Kemper and Richard Manning and series star Ben Browder confirmed on an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel that SCI FI was taking advantage of a contractual clause that allowed them to pass on a fifth season, despite its earlier commitment.

The series, which had been constructed as a narrative continuing from the fourth to the fifth seasons, would end abruptly in early 2003. Shortly after this announcement, fans of the show began the Save Farscape Campaign. For fans of the series, Farscape has become an orienting texti for an online fan campaign that refuses to let the show disappear. In the age of online communication, collective action can be conducted with great speed across time and distance. Forms of online communication such as e-mail, web pages, chat rooms, instant messengers, web rings, blogs, newsgroups, BBSs, and others offer exceptional tools for mobilizing shared resources. The ability of groups to take advantage of these technologies for collective action can be observed at play among those working to return the Farscape series to the screen. Where campaigns to save other cancelled and threatened-withcancellation television shows such as the original Star Trek relied upon letter-writing campaigns, contemporary groups with access to the Internet are able to plan and enact campaign strategies in dramatically new ways. For the fans of Farscape, access to these forms of online communication have opened up new possibilities for what might be called fan activism in general and for the saving of this highly-praised television series in particular. This paper provides a theoretical basis for studying the phenomenon of online fandom activity such as the Save Farscape Campaign. As a preliminary account, it provides a foundation for understanding the phenomenon of online fandom activity within the context of prior research in communication studies and sociology. With this in mind, this paper will examine media fandom as a form of media consumption, a political economy of fandom activity, and online fandom as collective action. The paper concludes with some of the compelling questions that have arisen from prior research into the phenomenon of online media fandom, and some of the directions that an in-depth study into the subject might take.

Media Fandom as Media Consumption Media-related fandom predates the Internet, but online communication has become extremely significant for fandom-related activity. Fans are considered to be more active than general media audiences. As Bielby, Harrington, and Bielby (1999) put it in their discussion of soap opera fans: To view television is to engage in a relatively private behavior. To be a fan, however, is to participate in a range of activities that extend beyond the private act of viewing and reflects an enhanced emotional involvement with a television narrative. Such activities may include purchasing or subscribing to fan magazines, writing letters to actors, producers, writers, or to fan publications, conversing with other fans on electronic bulletin boards, joining fan clubs, attending fan events, and so on. (35-36) In essence, fans activity tends to involve socializing publicly in both off-line and online contexts. On and off-line opportunities facilitate interaction between often disparate individuals whose basis for contact is at least initially a central or originating media text, such as a television soap operas (Baym, 1997; Bielby, et al., 1999), network television series such as Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman (Bird, 2003) and the X-Files (Wakefield, 2001) and science fiction TV shows including Stargate: SG-1 and Farscape (Scodari, 2003) among others (Clerc, 2000). Media fandom is a form of symbolic social action representing creative media consumption. This position represents a significant movement towards placing media fandom within the framework of research on larger, active media audiences. In the United States, the active audience tradition incorporates the reader-based interpretation promoted in literary reception studies (Radway, 1984/1991) with the qualitative study of media audiences (Lindlof,

1988, 1991). Elsewhere, audience activity came to be associated with Birmingham School sociology and its struggles to analyze the significance of media content within everyday life (Hall, 1980/2001). The most significant demarcation between the two approaches concerned the theoretical framework for understanding audience interpretation, which, in the case of the Birmingham School and its later proponents, emerged from Neo-Marxist social conflict theory. Halls framework of dominant, negotiated, and oppositional interpretation (or polysemy) of media content was eventually lost amid the shift from Althusserian to Gramscian conflict theory in British cultural studies, and the distillation of deCerteau into the notion of resistant consumption as the inevitable response of oppressed media audiences (Fiske, 1991). The concept of media interpretation as consumption, however, is not automatically an acceptance of resistance, as evidenced by later cultural studies research (see du Gay, Hall, Janes, Mackay, & Negus, 1997, and Mackay, 1997). Media studies scholarship has turned increasingly towards other forms of articulation in the experience of media consumption, particularly as new media forms present new possibilities for interactivity, both with the content and with the structures of production that make the content available to the public (for more on the technology aspects, see below). So concerned have scholars been in the possibilities for resistance that research into dominant and negotiated forms of media consumption are particularly ripe for further exploration. Some audiences, then, appear to have the potential for becoming more than simple consumers. Radway (1988) articulated this possibility by describing audiences as nomads who circulate among various media texts. As they do so, these nomads (fashion) narratives, stories, objects, and practices from myriad bits and pieces of prior cultural production (p. 362), and productively articulate together bits and pieces of cultural material scavenged from a multitude

of sites (p. 368). Like the personal computer users described in Murdock, Hartmann, and Gray (1994), these audiences draw upon and contribute to the formation of material, social, and discursive resources that help others to locate, access, and understand the particular meanings surrounding these media forms. These resources can be particularly important for fandom groups which deem specialized knowledge of the original text and an understanding of the proper use of unique tropes and jargon essential for membership. For example, interaction in the Order of the Blessed Saint Scully the Enigmatic (OBSSE), an e-mail list for women fans of The X-Files described by Wakefield (2001), requires an extensive familiarity not only with storylines and the narrative arc of the series but also with the discourse constructed by OBSSE members about the character of Dana Scully. Occasional viewers of the show not versed in these discursive resources would be unlikely to be able to participate fully in OBSSE interaction, although they might be able to participate on some level in the list, making friendships and learning through these social resources. For other online fan groups, however, audiences, such as for viewers of the CBS TV series Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, the Cynthias Porch email discussion list (also known as DQMW-L) might exist first as a social resource into which those with only a mild familiarity with the show could enter, lurk (observe without participating), and learn about and participate in the discourse created by online fans of the series (Bird, 2003). As for the position of material resources, these constitute the kinds of economic constraints that structure the production and consumption of media texts such as television series, something which will be discussed later in this paper. Fan activism also offers audiences the potential to redefine an existing cultural text in much the way audiences/users shape media forms. Much as the popular response to the phonograph record shaped its definition from office dictation device to entertainment medium

(Gitelman, 1999), media content may also be redefined. du Gay et al. (1997) have described the audience as a significant force in the circuit of culture involved in the construction of the meanings of media products once they have reached the marketplace. In terms of series television, the studios which produce and the networks which broadcast a show exert considerable control over the intended meanings of the final product. Audiences have limited influence over a television program in terms of shaping the product either through actual viewership (watching the show) or by writing to the studio, network, or local broadcast station. As a social collective, however, fans of television series may have some influence on programming and content by providing feedback to fan-oriented magazines or online discussion groups (Bielby, et al., 1999). The most dramatic responses occur upon cancellations of popular shows, when fans attempt to mobilize campaigns to save a show, such as the letter-writing campaign organized for the original Star Trek (Gerrold, 1973/1984) and upon the cancellation of CBS-TVs Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman (Bird, 2003). These activities are also a less-direct form of struggle for authority over the series text. As will be discussed later, the age of online communication offers particularly useful tools that improve the possibilities for collective fan activity, and, potentially, for improving the collective authority of fans on the originating text. New forms of media and information technology that take advantage of these new modes of communication also offer other opportunities for audience influence over a text. Today, people who engage with media forms have at their disposal a variety of technological possibilities that have engaged new forms of participation and interactivity. Increasingly, new media and information technologies offer the potential for adopting, adapting, and altering what were once considered static, fixed media texts. Media fans, as described in Jenkins (1992), have been particularly adept at taking such as television programs and creating new texts out of them,

from fanzines and fan-fiction to music videos with personal computers and home video recorders. These technologies allow media fans to blur the once-clear divisions between production and consumption, as with the Napster peer-to-peer file-trading system which allowed a recorded-music audience to become producers who provided content to others (Taylor, DemotHeinrich, Broadfoot, Dodge, & Jian, 2002). By ripping songs off of Compact Discs (CDs), posting them to the public Napster network, and burning downloaded music to their own CDs, participants contributed to an environment in which copyrighted songs and albums were transformed into easily-manipulated data files subject to the whims of users, rather than the recording industry. Moreover, the Napster phenomenon is particularly instructive in indicating the potential reach of these new forms of media consumption and/or production, even across national boundaries. In the age of global online communication, the opportunity to create and disseminate new texts and the means to produce them is amplified beyond the local and/or subcultural level. Media fandom today might best be conceptualized and studied as a worldwide phenomenon, particularly in an era of transnational media conglomerates (Bagdikian, 1996). New peer-to-peer file-trading networks, for example, allow users to exchange media files across national borders, as evidenced by the exchange of digitized comic books between American and Brazilian users on the BitTorrent and DC++ networks. When considering the issues raised by these phenomena, a number of compelling questions arise. First, are our traditional definitions of media production and consumption in need of revision in the digital age. When fans create new texts out of the stuff of their original media, is this phenomenon a form of production or a form of consumption? Second, with cultural production and consumption increasingly crossing transnational boundaries, how is

fandom shaped by and shaping texts across our imagined borders? Perhaps online fandom provides a kind of virtual cultural border zone not unlike the karaoke bars described by Drew (2001), a social space traversed by regulars and dabblers, tourists and townies, regional and ethnic subgroups (p. 27). While some borders online may be structurally imposed by national policies about information access (e.g. Chinas influence over search engine results), delimiting imagined nation-state borders, the primary boundaries to social interaction and cultural consumption online are largely linguistic (differences in language), discursive (differences in symbolic understanding), or economic (differences in access between that which is free and public and that which is fee-based and private). Finally, per Hall (1980/2001), since fan activism is a kind of active response to the text, we need to explore how fans respond to the discursive meanings within and around the texts in question. Does fan activism emerge from media consumption that follows the dominant discursive meanings imbued in these popular culture texts, is it a negotiated response, or is it one grounded in resistance? To best articulate fandom practices online, we should consider the ways in which new media and information technologies allow fans to not only be active audiences but to be cultural producers. We should also consider the significance of nomadic action across and within localized (pop) cultural discourses as well as across and within national borders. Finally, research into online fandom offers an interesting opportunity to consider audience activity involving popular culture that goes beyond active interpretation and into collective action.

A Political Economy of Fandom Activity The phenomenon of media fandom has rarely been examined in terms of its response to the larger structural conditions involved in mass media production. Our understanding of online

fandom might be productively complicated through consideration of the political economy of popular culture. In attempting to wed critical political economy to the concerns of cultural studies, Graham and Murdock (1996) argue that a critical political economy of media forms is differentiated from cultural studies in two ways; first, in critical political economys advocacy of the realist origins of media texts (i.e., they emergence from real worlds of industrial production and not merely phenomenal worlds); and, second, in positioning research on media within the specific historical context of late capitalism. A critical political economy of media thus requires three core concerns: The first is concerned with the production of cultural goods, to which political economy attaches particular importance in its presumption of the limiting (but not completely determining) impact of cultural production on the range of cultural consumption. Secondly, we examine the political economy of texts to illustrate the ways in which the representations present in media products are related to the material realities of their production and consumption. Finally, we assess the political economy of cultural consumption, to illustrate the relation between material and cultural inequality which political economy is distinctly concerned to address. (Graham and Murdock, p. 19). The proscription to detail the relationships between structural constraints and the real situations of media consumption appear too infrequently in the literature, but Waskos (1996) study of the Disney universe is a notable exception. In examining the nature of cultural authority exerted by the Disney global entertainment conglomerate, Wasko describes the companys extensive media holdings alongside a textual analysis of ideological themes in Disney media and how some audiences interpret Disney content. Wasko arrives at the conclusion that the manufacture of fantasy by a company like the Disney corporation has implications for the

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reinforcement of societal norms and values that benefit the company and the status quo (p. 366). If this is true, then there can be considered a relationship between the structural authority of a media conglomerate, the meanings of content produced by the company, and influences on how the public interprets that content. The production of media content thus enforces a kind of material constraint that hearkens back to the model of encoding and decoding described by Hall (1980/2001). Fan activism might best be approached as collective action in response to the material restraints imposed on audience consumption of popular media. Although media fans are a weaker force against the companies that manufacture popular culture, sustained fan campaigns do appear to have an influence on the production process. In 1968, fans of the original Star Trek TV series were successful in organizing letter-writing campaigns that encouraged NBCTV to return the show for a third season and, later, to encourage Paramount Pictures to consider returning the franchise to television and into movie theaters (Gerrold, 1973/1984). In 2000, participants in the Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman e-mail listserv (DQMW-L) invoked a similar campaign to save their cancelled show, adding the use of off-line rallies, group phone calls, and media advertising, which eventually persuaded CBS TV to produce two Dr. Quinn TV movies (Bird, 2003). The appearance of activist fan campaigns may introduce the audience as a more authoritative force in the production process than ever before. This form of textual authority, however, continues to have its limits. There is also the possibility, however, that instead of posing a potential threat to the control of media conglomerates, fan activism facilitates the success of media products in a highly competitive marketplace. From this perspective, Meehan (2000) argues that fandom offers a reliable support to production in vertically-integrated media companies, and, in essence, becomes

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a form of leisure work. Star Trek fans, for example, are said to provide Paramount Pictures with a stable audience of consumers whose appetite for official texts (new and old series episodes on tape, new motion pictures, books and video games) financially supports the companys other efforts. The reliability of fans makes the Star Trek franchise a valuable commodity whose various products will reach a guaranteed audience, ensuring a degree of success regardless of the ultimate quality of the product. While this would seem to improve the position of Star Trek fans as an influence over the series and other ancillary products, Meehan points out that the reverse is true: Paramounts assumption that Trek fans will always buy franchise products means fans become a taken-for-granted audience that comes secondary to the attempt to profit from reaching non-fans. Works by Wasko (1996) and Meehan (2000) provide a much-needed introduction of critical political economy into the study of popular culture fandom. The real-world conditions of media production may be considered to have an influence on fandom activity, but there has been little attempt to consider the nature or extent of that influence in specific cases either online or off-line. Since online fandom represents a form of collective action, however, it may be possible to consider fan activity in the use of this medium as a means through which audiences may be able to creatively respond to the conditions of conglomerate media production.

Online Fandom as Collective Action The Internet has proven to be a particularly effective tool in facilitating collective activity among media fans. The Pew Internet & American Life Project estimates that of the 90 million Americans who have participated in online groups, 60% are entertainment groupies, or those who contact a fan group of a TV show or entertainer (Horrigan, 2001, p. 4). Of these, 31%

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belong to TV-oriented fan groups, and were considered higher-than-average online participants when considering the amount and frequency of e-mail contact with their groups. These media fans take advantage of many of the existing channels for online communication, including electronic mail, USENET newsgroups, and web pages. Online fan groups are repeatedly depicted in the research as a form of community. Rheingolds (1994/1999) original description of online communities as social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace (p. 277) is an oft-repeated definition that has come to dominate discussions of recurring forms of social interaction on the Internet. In later variations, online communities are also viewed as an electronic version of Benedict Andersons imagined communities (Baym, 1998), or as a kind of virtual interpretive community (Mitra, 2000). The community metaphor is an attractive concept, offering not only a salve to the fears of Internet users abandoning off-line reality but also an sense of irony that virtual association may be a substitute for an off-line world characterized by increasing social isolation (Rheingold, 1994/1999). Online fan groups have been represented as communities in Birds (2003) study of an e-mail fan group oriented to the TV series Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, in Bayms (1997) research on soap opera fans engaged in communication on the rec.arts.soap-opera USENET discussion group, and in Wakefields (2001) study of web pages used by fans of The X-Files TV series. The notion of online communities is not without its critics. Willson (2000) has noted that the concept of community offered in optimistic accounts of online interaction is a sociallyimpoverished one. While the surface attributes of community interaction are present, the online experience is one in which there is a thinning of the complexities of human engagement to the

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level of one-dimensional transactions and a detaching of the user from the political and social responsibilities of the real space environment (p. 655). Abstracted from the real world, online communities are isolated from the political possibilities of real space (and) the necessity for direct, embodied, political action (p. 655). While the significance of real-world politics may seem low for online media-fandom groups, it is necessary to keep in mind the extreme power of transnational media conglomerates over the texts they produce. The decision to make changes or to cancel television series is under the ultimate control of the programs producers and the television networks. In the past, fans had little in the way of exerting influence over the process without collective action. Fine (1989), however, writes that collective action involving leisure is less goal-directed than collective action in social movements, where participants share a wish to achieve external ends or to change the fundamental character of the individual member (p. 321). The communication possibilities offered by the Internet, however, may extend what is considered possible among online groups. New forms of online communication may allow a degree of collective action with the potential to achieve goals that would have been considered unthinkable in earlier periods. The risk of the online community metaphor is that it invokes a virtual environment disengaged from the real-world contexts in which those orienting texts are produced, threatening the possibilities for collective action among fans if the series is threatened. The online community metaphor is a powerful one, but its widespread, unexamined use is problematic. Some groups on the Internet are not intensively communal, but may be seriously involved in collective, goal-directed action. One way to complicate our understanding of online fan groups is to explore them as social networks. According to Wellman (1997), electronic social networks resemble their off-line counterparts in being composed of both dense, bounded groups, and sparse, unbounded groups, both at work and in the community. The

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dimensions of density, boundedness, range, exclusivity, social control, and tie strength that define social networks are present in online groups to various degrees. The kind of analysis made possible through social network analysis allows consideration of structural issues both within and outside of the relationships under consideration. The social network perspective offers a metaphor for online fan groups that reflects the unique nature of associations built around but not ultimately structured by the orienting texts around which the group originates. Moreover, the social network perspective may be a more productive lens with which to examine issues surrounding collective action as a response to structural conditions. The network metaphor may provide a perspective on online fandom that allows a more activist, goal-directed focus than the online community perspective.

Considering Online Fan Groups through Critical Political Economy: The Saving Farscape Campaign A critical political economy of popular culture may allow us to explore many of the important issues raised in prior research into the media consumption among online fan groups. The Saving Farscape campaign gives us some sense of how these concepts may play out in the real and virtual worlds of online fandom. First, online fan groups tend to be productive media consumers whose actions include criticism of orienting texts. Instead of exhibiting passive media consumption, online fan groups are engaged in the active critique of the orienting text, discussing the characters and their actions in individual episodes and across the entirety of the series (Wakefield, 2001) as well as plot elements in series with larger narrative arcs (Scodari, 2003). Fans also critique commercial elements that structure the text, such as changes in the direction of a series, the casting of talent, and the marketing (Bird, 2003). These commercial

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concerns move fans in the direction of structural criticisms of series production, a development that may inspire or motivate fans to move beyond criticism and into social action. In the Save Farscape campaign, for example, participants have been careful to cast their criticism of the SCI FI Network in terms of disappointment rather than in terms of hostility. Campaign organizers were careful to direct participant energy away from placing blame on specific SCI FI executives and towards attempts to persuade those executives to consider returning the series to the networks schedule. By attempting to recast their campaign as a form of negotiation rather than opposition, Save Farscape activists apply their collective action in ways that take not only indicate a sophistication about how those the conglomerate media structures work, but also attempt to reach out to sympathetic connections within the companies in question. Another issue regarding online fan groups concerns the ways in which popular culture texts are being liberated from the control imposed by the industries that produce and market them. In a way, Jenkins (1992) textual poaching has given way to a kind of multimedia and multimodal poaching, in which the stuff of the original series its images, sounds, music are being appropriated to new and unusual ends. When viewed through the lens of content producers, discussion of official texts in online fan groups is generally considered within the acceptable limits of audience response. Fan-created fiction of the slash and Mary Sue variety, while usually created not for profit but for pure entertainment purposes, risk being interpreted as a threat to the authority of the texts producers because they tend to take copyrighted and often trademarked characters into new spaces and new places, not all of them simply within the fan groups. Whereas fan fiction was once only textual, multimedia poaches are now able to appropriate visual and aural content from television and motion pictures and

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manipulate this data in ways that create a text of reasonably-sophisticated quality that, in the age of the Internet, can be disseminated worldwide. The creativity of these fans is not officially sanctioned by the copyright holders, who are not afraid to invoke legal claims to their intellectual property. Take, for example, the case, reported in the Washington Post, of a Star Wars fan named Mike J. Nichols, who constructed a personalized version of the 20th Century Fox motion picture Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace (Greenberg, 2001). Nichols removed twenty minutes of story from the original movie, primarily to quicken the pace and to de-emphasize the role of the character JarJar Binks. Lucasfilm, the producer of the original version of The Phantom Menace, sought to halt distribution of this unauthorized re-edit being sold on eBay, although Nichols was not attempting to sell the version himself. Rather, others who were able to acquire the re-edit via online file-trading networks like Morpheus and KaZaa were selling the copies on eBay. Creative remixes of digital content can have an extensive life outside of their creators. In the digital era, re-edits of popular culture are easily uploaded to and made available on the world wide web and through the unregulated file-trading networks such as KaZaa, Morpheus, and Gnutella where other copyrighted content is exchanged. These networks facilitate the exchange of media files and computer software between parties who use programs such as BearShare to upload and download songs, movies, games, and other software programs. Although the U.S. Supreme Court has declared the exchange of copyrighted materials on these networks illegal, the networks themselves are not inherently illegal. Moreover, the more decentralized networks continue to be used despite prosecution of users by the recording and motion picture industries through a variety of legal (and some possibly illegal) means.

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What the Save Farscape campaign faces is a different situation involving similar issues about symbolic authority. No longer is it sacrosanct to assume that the decision to cancel a series means its end. Popular culture characters now exist in a media culture that allows them to be appropriated by fans outside of the control of the media companies and their claims to authority through legal protection. The extreme example of this is the attempt by Save Farscape participants to explore financing the production of a fifth season or of motion pictures in conjunction with or if necessary outside of the traditional structure of the media industries. Again, this kind of activity finds fans working with the media conglomerates to accomplish a collective goal. A final issue to consider is our understanding of the social nature of online fan groups involved in goal-centered social action. Clearly, there is a need to clarify the social nature of online fan groups, whether they can be considered as communities, social networks, as both forms, or as some other social formation. Whereas the community definition of online groups tends to isolate them in an electronic universe of narrowly-focused concerns, recasting them as social networks may allow for a more sophisticated examination of their potential for action both online and off-line. Considering online fan groups as social networks may make it possible to consider how external structural constraints can be negotiated with from the focal point of online groups. The Save Farscape campaign involves an action-centered group that differs from the traditional online fan groups analyzed in prior research. When, as with the Farscape campaign, strategic planning and implementation of plans is mainly the result of organizing efforts of significant members who maintain the web sites and e-mail listservs, are we dealing with an online community or some other form of social interaction? To produce the desired

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outcome, participants in the attempt to save Farscape must engage the real world of media production. Simply interacting in the community will not alter conditions offline, in the real world where the series is produced. Further analysis of the Save Farscape online fan group as a social network may reveal some of the limitations in the online community concept, at least as improve our understanding of how this online group can act as a force for returning Farscape to production.

Conclusion Existing research into the conditions of online fan activity raises a number of compelling questions. The nature of these questions ranges across the spectra of media as content, as technological form(s), as industrial structures of production, and as cultural resources for audience consumption and use. Fan group activity online also involves audiences in both the media structures which produce the orienting texts of significance but also in the structures of production involved in Internet and information-technology industries. Thus, online fan activity must be conducted within the material constraints of industries that manufacture media texts but also within those enacted by industries making online communication about those texts possible. This situation has been wholly overlooked by prior research, but it provides a potentially rich avenue to consider the material constraints and possibilities available to fans of contemporary popular media on a global scale. The final issue, and perhaps the most important to the phenomenon of the Save Farscape online campaign, involves the potential for online fan groups to exert a strong, direct influence upon the production of a television series. The Internet has opened up avenues for fan activism that offer the potential to increase the authority of audiences over the texts produced by

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media industries. Taking advantage of the Internet for organizing purposes, fans may no longer be content to wait for the media industries to facilitate their demands. Moreover, online fan groups and may be perfecting the tools for achieving their goals on a more level playing field than ever before.

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An orienting text would be the cultural content series, book, or character that provides the initial focus of the organization of fan activity at the online platform in question. This reflects the ways in which some fan groups, such as the Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman e-mail list (Bird, 2003) and the rec.arts.tv.soaps USENET forum (Baym, 1997) have a central text as the starting point for discursive interaction but then allow for the possibility of tangents, or off-topic discussions. When, as Bird notes, interaction becomes the focus of interaction in a fan group, then one could say that group has temporarily abandoned the orienting text.

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