Participation from above and below: Brand community and the contestation of cultural participation

Abstract

This article draws on work in communication and marketing studies to develop a theory of cultural participation as fundamentally contested, between cultural producers who aim to steer and manage the activity of participants via the brand community (participation from above) and participants who have the potential to resist and challenge the producers’ direction (participation from below). It develops this theory empirically with reference to a cultural form in which audience participation plays a central part, professional wrestling. World Wrestling Entertainment aims to direct and contain participation within sanctioned parameters, both online and offline, while fans retain the capacity to develop and voice an effective critique of existing storylines through those same venues. By sampling and examining the key storylines building to World Wrestling Entertainment’s marquee event, Wrestlemania, from 2014 to 2016, I show how the logics of participation from above and below interact, and how, ultimately, the production and reproduction of brand community are fundamentally contested.

Keywords

Audience studies brand community social media cultural participation professional wrestling

Thousands of people gathered around a square last night and urged for change. They chanted in unison; they held signs; some of them even threatened to riot. This wasn’t a political uprising, however. This was a live taping of WWE’s Raw in Chicago and the crowd’s cause was to make pro wrestling less dumb. – Washington Post (Payne, 2014)

Cultural participation, especially in the accounts given by the likes of Henry Jenkins, has been celebrated as opening up opportunities for ordinary people to engage with and make culture. On those accounts, such opportunities have been enhanced by the development of new media in general and social media in particular, as an increasingly egalitarian and participatory culture empowers the active user (Jenkins, 2006; Jenkins et al., 2013). More specifically, these scholars have argued that a shift from the one-to-many logic of mass media to the many-to-many logic of social media has blurred the distinction between audience and content provider. New media, for Jenkins, are the harbinger of a “more participatory model of culture, one which sees the public not as simply consumers of preconstructed messages but as people who are shaping, sharing, reframing, and remixing media content in ways which might not have been previously imagined” (Jenkins et al., 2013: 2). Others have developed accounts of participatory culture in online fan communities oriented around television shows (Baym, 2000; Kirby-Diaz, 2009), sports teams and stars (Keaton et al., 2015; Liberman et al., 2015), and museums (Axelsson, 2011), among countless other cultural forms.

While Jenkins has widely been considered the biggest “booster” of social media’s participatory potential, his work also speaks in subtle ways of contradictions and tensions in participatory culture. As he stated recently, media producers “also seek to shape and direct our participation into forms that they see as serving their own interests” (Jenkins et al., 2015: 14). In Spreadable Media, Jenkins et al. (2013) discuss this question with reference to Tim O’Reilly’s (2005) foundational manifesto, “What is Web 2.0” (2005), arguing that that text conflates the collaborative and participatory dimensions of Web 2.0 on one hand with the opportunities it provides for the aggregation and monetization of user data on the other (also see Yeritsian, 2017).

Similarly, in his earlier book Convergence Culture, Jenkins links this more managed form of user participation to the construction of brand communities (Jenkins, 2006: 20). These “brand communities” (Muniz and O’Guinn, 2001) consist of committed, active, and most importantly, loyal consumers. Media firms are no longer solely concerned with exposure, that is, the number of “eyeballs” on a media product, but increasingly with engagement, that is, how actively consumers relate to the product, as when television viewers discuss a show on an officially branded social media page (Napoli, 2011). These shifts have gone hand-in-hand with the rise of marketing discourses and strategies oriented around “cult” or “emotional branding,” aiming to capture value via the management of consumers’ desires and commitments (Jenkins, 2006: 61–63, 73).

Brand communities have been the focus of much academic research in recent years, especially in marketing studies – where they have been examined both from mainstream and critical perspectives, the former often combining theoretical and empirical analysis with a consideration of implications for business strategy (Algesheimer et al., 2005; Cova and Pace, 2006; McAlexander et al., 2002; Muniz and Schau, 2005). In their foundational article on the subject, Muniz and O’Guinn (2001: 412) define a brand community as a “specialized, non-geographically bound community, based on a structured set of social relationships among admirers of a brand.”

More recent studies have addressed the relationship between brand communities and social media, which marketers have seen as prime space for the construction of brand communities given the enhanced opportunity for consumer engagement with the brand and the sharing of that engagement. Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) discuss early uses of social media for the fostering of brand community, though the cases they cite mostly feature those media as a distribution mechanism from firm to consumer: Warner Bros creating a Facebook site offering clips and trailers for an upcoming film release; Adidas sponsoring a MySpace community; 1-800 Flowers offering “virtual bouquet” delivery. There is less emphasis on a dynamic, back-and-forth relationship between consumer and firm in these cases; instead the firm is using social media for advertising and/or distribution. De Vries et al. (2012) similarly focus on the effectiveness of brand posts (in terms of likes and responses they receive) on official brand fan pages. Singh and Sonnenburg (2012), by contrast, distinguish more traditional center-to-consumer “brand storytelling” from consumers’ improvisatory “co-creation of brand performances” via social media, while Bruhn et al. (2012) discuss the effects on brand equity of user-generated content relating to the brand via social media. These latter studies are examples of work in marketing that is increasingly thematizing a dynamic, back-and-forth relationship between consumer and brand, though they do not theorize this relationship very critically.

That is left to scholars like Arvidsson (2005, 2006), for whom contemporary branding captures the value generated by the autonomous sociality of consumers (as opposed to the older logic of brand messages being “dispensed” to consumers via broadcast media). That sociality is more or less synonymous with Lazzarato’s (1996) “immaterial labor.” For Lazzarrato (1996), insofar as cultural consumers are the “addressee” of the product, they play an indispensable role in “receiving” it and interpreting it, thereby “[integrating] it into social communication”; their reception is therefore “a creative act” (p. 144). The capitalist plays a relatively passive role vis-a-vis these circuits of immaterial labor, reduced to “managing and regulating” the innovation generated by the public/consumer. Critical studies like these carry out the Marxian move of unearthing the social labor that underlies brand community and brand value.

Participation from above and from below

What emerges, more implicitly than explicitly, in work on audience and fan studies, considered in relation to the critical literature on marketing and branding, is a logic of contestation at the heart of cultural participation. The theoretical aim of this article is to examine this logic of contestation in terms of what I call participation from above and from below. On one hand, the brand aims to foster “from above” forms of managed, controlled, and sanctioned engagement and participation. On the other hand, there exists the capacity “from below” of members of the brand community to individually and collectively voice their own perspectives, develop a critique of the brand, and potentially affect the brand’s behavior and orientation.

This analysis is in line with existing studies that theorize “discordant fandom” (Hewer et al., 2015) and fandom versus “brandom” (Guschwan), but rather than stage a collision between “passions” on one hand and “finance and branding strategies” on the other, this article finds different forms of passion on both sides of the divide: the mobilization and management of passions from above, and their more autonomous emergence and expression from below. The latter, moreover, need not manifest itself in the form of alter or counter brands (Cova and White, 2010) that offer an alternative to the mainstream but rather focus on critiquing and changing the behavior of an existing “mainstream” cultural brand. This arousal of popular passion vis-à-vis the brand also highlights the sociological dimension of emotions, the way in which collective consumer practices partake in shared affects associated with objects of consumption (Illouz, 2009).

Below, I develop this theory of cultural contestation empirically through an exploration of audience participation – in person and online, from above and below – through a case study of a cultural form in which such participation is crucial and is inscribed into the audiovisual text itself, professional wrestling. Wrestling has been a linchpin of American popular culture since the latter half of the 20th century, with the largest company, World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) – which effectively exercises a monopoly in the United States – valued by Wall Street at US$5 B and drawing millions of television viewers and sellout crowds.

Professional wrestling represents a “strategic” case study (see Merton, 1987) for a number of reasons. First, audience participation is central to this cultural form, insofar as it is incorporated directly into texts and performances. Shows are produced and scripted to arouse particular reactions from the audience at critical dramatic moments: enmity toward a villain who betrays a former friend, shock and excitement at a surprise return, triumph when the protagonist overcomes the odds, and bemusement in comedic moments of the presentation. The conventions of the genre are straightforward, featuring soap opera style narratives in which “babyfaces” (protagonists) and “heels” (antagonists) fight it out in simulated contests over either a personal issue or a championship title. Each storyline builds to the next, as there is no offseason and the fictional universe continues to function ceaselessly with fresh rivalries and matchups being created.

The presence of a live audience encouraged to react loudly and enthusiastically to the content thus makes wrestling more inherently participatory than other cultural forms. Television and film audiences may tweet or blog about their favorite shows but at a significant spatiotemporal distance from one another and from the performance. Contemporary theater audiences may laugh or gasp, but they are certainly not encouraged (or allowed) to react as dynamically as wrestling audiences. Sports audiences are perhaps the most comparable, insofar as they are boisterous and loudly engaged, but legitimate sporting events cannot be scripted to arouse particular kinds of reactions, and those reactions are less likely to affect the decisions of people in positions of managerial authority (a wrestling storyline is more likely to be altered due to fan reaction than a sports team’s roster).

The study will seek to build upon the modest but steadily growing academic literature on the genre. Existing studies have addressed a diverse array of questions regarding professional wrestling, including its Manichean spectacle of moral excess (Barthes, 1972), genre conventions (De Garis, 2005; Jenkins, 2005), racial politics (Rahmani, 2007; Roberts, 2015), constructions of masculinity (Oppliger, 2003), insider jargon (Kerrick, 1980), and the emotional labor of its performers (Smith, 2014). Several of these studies have dealt specifically with wrestling fans, including the 1950s female fan following (Dell, 2006); the complex enjoyment of reality and fakery experienced by “smart” fans (Wrenn, 2007); the emotional engagement of independent wrestling audiences (Hill, 2015); and the online reappropriation of texts by female fans (Salmon and Clerc, 2005).

Scholars frequently comment upon the dynamic nature of fan participation in wrestling. Sammond (2005: 16) notes that wrestling affords fans the opportunity to “aggressively intercede in the narrative and aesthetic choices that producers make.” Hill (2015: 184) highlights fans’ freedom to “spontaneously express themselves within the scripting and ritual elements of an event.” Mazer (1998: 37) argues that wrestling events are structured to arouse and then satisfy particular audience expectations. Finally, Jenkins (2005b: 328) addresses the problem of managing audience reactions and links it to the growth of more savvy communities of fans on the Internet: “In the early 1980s, I’m not sure you could have gotten enough strangers together in one section of the crowd to create such a clamor against the grain of the show.”

Such comparatively informal observations, aside, however, none of these studies has theorized in anything like a systematic way the relationship between online and in-person forms of audience participation in wrestling, or the contested dynamic between sanctioned and unsanctioned participation.

Below, I argue that contemporary professional wrestling combines in person and online participation, thus marking an overlap between the two eras and forms of audience autonomy highlighted by Napoli: 19th century theater and 21st century new media (2011). In recent years, arena audiences have become increasingly autonomous, reacting to the product presented to them in unpredictable ways (e.g. booing a top “babyface,” or protagonist, or vociferously cheering performers who they feel are talented but underutilized). This growth in autonomy, moreover, is seen by many observers (see Wrenn, 2007) to be an outcome of the development of a layer of “Internet fans” or “smart marks,” those with more discriminatory tastes who keep up with backstage goings-on via social media sites.

I further argue that this increased autonomy is part and parcel of the fundamentally contested dynamics of participation in the genre. Shows are built around “sanctioned” forms of participation, as live audiences are supposed to cheer the protagonists, jeer the antagonists, and react enthusiastically to storyline surprises and climaxes. Moreover, with WWE developing an elaborate social media strategy, such sanctioned participation takes place online as well, as fans follow performers’ social media pages, tweet using official hashtags, and vote in polls via the company website. I aim to examine the two sides of this picture – how the WWE tries to control and manage audience participation, that is, participation from above, and how it sometimes finds itself caught off guard by an autonomous, unruly, and subversive audience, that is, participation from below (Table 1).

Table 1.

Key examples of participation from above and below, online and offline.

	Participation from above	Participation from below
Online	Official social media/brand strategy	Fan critique through Twitter, other social media
Offline	Predictable crowd reactions	Crowds “hijacking” shows

Data and method

This article draws primarily on the interpretive analysis of discursive data, mainly textual but also audiovisual. To understand offline participation from above in professional wrestling, I make reference to the basic conventions of the genre, based both on a number of academic articles (e.g. De Garis, 2005) and on my own experiences as a lifelong fan. With respect to the WWE’s social media strategy, that is, online participation from above, I draw upon company statements and press releases, observations from viewing company content on television and via its streaming service and app, and media discussions of WWE strategy. To understand participation from below, both offline and online, I sample the main storyline leading into WWE’s marquee event, Wrestlemania, for three successive years from 2014 to 2016, probing the extent to which its trajectory is impacted by fan response. This sampling strategy gets at whether fan response is significant in the most important narratives presented (rather than cherry picking marginal cases). In addition to discussing the basic features of the storylines, as evident in television content, I make frequent reference to Dave Meltzer’s Wrestling Observer Newsletter, the leading publication on the industry, in which Meltzer reports not only on storyline developments but on audience reactions and behind-the-scenes happenings. To capture online participation from below in a more focused fashion, I cite mainstream media accounts of movements like the “cancel WWE Network” initiative, and conduct a discourse analysis of posts in key discussions on the Wrestling Observer Newsletter message board, a hub for hardcore wrestling fans who not only keep up with but are keen to offer their views of on-screen and behind-the-scenes developments. I sample those “threads” (i.e. discussions) dealing with key events leading up to the Wrestlemania main event matches in the three successive years. Through the combination of these diverse strands of evidence, I develop an historical, interpretive, and “netnographic” (Kozinets, 2015) account of this cultural form.

Participation from above: WWE’s social media and brand strategy

As a genre form, professional wrestling relies on arousing and satisfying particular sorts of audience expectations and reactions (Mazer, 1998). The moral logic of pitting the forces of good and evil against one another (Barthes, 1972) means that the audience is supposed to feel sympathy for the protagonist – as the antagonist gets the better of him in a storyline or a particular match – and to cheer on a comeback (convention dictates that both storylines and matches tend to be dominated by the antagonist). Channeling this fan support, the protagonist manages to overcome the obstacles in front of him and to triumph, before the cycle begins all over again when he is matched up with another dastardly opponent. Companies intend for fan response to take the form of the “rowdyism” of 19th century theater audiences (Butsch, 2000), but a rowdyism that contains itself within the parameters of the storyline being presented. Thus, fan participation is an object of management and control. Management failures can take a number of forms. Fans can simply express boredom (often accompanied by chants of “boring”) and indifference. They can side with the heels against the babyfaces. They can get behind a lower card performer who is not placed in a featured role by the company. But most of the time, especially prior to the growth of savviness amongst the fanbase in the late 1990s – accompanied by the decline of “kayfabe,” that is, the pretense that wrestling promoters were presenting authentic rather than simulated combat – management of audience reactions basically succeeds, and thus audience participation takes the form of participation “from above.”

With the rise of social media, this management of audience participation from above has extended to the management of an online brand community, something which WWE has systematized and made a core part of its business strategy. The company integrates into its presentation frequent references to Twitter, with every show featuring official hashtags in the corner of the screen that the company encourages fans to tweet, as well as the Twitter usernames of each performer as he or she is being introduced. These hashtags are specific to the current match or segment being presented, and any hashtag or phrase that becomes a leading worldwide Twitter “trend” – which means that it is mentioned frequently in a limited period of time – is highlighted on the show. The company has even used Twitter at points as a medium through which fans can vote on particular match stipulations. In addition, the official WWE Twitter often posts polls to gauge customer satisfaction after major shows.

The WWE also operates an official mobile app that runs live content during its major TV presentations—this app features photos, historical background on performers, polls, and trivia questions. The company refers to use of the app as a “second screen experience” and notes on its streaming service (“WWE Network”) whether this live app functionality is available for a particular program. The app is aimed at getting viewers engaged, both affectively and haptically (see Barris, 2014), with the company’s storylines and performers.

Executive Stephanie McMahon, daughter of owner Vince McMahon, has trumpeted WWE’s primary social media objective as not disseminating content outwards but rather engaging fans, and “listening and responding” to their engagement (Yakowicz, 2014). The company’s performers use social media to “drive story line and engagement,” extending their onscreen stories online, as it were, and generating a 24/7 fictional environment in which fans can immerse themselves: “They are never disconnected from WWE, it’s an opportunity to keep our fans engaged with our brand” (Yakowicz, 2014). Temporally, then, the company’s social media strategy works to “colonize” more and more of a fan’s leisure time; rather than simply watch a 2- or 3-hour show, fans are encouraged to remain connected to WWE’s fictional universe continuously. According to entertainment news site TheWrap.com, the logic of the company’s strategy is to extend the brand temporally and spatially, quoting a WWE executive in charge of digital and social media content:

We’re listening to our fans and creating content that they want on a platform that they want … And we’re creating that authentic experience where you’re getting to see backstage content with our Superstars – seeing them in their personal lives – it really extends the WWE brand. (Otterson, 2015)

Social media allow for storylines to bleed into the texture of “real life”: “You probably won’t be seeing characters on ‘CSI’ spark a Twitter fight that bleeds into an upcoming episode” (Otterson, 2015).

In press releases and communication to its investors, the WWE trumpets its huge combined numbers of social media followers. For example, in a July 2016 document touting “key performance indicators” to stockholders, the company highlights its continuously increasing followers on Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms (an overlapping figure totaling 672 million) and social media “engagement” as measured in likes and shares, a figure that has also shown consistent growth (WWE, 2016a). In spite of recently declining television ratings, executives argue in public statements and conference calls with stockholders that these social media metrics are increasingly salient (even though they are not immediately monetizable; see Rueter, 2016).

Moreover, the company insists via its official outlets (television, social media, and so forth) on a number of “branded,” copyrighted terms to which most fans tend to be resistant. Professional wrestling becomes “sports entertainment.” Wrestlers are “superstars” or “divas” (female wrestlers). Fans are the “WWE Universe” (or sometimes “WWE fans,” but never just “fans,” “crowd,” “audience,” “people,” or “wrestling fans”). Belts are “titles” or “championships.” In general, the brandspeak is quite heavy handed and artificial sounding, and few fans seem to internalize it or reproduce it. The aim of these terms is to brand fandom itself, to bound any discussion of the entertainment form to the brand (see Guschwan, 2012).

These points all speak to an overall strategy of steering, managing, and incorporating the various forms of sociality and participation engaged in by the company’s audience, both online and offline, within the logic of brand community.

Participation from below: Fan contestation

Wrestling fans resist these efforts to corral and incorporate them into a loyal brand community in part by identifying as fans of the genre rather than WWE fans. Thus, they claim an affinity with professional wrestling – a cultural form the history of which extends back to the late 1800s – as opposed to the WWE’s efforts to monopolize the cultural form and that history, and discuss alternate historical and contemporary wrestling promotions on genre specific fora.

Moreover, while WWE views social media as a mechanism both to “get its message out” and to encourage sanctioned and integrated forms of participation, fans can use those same media – most notably Twitter – to critique the direction of existing storylines and offer alternatives. Such unsanctioned participation would likely have much less impact if it did not have a relationship to more visible and audible forms of protest. These unsanctioned forms of participation manifest themselves in the arenas, with increasingly unruly groups of hardcore fans who are more difficult to inscribe into official narratives and storylines.

It is crucial to note here the central role that fans play in the audiovisual narrative of professional wrestling. They are in no way incidental, but are part of the show and thus expected to react in relatively predictable ways in order for the performance to hold together. If fans are sitting on their hands during a major main event match, engaging in irreverent chanting, or becoming inordinately enthusiastic about a lower card performer whom the company is not keen on promoting in a more featured role, then the coherence of the performance breaks down, in the sense of Goffman’s (1959) “working consensus.” This fear of fans’ “hijacking” shows is bound up with conceptions of “Internet fans” or the “Internet wrestling community,” that is, those most engaged on social media and message boards, as representing the vanguard of the unruly fanbase at arenas (see Wrenn, 2007). Unsanctioned participation online leads to unsanctioned participation in the arenas, and both threaten the control exercised by the brand over the fan community.

In recent years, the company’s key storylines – those building to the main events of the company’s annual big event, Wrestlemania – have been impacted in crucial ways by forms of unsanctioned audience participation that have forced the WWE to change direction. In 2014, fan protest forced the company to insert Daniel Bryan, an immensely popular though undersized former independent wrestler whom the company did not view as a top attraction into the main event of WWE’s biggest show of the year, Wrestlemania.

Below, I present a historical account of the process by reference to Dave Meltzer’s Wrestling Observer Newsletter and key threads from the Wrestling Observer subscriber message board. Sampling messages in those threads allows me to develop an account of the response of hardcore fans online to storylines; in the process I link messages on the board with other online resistance campaigns (e.g. “cancel WWE Network”), thus demonstrating the breadth and coherence of fan critique online, and also to fan response on the part of live audiences, demonstrating that what is at stake is not a tiny minority of the fanbase but a segment large enough to be very audible (even the predominant voice) at live events.

The company’s two biggest pay-per-view events every year are the Royal Rumble, in late January, and Wrestlemania, in late March or early April. The Royal Rumble features a massive 30-person elimination match the winner of which enters the Wrestlemania main event. In 2014, fans largely anticipated that Daniel Bryan would be the Royal Rumble winner; he was immensely popular and riding a wave of momentum. However, WWE had different plans. When Daniel Bryan turned out not even to be a participant in the Royal Rumble match, the fans turned on it, booing the rest of the way, especially vociferously when the company’s handpicked favorite, “Batista,” was declared the victor.

In his February 3, 2014 newsletter, Meltzer pointed out that fans were irate when the company presented them a narrative in which they had no interest, one distinct from what they had collectively anticipated. The fans had written the story themselves, given that a Daniel Bryan victory made storyline sense and that he was receiving by far the most boisterous live reactions of any performer. Meltzer noted,

What they [the company] didn’t count on was the Bryan fans turning on the show … outwardly attempting to kill the Orton vs. Cena [world championship] title match … and hat[ing] Batista, who they deep down knew was the only guy except Bryan who could actually [win] the Rumble.

The message board associated with the Wrestling Observer Newsletter website served as a hub for online participation from below in the aftermath of the event, with fans using the forum as a space to vent their disillusionment and to develop an autonomous critique of storyline direction. One user wrote, “I know there are some out there that defend WWE and their shitty booking to the nth degree, but can we all now say that Daniel Bryan has ‘played itself out’ and WWE fucked it up almost every step of the way?” Another poster pointed to the potential disaster of the company proceeding with the main event plans it had in place for Wrestlemania: “They’re in for a real treat if they go ahead with Batista/Orton at WM and really I don’t think they, the ones in charge, even care.” A third member spoke of the sense of disillusionment amongst fans who were giving up on the company ever being genuinely responsive to their preferences: “I was enjoying the Rumble match for a while, but by the end I just felt deflated like I usually tend to feel after WWE shows these days. WWE just isn’t all that fun anymore.”

Faced with the intensely negative fan response online and offline, the company found itself having to change course. It inserted Daniel Bryan into the main event match at Wrestlemania, even rewriting the show entirely around him. In the March 17, 2014 issue of the Observer, Meltzer commented on the fundamental changes made in the interim to the company’s Wrestlemania plans (forced by the negative fan reaction): “As far as [Bryan] being added to the title match, that decision likely came at the exact moment the promotion decided to turn Batista heel, as an admission that the people weren’t cheering him like a top babyface.” Wrestlemania was completely built around Bryan, who wrestled in the opening and closing matches and triumphantly captured the company’s championship in the main event.

The show received a hugely positive response both from the live crowd and online. In Meltzer’s April 14 recap of the show, he wrote, “it was among the best Wrestlemanias in history, ending with Bryan overcoming the odds amid a sea of ‘Yes’ chants.” Observer message board users were thrilled by the show, with one post typical of the euphoria in the threads dedicated to the event, “What (sic) phenomenal show, I’m exhausted and need to lie down. A night for the ages.” Fans, both in the arena and online, felt that their voices had been heard in the fundamental rescripting of the biggest show of the year. Participation from below had succeeded in radically altering creative direction.

In 2015, a similar creative disaster to the one that had occurred 1 year earlier took place at the Royal Rumble, as Daniel Bryan participated in the match but was scripted to be eliminated early on, while another performer chosen by company executives to be their next megastar, Roman Reigns, was scripted to win. Again, the win was met with a chorus of dismissive boos from the audience.

Meltzer commented on the live reaction in the February 2, 2015 Observer, again pointing up the savviness of the audience and its ability to anticipate match finishes:

A major issue is that it was clear to most fans that there were only two people who really could win the Rumble, Bryan and Reigns. The crowd completely figured it out, and as soon as Bryan was thrown out–early–to make sure he was gone before Reigns even arrived, the crowd turned on the match.

The fans, having succeeded in changing the creative direction 1 year prior, “set out to do it again. And Vince McMahon wasn’t going to let it happen again because he knew better. In his mind, Bryan was not the guy”. This draws out the question of the management of the audience, and McMahon’s development of this storyline became a case of failure to successfully anticipate and manage an audience reaction – and thereby to get his chosen star “over,” or popular with the fans.

Fans expressed their displeasure on the Observer message board, specifically targeting the “booking” (i.e. the writing and storytelling). Wrote one user: “Terrible booking by WWE, eliminating Bryan that early made EVERYONE look bad.” Many compared it with the previous year’s Royal Rumble event: “They managed to fuck up the Royal Rumble 2 years in a row. And made Reigns, your hand-picked guy, … look dumb and uncool in the process. Well done, WWE.” Another wrote, “Last year I was angry. This year I am shocked by the WWE’s arrogance and stupidity.” One user summarized the frustration and anticipated a disaster of a main event to come at Wrestlemania: “The whole deal was so cringey. Reigns is going to get booed out of the stadium vs Lesnar.” Here the reference was to the main event of Wrestlemania, with Reigns slated to take on returning megastar and mixed martial artist Brock Lesnar.

Beyond the wrestling specific forums, the negative online reaction manifested itself as a campaign to “cancel WWE Network” (including a trending Twitter hashtag), and while this was unsuccessful in threatening the streaming service’s subscriber numbers (which in fact were trending upward), it was part of a broad-based fan response that pressured the WWE into altering the direction of the storyline. The movement gained quite substantial mainstream press attention, with Time Magazine reporting that the Twitter hashtag had become a worldwide trending topic (Stout, 2015). However, the company initially ignored the outcry of some of its fans online (as well as the fans present at the Royal Rumble) in the immediate aftermath of the event, suggesting a failure of participation from below to affect creative direction.

As in the previous year, though, the company began to waver on the issue of the Wrestlemania main event, considering again inserting Bryan into the picture—but this time, McMahon would ultimately stand firm. However, Brock Lesnar was scripted to dominate Reigns in the matchup, and rather than serving as the coronation of the company’s next handpicked star, WWE decided to create a complex ending to the match whereby the championship belt ended up in the hands of another rising star, Seth Rollins (who, like Daniel Bryan, was a former independent wrestler), thrilling the live Wrestlemania crowd. The company sensed that the fans simply would not accept the imposition of Reigns in the top position on the card.

Response to the 2015 Wrestlemania show by Observer message board members was a combination of surprise and satisfaction. One user wrote, “It doesn’t excuse the poor booking over the past 3 months, but Wrestlemania 31 was a great show.” Referring to the surprise ending that had Rollins leave with the title, another interpreted it, like Meltzer, as the company cooling down on its handpicked favorite, Reigns: “Thank God for the … out clause [Rollins] they left themselves when Roman became such a dud.”

2016 would be the year of Reigns’ crowning in the main event, as he defeated aging veteran (and heir to the corporate throne) Paul “Triple H” Levesque in a match that was largely booed by the live audience. However, sensing that Reigns was going to be received negatively and that the matched lacked the necessary “heat” (or buzz) to serve as the main attraction on the card, the company brought back Vince McMahon’s son Shane to wrestle the Undertaker in a more widely promoted match that generated more audience attention in the buildup to the show. In some sense, the company ultimately got its wish, forcing its handpicked star down the fans’ throats, but it did so amidst persistent fan outcry to which it found itself having to respond for a third year in a row.

Through the course of 2016, Reigns held and lost the championship, and while the company still positioned him as their long-term top star, they moved him down the card in response to widespread fan resistance. Ultimately, the company has largely failed to elevate its handpicked attraction, forced to make critical concessions to its audience’s preferences as it struggles to anticipate, manage, and get ahead of fan participation.

Discussion

The contrasting and interacting logics of cultural participation from above and from below have played out dynamically in professional wrestling’s marquee storylines over an extended period. In 2014, the WWE’s efforts to manage participation from above failed, as fan outcry on social media and in the arenas forced the company to reorganize Wrestlemania around fan favorite Daniel Bryan. In 2015, a similar fan outcry arose, including an initiative to encourage subscribers to cancel WWE’s over the top network; though it was less successful, it did force a partial reshuffling of the Wrestlemania matches and results. 2016 represented management’s most successful effort to elevate and feature its handpicked star, Roman Reigns, though even this success seems to have been only partial. Given that wrestling is often described in popular media as male soap opera, its narratives are ongoing. Not only will the “good” and “evil” characters continue to battle one another indefinitely, so will management and the fans, over the creative direction of the stories being presented. Knowing they have had a marked impact in the past, fan communities online and offline will likely retain their partial autonomy from management and press their influence when they disagree with the imperatives of the latter.

Thus, the WWE strategy of brand community relies, in the logic of Arvidsson (2005), on the semi-autonomous sociality of consumers engaging dynamically with the brand. WWE fans play the role of Lazzarato’s (1996) immaterial laborers, creatively incorporating the text into social communication and action, just as they themselves are incorporated into the audiovisual text itself. Management is left with the task of attempting to “regulate,” control, and direct these flows of sociality, and it is often forced to respond to fans’ rebellion against the content presented to them. Wrestling fans demand a significant measure of control in shaping this cultural form over which they feel a sense of ownership, taking pride in their capacity to organize their own spontaneous and autonomous participation and to contest management’s imposition of participation from above. While Arvidsson (2005) makes reference to the possibility of collaborative social labor bringing about new forms of egalitarian cultural production and participation, his primary emphasis is on the valorization of the work of the crowd and its recuperation as profit. In this sense, this study suggests he underestimates the autonomous potential of the crowd toward participation from below, that is, forms of popular activity that challenge cultural producers.

Insofar as they mount such challenges, WWE’s fans are engaging in what Hewer et al. (2015: 602) term “discordant fandom,” as they “contest and resist such language [imposed by the official brand community] as a mechanism to preserve their own particular enclaves of community spirit,” and reclaiming what Guschwan (2012) calls “fandom” in opposition to “brandom.” While both of those studies place some form of contestation between brands and fans at the center of their analysis, the story they tell tends toward Manicheanism: fandom comes into conflict with the “brute forces of economics, branding and marketing strategy” in Hewer et al. (2015: 612), while the vibrancy of fan culture characterized by “deeply felt emotions, relationships and identities” is contrasted with a consumer culture that “constantly quantifies, monetizes and leverages human impulses” in Guschwan (2012: 35). This study has problematized that narrative, showing how the participatory crowd can actually be activated from above by cultural producers but then “go rogue” in ways that escape the control of the latter. It is not a simple story of dead commodification versus vibrant passion; popular passions are central to both the “from above” and “from below” dynamics of a participatory culture that is oriented so centrally around an active, engaged audience.

Conclusion

This study has demonstrated the ways in which professional wrestling, as a cultural form, combines the logics of participation “from above” and “from below,” and how these logics manifest themselves online and offline. On one hand, WWE attempts to manage audience productivity and participation and contain them within the bounds of its brand community, labeled the “WWE Universe.” This participation from above includes both predictable reactions from live crowds and sanctioned forms of online participation like following performers’ Twitter accounts and tweeting using official hashtags. On the other hand, fans engage in participation from below both offline and online, reacting in resistant and rowdy ways in live venues and developing a sustained and often effective critique of storyline direction in online forums like the Wrestling Observer message board.

Ultimately, the article has used these examples to illustrate the fundamentally contested nature of cultural participation, thus bridging those perspectives which view it as basically democratic and egalitarian and those which view it as a form of quasi-Foucauldian incorporation or capitalist prosumption (see Ritzer and Jurgenson, 2010), that is, the “empowerment analysis” and the “incorporation analysis” (Ekström et al., 2012: 7). Rather cultural participation contains within it both sets of potentialities.

A crucial question is the extent to which conclusions derived from this case study can be generalized to cultural forms besides professional wrestling. After all, I have argued in part for the uniqueness of wrestling as a hybridized cultural form, combining elements of theater and sport. With that said, the broad model of participation from above and below would seem to hold with respect to most cultural industries in which audience participation is an important feature. It is increasingly the case, in the era of many-to-many new media that all audiences participate in some way or another (Napoli, 2011). Generally, cultural producers and brands – whether they be television or film companies, sports teams, nonprofit cultural organizations, or social media platforms – aim to inspire and manage participation within sanctioned parameters. With respect to television, this sort of participation from above is measured through such means as Nielsen Social’s (n.d.) analytics, which track social media engagement relating to particular television programs.

Insofar as such engagement and participation become more important to the contemporary cultural industries, efforts to activate audiences risk encouraging potential “rowdiness” (Butsch, 2000) and rebellion on the part of those audiences, taking the form of critiques of television storylines or of the management decisions of a local sports team, for example. In relation to the former, Family Guy fans successfully campaigned to bring back a major character by setting up online petitions and posting thousands of critical messages on social media (Denham, 2013). In relation to the latter, recent initiatives on the part of Liverpool soccer fans point to the unpredictability of the active audience, with supporters staging a 10,000-strong walkout to protest rising ticket prices (Press Association, 2016).

It would seem that the powerful effectiveness of participation from below in professional wrestling is less broadly generalizable with respect to cultural forms besides sports. The Family Guy example aside, because television and social media audiences and users are rarely if ever in direct offline proximity to one another, they have difficulty exerting the kind of sustained collective impact that WWE fans have. After all, in many cases, participatory culture is a somewhat niche or marginal phenomenon, as with the wrestling fan fiction Salmon and Clerc (2005) analyze or the forms of fan reappropriation of television content that Jenkins (2012) examines; in such instances, participation from below manifests itself as subcultural play, having little impact on the mainstream fans of those genres or on the content producers.

In light of these considerations, then, it is crucial that analysts of media and communication pay careful attention to the particular forms and effects of audience participation in whatever case they examine. In all cases, however, they should avoid the trap of considering cultural participation either as totally autonomous or under control – analogous to a purely structural or purely voluntarist analysis – instead interrogating the contestation that tends to arise between these two sets of forces, as popular passions are mobilized from above and from below.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Stefan Bargheer and two anonymous reviewers for their feedback.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author Biography

Gary Yeritsian is a PhD candidate in Sociology at UCLA. His research, encompassing sociology and communication studies, examines the contested dynamics of audience participation in a number of media forms, ranging from video games to social media.

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