Crowdfunding: A Spimatic application of digital fandom

Abstract

The digital environment has opened up new spaces for fans to engage with the production process of their favoured texts. However, fan studies have largely neglected the larger temporal structures undergirding this engagement. In this article, I augment studies of digital fandom by utilizing Bruce Sterling’s technosocial concept of the Spime as a means of investigating the relationship forged between the technology of crowdfunding and the affect of particular audiences. The successful Kickstarter campaigns for Rob Thomas and Kristen Bell’s Veronica Mars film and Zach Braff’s film Wish I Was Here, and the failed Kickstarter campaign for Melissa Joan Hart’s film Darci’s Walk of Shame, each illustrate how the entertainers drew (or did not draw) on specific support from the lineage of his or her own fan communities to generate funds and word-of-mouth publicity. These campaigns ultimately illustrate the consequential powers of the fan at multiple nodes within the production process.

Keywords

Crowdfunding crowdsourcing fan Kickstarter participatory culture Spime

In 2013, three high-profile Kickstarter campaigns each drew on specific fan audiences to garner both money and attention for new projects. In March 2013, Kristen Bell and Rob Thomas, of Veronica Mars fame, quickly became Kickstarter superstars by completely funding a Veronica Mars movie within 8 hours of opening the project. Popular press (e.g. Goodale, 2013) and academic blogs (McNutt, 2013) touted the new era of film funding this heralded (Bishop, 2013), while others illustrated antecedents for this type of film funding (McCracken, 2013). A few weeks later, Zach Braff, from the sitcom Scrubs, took to Kickstarter to fund his own indie film called Wish I Was Here, although this was met with more ire than Bell and Thomas’ endeavour (Fernandez, 2013). And a month after Braff’s Kickstarter was fully funded, Melissa Joan Hart (the titular lead in Clarissa Explains it All) attempted to use Kickstarter to fund her romantic comedy Darci’s Walk of Shame. Unlike Bell and Thomas’ and Braff’s campaigns, Hart’s campaign failed to earn the 2 million dollars she had set as her goal (June, 2013).

As examples of entertainers drawing on their own fan audience for financial support, these campaigns are key examples of neoliberal 21st-century fan/industry relations (see Booth 2015). But looking at just the Kickstarter campaign out of its temporal context only tells part of the story. As Potts (2012) describes in her analysis of how musician Amanda Palmer uses fan financing:

Palmer’s fans are not passive; they are her contributors, co-conspirators, and supporters within a much larger do it yourself (DIY), participatory culture forming between artist and fan … the ability to engage with a fan base, co-produce with them, and support each other is a major factor in finding … success. (pp. 361–362)

Potts calls this an ‘ecosystem’ (p. 362) of fans, producers and record labels, and maintains the importance of fan engagement as ‘a domain for participation’ (p. 377). This article explores this ecosystem as a technosocial system, arguing that to see fan participation in this system requires a more procedural examination of the relationship between fandom and technology.

This system I am terming ‘Spimatic fandom’, appropriating the term ‘Spime’ from Bruce Sterling (2005), who argued that this new concept, a portmanteau of space and time, is indicative of the future of the object. Spimes are not just physical objects – or, rather, not only physical objects – but also exist as instantiations in time. A Spime describes the lifecycle of an object from initial design through physical substantiation to final digital trace. It changes the ‘object’ from a purely physical entity into a lifecycle of technological transformation, and uses time as another dimension upon which an object can be measured. Each Spime is individual and unique and, like the diverse array of fan practices in the digital environment, complements fannish activity by putting a temporal lens onto fandom. Investigating temporality as a part of the Spime means seeing ‘the entire industrial process … made explicit’ and understanding ‘more than the object’ itself (Sterling, 2005, 23). Thus, at every instance of a Spime’s existence, technology and human must meld: In a world of the Spime, ‘designers must design, not just for objects or for people, but for the technosocial interactions that unite people and objects’ (Sterling, 2005: 22). Outside of technology studies, the Spime can also usefully be applied to the role of fans within the crowdfunded venture, as this ‘Spimatic fandom’ integrates production and reception as coexistent paradigms of crowdfunding. To this end, I augment studies of fandom by integrating the Spime into the relationships forged between the technology of crowdfunding and the affect of particular audiences, in order to see how fan participation in crowdfunding develops through temporal association with the media object.

In this article, I want to develop a more robust understanding of the way participation can be enabled and generated online. The spaces for fans to finance aspects of the filmmaking process open up new models for understanding fan participation, redefined by the underlying technosocial structure of digital fandom’s interaction with the media. This ‘Spimatic’ appreciation of the process of fandom highlights changing paradigms of fan viewership as a form of participatory culture. I will conclude that, rather than through exemplary products, a Spimatic fandom sees the process of fan activity as key to fan affect through participation. Just as the Spime exists through both space and time, so too does fannish input into crowdfunding media projects parallel the spatial and temporal situations of fan/producer interaction. I describe how viewing the influences of fandom within crowdfunding projects as Spimatic changes the interpretation of the fan experience within participatory culture.

Fan funding

For each of these Kickstarter campaigns, the entertainer drew on specific support from his or her own fan community to generate funds, both highlighting the power of fandom to enact media change but also problematizing fandom’s transformative potential (Chin et al., 2014). In this article, I am concerned with investigating the larger techno-cultural processes that lead to fan financing of products, and the mechanisms by which both fans and producers become imbricated within a technological system. On the one hand, participants in crowdfunding campaigns become indentured to the process, subsuming their own opinions about the content among the larger paradigms of financial payment. Fans are on unequal footing with media producers, as a structural inequality between fans and the industry exists on these campaigns. On the other hand, only by a form of networked participation can crowdfunding function. Each campaign needed fans and drew on that support. This uneasy relationship emerges at a time when power is more and more perceived to be in the hands of individuals online, indicating that a new model that links participatory culture and fandom needs to be explicated.

Fans’ engagement at multiple nodes within the production process portends a consequential role in the production of the media object. Crowdfunding campaigns that successfully engage their fans in a more participatory manner – acknowledging previous fan work, noting the saliency of fan activities in the past, appealing to fan attention in the future – highlight the temporal existence of a fandom. This occurs whether a specific media object (e.g. the Veronica Mars Kickstarter campaign) or a media celebrity (e.g. Amanda Palmer’s successful use of fan funding). But such reliance on fandom as a temporal structure is predicated on those fans existing in the first place. Engaging a fandom that doesn’t exist may spell failure for the campaign (e.g. Darci’s Walk of Shame).

This networked participation is itself engendered by particular technological processes. Some scholars (Andrejevic, 2008; Aytes, 2012; Pebler, 2013; Terranova, 2000) have argued that participatory online culture is exploitative of fan money, time and work; in the case of Veronica Mars specifically, Pebler (2013) notes that ‘Under current rules, it is possible for media entities to exploit their fan bases in a way that is pernicious and ultimately unsustainable’ (p. 6). Other scholars (Chin, 2013; Jones, 2014) demonstrate how fans in the case of the Veronica Mars Kickstarter are well aware of their role in the financing of a film, and are not exploited at all. For example, Chin (2013) argues that fan agency is crucial for understanding a desire/willingness to donate to a Kickstarter campaign: ‘Frustratingly, fan agency always gets left out in arguments which purports concern that fans are being duped by studios and networks’ (p. 6). Chin demonstrates that fans are not ‘dupes’ but rather are aware of what they’re donating to.

Indeed, crowdfunding exists at a unique rupture between the neoliberal emphasis on the role of individual, and a more open, participatory model of networked action. And while debating the exploitation of fans within the crowdfunding process is necessary and useful, it is also important to investigate the larger technological processes that are in place that shape this fan/producer/technology interaction. By concentrating on the single issue of fan exploitation or fan agency, fan studies run the risk of ignoring the larger techno-cultural paradigm that predicates this shift in the first place.

As a concept, the Spime expands on the technological infrastructure of human discourse; yet, it has traditionally been associated with technological developments. To that end, the concept of the Spime has been in the past usefully applied to multiple technological discourses, including philosophical concepts of virtuality (Garassini, 2008), the notion of physical hypertext (Bonanni et al., 2009), marketing new technologies (Patel, 2009), even food production (Maciag et al., 2010) and environmental issues in new technological development (McFedries, 2010). But the Spime could also usefully be applied to issues of culture as well as issues of technology; culture and technology not being opposed so much as complementary. As Allen-Robertson and Beer (2010) note, focusing solely on the technological infrastructure ignores much value in ‘resonance between [the Spime] and the range of debates that are occurring in sociology and across the social sciences with regard to possible viable future directions’ of research (p. 530). They take a meta approach to the Spime in their study, viewing the Spime as an idea that can be traced throughout space and time, effectively giving a Spimatic trace to a non-physical object. In the same way as Allen-Robertson and Beer (p. 542) treat ideas as ‘objects that can be followed and visualised along their lifecourse’, so too do I use a Spimatic reading to illuminate the patterns of process and progress of non-physical entities like fandom. Applying the concept of the Spime to fandom in terms of crowdfunding media campaigns allows us to note and augment the saliency of fan work in multiple aspects of the production process.

As exemplars of an active audience, fans have served to clarify and represent larger concerns within ‘participatory culture’ for fan studies scholars (Jenkins, 2006, 2013; Scott, 2013). A participatory culture has been defined by Jenkins (2009) as one where ‘members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connections with one another’ (p. 7). In some respects, fandom would seem to exemplify participation, as Jenkins (2006) indicates by holding fandom up as a central focus of contemporary convergence culture. At the same time, as fan researchers we need to be cautious to avoid making ‘fandom’ and ‘participatory culture’ synonymous. As Leora Hadas (2009) has noted,

while the logic of participation might seem to mirror the logic of fandom … they are not one and the same; … even an interpretive fannish community cannot be seen apart from its own norms and ideals; and … the loose and open nature of participatory culture as idealized in the Web 2.0 model might, in fact, clash with these ideals as much as it might clash with the wider cultural model of production it is threatening to replace. (p. 1.2)

As she goes on to show, while some fans may embrace the emancipatory potential of Web 2.0 participation in digital spaces, other fans embrace the strict hierarchical functionality, neoliberal notions of capital and regulation of fannish content engendered by Web 2.0 digital networks (see Aytes, 2012, on the neoliberal harnessing of cognitive labour online, and De Kosnik, 2012, on fans’ labour as generative of capital). Fan funding, at least as it has been practised so far, seems more tied to this neoliberal style of fandom than to a transformative one. Indeed, fandom is not a homogenous grouping, and the boundaries between fannish groups often remain entrenched (Hills, 2002, 2012). Instead, different fans embrace different aspects of the web for different purposes (Booth and Kelly, 2013). Such is the power of fandom, to resist easy typification.

The problem with linking fans to participatory culture is that it simplifies both fan activity and audience participation. As Bury et al. (2013: 316) and others (Booth, 2013; Hills, 2010a) have noted, there is an ‘over-emphasis on participatory fans in the academy’. Fan activity can be incredibly transformative, but it can also, for example, be what Hills (2010a) calls ‘mimetic’, or the ‘desire … to replicate what’s seen on screen’ (n.p.). This focus on the non-transformative fan activities is important for fan studies to remain well rounded. Although crowdfunding appears to harness one particular type of fandom to generate funds for a media project, ignoring the importance of fans’ financial participation risks eliding these fans from fan studies.

Similarly, participation is a more complex proposition than just ‘doing things’ with the media – as Amazon.com’s 2013 drive to monetize fan fiction through Kindle Worlds illustrates. That May, online retailer Amazon.com announced that a range of popular media series, including Gossip Girl and Vampire Diaries, would become available for authorized fan fiction to be sold on the website (Amazon Publishing, 2013). Fans could write stories (following strict guidelines) to sell and collect royalties on. Although problematic for a number of reasons (see Baker-Whitelaw, 2013), Kindle Worlds also demonstrates that participation in cultural processes is a difficult tightrope to walk. By limiting the authorized fan fiction to specific types (‘no porn’ … ‘doesn’t violate laws or copyright…’ ‘no crossovers’, et al. [Baker-Whitelaw, 2013: n.p.]), ‘participation’ becomes a directly modulated and regulated activity by Amazon. This authorization can also be tacit, as even the act of using an Internet service to share creative fan work can be subject to the whims of the owner of the service. Far from the ‘open and empowering playground in which the entire audience can play, regardless of their level of involvement, experience, or competence’, as Hadas (2009: 2.4) defines participatory culture, creative online fan fiction demonstrates that participation is often regulated, overseen and authorized.

Spimatic fandom

For media fan researchers, fandom has offered a way of exploring the activity and participation of audiences. Sterling’s (2005: 11) notion of the Spime as the temporal existence of an object, a ‘material instantiation … of an immaterial system’, represents a new mechanism by which participation in multiple timeframes can be determined. Fan studies attempt to engage in a socio-cultural critique of audiences, to develop media studies and to analyse the activities of fan communities. In Cult Collectors, Lincoln Geraghty (2014) expands fan studies to include a focus on collecting merchandise, and examines the way that fans’ ‘relationships [are] created and embodied’ by these collections (p. 5). In many ways, this new turn in fan studies to examine how the products of professional media industries, like action figures, toys, games and collectibles, can reflect different fan attributes. The use of crowdfunding, like Geraghty’s discussion of fan collecting, is another way that fans can find meaning out of giving money to a media organization. For the fans in Geraghty’s study, fan identity forms through the ‘convergence of popular fandom, new media, nostalgia and contemporary toy culture’; for the fans that donate to crowdfunding, such nostalgia is meaningful in the way the campaigns they donate to draw on the affective memory of the fans’ interactions with the original media entity (p. 9).

By more fully integrating the concept of the Spime into fan research, the perception of consumption and production as practices shifts to see them as one cogent and chronological process instead. While Bruns (2008) identifies this process as ‘produsage’, where ‘the role of “consumer” and even that of “end user” have long disappeared’, I assert that consumption and production remain tethered but not blended (p. 2). Applying the Spime to fan crowdfunding illustrates how consumption and production are uniquely positioned as nodes in a network of fan activity. Previous research into digital fandom (Booth, 2010) examines the way that new technology shapes fannish work – the specific affordances of social media that influence the development of fan communities, especially in the way those communities interact online. But reading this fandom through a Spimatic lens offers a different interpretation: that fan communities grow and change through time, and the interaction between the entire network of relationships – fan, media text, producer, technology – creates unique trajectories for each fan within that community.

In an age when one can follow the history of an object from its very (digital) conception to its final (physical) destruction, the tangibility of an object describes only one portion of a much longer process. When I purchase a book on Amazon.com, my copy of that book does not begin and end with a physical object. Instead, from the publisher’s first input of data into the Amazon’s servers to the (eventual) barcode associated with the book when I donate it to a library, that book becomes part of a process that integrates digital and physical into one – a Spime. And it’s a personal Spime – it defines just that copy of the book, that digital imprint. That book’s existence in my hands as I read it is just one part – often the shortest part – of its Spimatic life. A Spimatic examination of fandom would see the interactive participation of the fan at multiple points in the temporal process as generative of production. For example, the television series Doctor Who illustrates how the fan presence throughout the history of the series meant different things at different times. Fandom in the 1960s helped spur ‘Dalekmania’ and convince the BBC to keep the show on the air (Bignell, 2007). Service to the fans in the 1980s was largely perceived negatively and may have led to the show’s being put on permanent hiatus, but that same service to the fans helped bring the show back in the 2000s (Hills, 2010b: 61). While the show was off-air in the 1990s, as Matt Hills (2010b) argues, many fans from the 1970s and 1980s rose in prominence in the Doctor Who community to become ‘fan-producers’ of original novels and audios, and then transitioned into becoming fan-producers of New Who as well (p. 56). At each stage of Doctor Who Spimatic fandom, the fan exists as audience, creator and financer, revealing the unique fannish presence at all these moments. Importantly, Spimatic fandom doesn’t describe just one way of experiencing this relationship: As every Spime is unique, so too is every fan’s interaction in this cycle.

To analyse each of these fan interactions as separate necessitates ignoring the larger temporal processes that develop through fan interaction: The Spime offers a way of seeing the unique processes of fandom throughout the lifecycle of a media text. This life, defined by and inclusive of the physical object at its heart, can be applied to the development of a crowdfunded campaign as well. If each fan’s individual interaction with a media object forms a Spime – from the first viewing of an episode to the final click of the pause button – then the diverse array of Spimatic fans generates a temporal exploration of crowdfunding.

Crowdfunding

Crowdfunding, the grassroots financing of projects using social and other online media, provides a contemporary avenue for exploring the interaction between users and technological systems within a digital culture. There are many economic models used to develop theories of crowdfunding (Agrawal et al., 2013); two of the more common are the commons-based peer production model described by Benkler (2006), in which the creative energy of communities is coordinated into meaningful projects, and the model of collective intelligence (Lévy, 1997), in which individuals are empowered as part of a community to contribute meaningful value to information transactions. Both these models position crowdfunding as an extension of participatory culture (Jenkins, 2006), although as have previously been described (Booth, 2010; Jenkins et al., 2013), new models of economic theory might be necessary to fully articulate the cultural ramifications of crowdfunding.

Specifically, the use of fan audiences as generative of capital demonstrates a procedural look at fan affect, what I (2010) have previously called the ‘Digi-Gratis’ economy (p. 24). In the Digi-Gratis economy, monetary, social and cultural values for products are interchangeable. Fans may give money to buy memorabilia, donate time to staff conventions or spend energy creating fan fiction, vids or other cultural products: Each element becomes one node in a network of value and exchange within an affective media environment. In the case of the Digi-Gratis economy, I (2010) offered the example of Doctor Who fans who gave time and money to see their show put back on the air; as Jenkins et al. (2013) assert, this ‘reappraisal and recirculation’ of value portends a new form of digital economy (p. 96). There are different levels and types of participation within a project, and for many fans, donating money can offer participatory pleasures (Booth, 2013). As Belleflamme et al. (2013) note, raising funds tends to be easier if the donors already have an emotional investment in the project (see also Sørensen, 2012).

As I’ve (Booth, 2013; Booth, 2015) previously discussed in relation to Inspector Spacetime fandom, fan audiences can develop and focus crowdfunding projects into the pleasure of production. Giving money to a project can be enjoyable in and of itself; although the ‘power’ of creation may still lie within the media producer, donating to a crowdfunding campaign provides the specific pleasure of connection with an artist (Potts, 2012) and a feeling of community (Booth, 2013). For the fans of Inspector Spacetime, a parody of Doctor Who as seen on the NBC sitcom Community, participation in a Kickstarter campaign to generate an Inspector Spacetime webseries (separate from Community) not only gave them the pleasure of creating new fan work, but also provided a tangible (if momentary) sense of being a producer themselves. Providing capital-generated notions of participation. At the same time, however, these notions did not end up making fans into producers; instead, they reified the boundary between fan and producer by establishing a clear demarcation among participants on the Kickstarter campaign. The actual producers of Inspector Spacetime (NBC-Universal and Sony Pictures) threatened to sue if that name was used, so the creators of the Kickstarter were forced to change the name (and identity) of the series to Untitled Web Series About a Space Traveler Who Can Also Travel Through Time, alienating the fans that contributed to an ‘Inspector Spacetime’ Kickstarter. The assertion of authority by the media industry reflects the power differential that still exists between media creators and media consumers. Yet, the fact that Inspector Spacetime fans still flocked to the Kickstarter even after the name change, and even donated over $25,000 to an IndieGoGo campaign for a film version of Untitled Web Series About a Space Traveler Who Can Also Travel Through Time, indicates that fan participation doesn’t always require their productivity being sanctioned by the industries.¹

Crowdfunding campaigns designed by media corporations occupy a similar conflicted stance between production and consumption. But fandom is always about this conflict, of noting the saliency of fan work within the context of corporate media. By following a crowdfunding campaign from opening video to funded project, one could theoretically see the birth of a new form of creative product – one formed not just from corporate control and organization, but also from crowdsourcing and fan involvement (Brabham, 2013), a hybrid system of production and consumption. Fans, engaged in crowdfunding endeavours, not only personify the campaign, but also personify the production process of the campaign, from inception to reception. Rather than seeing the production process in stages – pre-production/production/post-production, for example, – a Spimatic examination of fandom portends a more fluid process of participation and observation. We can see this process in action by looking at three fan-based Kickstarter campaigns in more detail.

Kickstarter campaigns

Spimatic fandom illustrates the procedural logic behind fan participation in crowdfunding. The three crowdfunded campaigns analysed here demonstrate different levels of fan engagement. While the final existence of the film (as a demonstrable product) is easily established (Veronica Mars and Wish I Was Here were funded; Darci’s Walk of Shame was not), the continued existence of the Spime (as a comprehensible process) of each of the campaigns allows for a more concrete exemplar of the crowdfunded campaign’s temporal actuality. Specifically, all three campaigns are Spimatic, but the presence of an active fandom in the case of the Veronica Mars Kickstarter campaign reveals a more participatory Spime and the lack of acknowledgement of fan presence in Darci’s Walk of Shame exposes a less participatory Spime. What each project hinges on is harnessing fan nostalgia and acknowledging the presence of fandom at multiple nodes in the production process. For Geraghty (2014: 3) and for myself (Booth, 2015), nostalgia plays a crucial role in understanding contemporary fan interests; Geraghty writes that ‘notions of nostalgia and memory are bound up in the recreation of a contemporary fan identity rather than a recreation of the past’, highlighting the temporal and historical awareness of fandom surrounding a media project. Examining fandom as Spimatic deepens the investigation of this nostalgia as it applies to what Jenkins et al. (2013) describe as a social transformation of technology. With access to more and more information, individual consumers are beginning to ‘spread’ media content beyond the boundaries it was originally intended for. Spreadability – the potential for ‘audiences to share content for their own purposes’ (p. 3) – is a paradigm shift in the way analysts can think about media distribution: if the broadcast paradigm saw media circulation limited to an elite few, spreadability sees more distribution power to the masses.

Indeed, Kickstarter itself has spreadable characteristics. Specific campaigns often draw on the word-of-mouth of individuals who spread information about each project. And once a donation is given, Kickstarter encourages the donator to post news of the donation to social media like Twitter and Facebook. In the case of the Veronica Mars Kickstarter, for example, I first heard about it on my Facebook wall when two colleagues and a friend each separately posted that they had contributed to the campaign, spreading not only their own generosity, but also news of the project itself. As Kuppuswamy and Bayus (2013) note, this spreadability increases as projects near completion, both because project creators make final pleas for more donations (if not funded) and because more people wait to donate until the end of the campaign.

To examine each Kickstarter project on its own, however, one risks inducing specific characteristics from particular campaigns. As Gray (2011) suggests, individual Kickstarter campaigns appear to harness an ‘amorphous’ crowd that does not aggregate into a community. However, seeing multiple projects manifest similar characteristics allows us to see the ‘community of participants’ (Jenkins et al., 2013: 249) – the crowd itself becomes participatory, engaging in ‘the production and distribution’ of media products themselves (Aitamurto, 2011: 431). In other words, crowdfunding fandom alters the experience of online participatory culture. Each of these Kickstarters reveals that different Spimatic fan processes help shape the eventual outcomes of the campaigns.

This participatory process holds true whether or not the crowdfunding campaign could be considered successful. For example, the Veronica Mars Kickstarter opened on 13 March 2013 and within one day had surpassed its US$2 million goal. When it closed on 12 April 2013, the campaign had over 91,500 backers who invested a total of 5.7 million dollars towards the making of the film. Warner Brothers became involved in the project soon afterwards, offering to distribute the film and as of June 2013, the movie had started filming, with a 2014 release date. By all accounts, this particular Kickstarter campaign was a success, and the thousands of people who invested will know that their money has helped bring this fan favourite show back on the screen.

This strong fan base is the reason for the highly visible success of the Veronica Mars Kickstarter. In the three years the show was on the air (2004–2007), it was critically acclaimed but had a relatively small audience. However, the audience was loyal and dedicated, as San Diego reporter Karen Peterson (2006) describes. Along with other fan campaigns, the Veronica Mars fandom became highly invested in restarting the show – the Veronica Mars ‘Cloud Watchers’ organized viewers to garner higher ratings during the show’s airing, and later sent over 10,000 Mars candy bars to The CW to try and save the show from cancellation (Empire Online, 2012). This parallels similar efforts by other fan groups to get their favoured shows back on the air – Star Trek fans’ famously writing letters to CBS, Jericho fans sending peanuts to CBS and Roswell fans mailing Tabasco sauce to the WB – although rarely do the shows get renewed, and if they do, it’s only for a little while.

Traditionally, fan studies scholars might view the activity of all these different fan communities through a reception studies lens. That is, each of these fan groups was active and participatory in the media environment, but only after they had already been consumers of the show. Jericho fans and Roswell fans sent food items because characters on those shows mentioned that food – it was a direct reference to what had been outlined on air. Taking quite literally Jenkins’ (1992) ‘poaching’ metaphor from Textual Poachers, these fans took their ‘save-our-show’ campaigns directly from the text itself. In no way is this intended to demean the act of these fans – they are, as Jenkins notes, using the resources at their disposal to interact as best they are able given the media environment.

What the Veronica Mars Kickstarter campaign illustrates, however, is the presence of fans’ active receptive practices within multiple aspects of the production process. Similarly, the receptive practices of the filmmakers towards the fan campaign via acknowledgement of fans’ work may have helped spur fans to want to donate to the Kickstarter. And in turn, the reward structure of Kickstarter augments Spimatic fandom: The rewards from the digital downloads of the film to a guest role onscreen reflect fan concerns about the future of the project (i.e. as Mittell [2013] states, with ‘fans as funders, we’re basically just pre-buying merchandise, DVDs, or experiences’, p. 2). In a transmediated text like Veronica Mars, specific identifiable moments of ‘production’ and ‘reception’ are difficult to articulate and differentiate. But when Veronica Mars fans attempted to get the show back on the air in 2007, their efforts were highly visible to the Veronica Mars production team. According to an article at the time, Rob Thomas even noted fans’ efforts to save the show (Menon, 2007). It is possible that the post-reception influence of fans on the show helped to convince Rob Thomas and Kristen Bell to crowdfund the film. In the video promoting the campaign (itself a ‘spreadable’ component of Kickstarter projects), both Bell and Thomas mention the Veronica Mars fandom by name – calling them an affectionate ‘Marshmallows’ – and use community-based language like ‘this is our chance to make the Veronica Mars movie happen’, fully involving the fan community in the project. When the film was released a year after the Kickstarter, Thomas referenced fan work again: ‘Today, Veronica Mars returned, and it’s all because of you’, he wrote on the Kickstarter page, imbricating fandom and acknowledging the Spimatic fandom throughout Veronica Mars’ existence.

The interactive potential of fans and producers becomes fluid in the digital environment; crowdfunding presents a useful metaphor for seeing this procedural relationship grow and develop. Furthermore, one way to identify moments of activity of this relationship is through the Spime. If the entirety of the Veronica Mars fandom can be identified as a Spime – from the moment the show was conceived of by Rob Thomas until its final download decades from now – then fans and producers have an equally participatory role to play in this Spimatic construction. Despite the unequal financial or creative role in a neoliberal media environment, Spimatic fandom is co-created. The influence of one upon the other cannot be measured simply in dollar amounts or volumes of fan fiction produced. Rather, the collaborative potential of both groups portends a truly participatory media environment.

Although not as successful as the Veronica Mars Kickstarter, Zach Braff’s Wish I Was Here Kickstarter campaign also demonstrates the participatory potential of fan through the Spime. Specifically, Wish I Was Here did not generate the same positive press as did the Veronica Mars project, but still used Spimatic fandom to generate funds. Braff started his campaign on 24 April 2013 and as of 24 May had raised over 3.1 million dollars with 46,500 backers. This total was over a million dollars more than he had originally planned. The reward structure for Braff’s campaign, similar to the Veronica Mars campaign, offered some tangible rewards like tee-shirts and soundtracks, and also intangible rewards like being able to attend a special screening with him in various cities around the world.

Braff’s film, a follow-up to his successful indie hit Garden State (2004), met with ire from many online. The reason for this is aptly summed up by NBC’s Maria Fernandez (2013): ‘someone with plenty of money of his own and direct access to Hollywood resources has no business playing in the kiddie pool that is supposed to be Kickstarter’ (n.p.). McNutt (with Chin, Jones, and Pebler, 2014) describes how the reaction considered it a ‘bastardization’ of the Kickstarter process. Even The New York Times questions the ethicality of his funding the film through Kickstarter when he has plenty of money himself (Klosterman, 2013). Furthermore, such ethical discussion did not appear with the Veronica Mars campaign, even though Kristen Bell is also a high-profile actor who also has a large bank account. And, Salon.com’s Erin Keane (2013) defends the project: Anyone who thinks ‘Kickstarter [is] an amazing resource for cash-strapped innovators who might otherwise not have access to more than their own savings accounts’, she argues, is ‘thinking like a production company, not like a fan who doesn’t mind buying into a glorified fan club to show her support for an artist she likes’ (n.p.). In other words, Braff’s campaign succeeded because of his own personal star power and fannish influence. Although Wish I Was Here is not part of a franchise, Braff’s indie film Garden State and his work on the TV show Scrubs gives his fans the power to articulate a previously established relationship with him.

Braff also establishes a connection with his fans via the video on his Kickstarter page. The video opens with him articulating his knowledge of his fan base, by joking about his most commonly asked question – ‘Can I mount you and yell “Eagle!”?’ – and sitting next to a poster for Garden State. The irreverent joke is similar to many from Scrubs. He then appeals to his fans’ appreciation of his previous work (Donald Faison, co-star of Scrubs, makes a cameo in the video) and explains that he would like final cut/casting decisions on his movie. Throughout the video, Braff clearly situates his audience as his fans – making sure they are included in the process. ‘Most importantly’, he says, ‘[Garden State] became a very special film to you, who did understand what I was trying to say’. However, this articulation maintains a separation between Braff as producer and his fans as viewers:

I want to bring you, my fans, the truest representation of what I have in my brain. That means I’ll have the final cut over what ends up in the movie and I get to only cast the actors I think are perfect for the roles. Please help me make another movie for you like Garden State. (Emphasis added)

Braff distances himself from the fans, using less-inclusive language and singular personal pronouns than Bell and Thomas do in their campaign.

Braff’s ownership of his own production may have caused some of the negative backlash from fans. Throughout the video, Braff aims to connect with his fan base, but also holds them at a distance. Yet, from a Spimatic point of view, the same participatory potential seen in the Veronica Mars Kickstarter emerges here as well. The fans are spurred to donate by the previous receptive and productive practices they’ve engaged in in the past. Although the Spime of Wish I Was Here is similar to the Veronica Mars Spime, the specific outcome of that process can vary greatly, as two Spimatics differ in their participatory fandoms.

Finally, former child star Melissa Joan Hart’s Kickstarter campaign for her romantic comedy Darci’s Walk of Shame utilized a video like Braff and Bell did, but failed to make the US$2 million minimum to fund the project. The rewards for her project were similar to Braff’s: tee-shirts, digital downloads, and options to attend screenings. However, few of these rewards were taken up. She cancelled the campaign two weeks early (although, given the statistic that most Kickstarters get funded in the last few days, that may have been a mistake; see Kuppuswamy and Bayus, 2013). At the same time, however, Hart’s campaign illustrates many of the same Spimatic elements as the other two. What is intriguing about Hart’s failed Kickstarter project is not just in the ways it failed to attract an audience, but also in the way it continues to unfold as a process. The participatory culture of the project suffered by neglecting Spimatic fandom and creating a distinction between fan participation and fandom as a process.

The reasons for the failure of Hart’s project could be attributed to many elements, but perhaps most salient is the fact she did not appeal to her fan base in the same way as Bell and Braff did. If fandom is itself always a process, then alienating a section of fandom through temporal negation may have hurt her chances for financial donation. Hart, made famous in the mid-1990s for staring in Nickelodeon’s Clarissa Explains it All, has a fan base aged in their twenties and early thirties. Since Clarissa, Hart has appeared in another children’s show, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and currently stars in Melissa and Joey, a sitcom aimed at families on the ABC Family network. Rather than reaching out to her fan base via direct address, Hart’s video on her Kickstarter page stars her and her mother, reading through scripts that take familiar elements from her previous works and mock them. ‘I think you need to do something different’, her mother says. They note how Hart has moved past her roles on Nickelodeon and in Sabrina, and her mother suggests she takes on a new role, as an adult. Hart admits ‘I don’t know anyone who’s going to put me in a movie like this’. When she directly addresses the audience, Hart doesn’t appeal to her fan base’s early years – she says ‘I need your help to prove to people that I’m more than just Clarissa or Sabrina’ (emphasis added). Any fans attached to her previous work are shut out by her direct address. Literally talking to the fans, she tells them she does not want to appeal to them. She distances herself from her fan base, and her fans did not get behind the film, as they were alienated from the production process.

So while the film failed to be funded, and fan participatory influence also suffered, the Spime itself hasn’t died. Because fans were not involved at different times, nor invoked at the ‘proper’ times, the Spime of Darci’s Walk of Shame could not imbricate fandom into the participatory paradigm. Hart’s video had the opposite effect than was intended, according to the LA Times (Spelling, 2013): ‘Hart’s project lacked a nostalgia factor’ (n.p.). But more so than nostalgia, it also lacked a specific acknowledgement of any Melissa Joan Hart fan’s work. Crowdfunding through fandom works through recognition of participation. It becomes participatory through previous interaction. Hart failed to recognize her fans as a unique group, and the Spime couldn’t continue as a film – instead, it continues as a presence within the Kickstarter pantheon of failed campaigns, and as the topic of analyses like this one.

Conclusion: Spimatic participatory cultures

If, as Aitamurto (2011) notes, ‘participation, specifically … donations, [is] a manifestation of a participatory culture’, then each of these three Kickstarter campaigns engages the participatory culture of its fan base in different ways (p. 433). This is to be expected – as Sterling (2005) notes of the development of the Spime, ‘technocultures do not abolish one another in clean or comprehensive ways. Instead, new capacities are layered onto older ones’ (p. 12). Media producers are only just beginning to learn the best ways to harness fandom’s affective potential and economic viability for crowdfunding purposes. It may be, as Jenkins et al. (2013) assert, that ‘the greatest advantage’ of crowdfunding media projects ‘may rest with those producers whose work operates within genres with strong fan followings (animation, science fiction, horror) and who speak to well-defined populations (minority and activist groups)’ (p. 234). Certainly, this appears to be the case with the Veronica Mars Kickstarter campaign, which tapped into a rich vein of fannish enthusiasm for the series. Additionally, the fact that Rob Thomas and Kristen Bell had largely identified the group by a particular name, declaring it into being through nomenclature, solidified the identity of the fan group. Neither Braff nor Hart has particularly ‘well-defined populations’ of fans following them (not to say they don’t have fans, but rather than their fandoms may be more mainstream and diffuse than the idiosyncratic Veronica Mars fans). Yet, even in their assertion of fandom’s particular value, Jenkins, Ford and Green assert a separation between fan and producer – the producers ‘work’ while the fans ‘follow’.

However, I’d like to posit a more complex rationale for why the Veronica Mars Kickstarter campaign succeeded while Hart’s did not. It still revolves around fan audiences, but instead of seeing them as separated from the production process, it argues that fans are actually imbricated into the very system through their Spimatic value within the complex process by which texts become actualized. For Sterling (2005), ‘in the age of Spimes, the object is no longer an object, but an instantiation. My consumption patterns are worth so much that they underwrite my acts of consumption’ (p. 79). The Spimatic effect of a Kickstarter campaign means that even if a product fails to materialize, the overall process continues to exist. As a case in point, Kuppuswamy and Bayus (2013: 18) discuss the failed Kickstarter campaign for the HanFree iPad accessory. In 2011, Seth Quest created the campaign in order to fund a project for a hands-free stand for the iPad. Raising US$35,000, Quest not only exceeded his target goal of US$10,000, but also garnered 440 supporters.² However, the publicity surrounding the campaign may have hurt Quest more than helped – Agrawal et al. (2013) illustrate that the disclosure of funds hampered Quest’s ability to bargain with potential supplies. The HanFree accessory failed to materialize, and Quest was forced into bankruptcy. Although the product does not exist – to date, there is no HanFree accessory, and all the backers lost the money they invested – the process is forever inscribed online and in print. The website for the Kickstarter campaign houses digital information about the project, and the aftermath of its failure is enshrined on website (and scholarly articles) in perpetuity. As a product, HanFree is nowhere; as a Spime it is everywhere.

Looked at through traditional models of economic development, fans’ support of Veronica Mars is certainly a success story and non-support of Darci’s Walk of Shame a failure. To be fair, one will produce a movie and one won’t. But using a more Spimatic analysis, we can see the overall pattern of fandom both campaigns manifest. It’s not just about the film that gets made at the end of the campaign (after all, the film could be considered a box office or critical failure even when it does get made, as Wish I Was Here demonstrates), but the process by which fans become integrated into the production of the film. And as the Spime illustrates, the generative potential of fandom does not just happen at specific moments of reception, but rather becomes emblematic of the entire temporal process of creation. Fans are always imbricated within the digital media system, from start to finish.

In this article, I’ve illustrated one way that fan studies and technology studies can integrate in order to demonstrate changing paradigms of audience involvement in the media process. Fandom is an inherently emotional experience; digital technology can facilitate and channel that emotion into new avenues. New concepts in technological development, including the Spime, can be usefully applied to non-corporeal procedures, like media creation and idea generation. Fandom excels at both, and applying theories of the Spime to fandom through the model of crowdfunding portends a more emotive, affective process of media creation. Fandom is traditionally participation after-the-fact; the Spime allows us to see fandom as generative of meaning throughout the entire participatory process.

Footnotes

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

Author biography

Paul Booth is Associate Professor of Communication at DePaul University, USA. Booth’s research interests include fandom, new technologies and media, popular culture, and cult media. He is the author of Game Play (Bloomsbury 2015), Playing Fans (University of Iowa 2015), Time on TV (2012), and Digital Fandom (2010). He has edited Fan Phenomena: Doctor Who (2013), and has published numerous articles on fans, social media, and technology. He is currently enjoying a cup of coffee.

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