I read Loyd Case's ExtremeTech article entitled "The Death of Fandom". It got me to wondering. Is fandom really dead? I don't know that it is, but it's definitely evolved since the 1960's and 1970's.

Loyd's two main points seem to be that marketing has destroyed fandom, and that being a fan is no longer "hard" or something you had to work at. He makes some good points.

In the 1970's you'd have had to personally pore over every episode of Star Trek to build you own little list of nitpicks and goof-ups that made it to the screen. You'd have had to photocopy that list and find other fans to share it with. You definitely would have had to work at it. Today, you have books that offer up that same list of nitpicks for sale on Amazon.com. Buy it today, it'll be in your hands tomorrow. You don't even need to watch a single episode again. So yes, it has become rather easy to be a fan.

On the other hand, it's also more difficult. After all, now that the Nitpicker's Guide to Star Trek is published, it's "easy" to find all those little mistakes in the show. The real challenge for the "uber fan" is to find a nitpick that's missing from the guide. Another challenge is to build a web site that ISN'T a run of the mill fan site but actually has something worthwhile to say about the show. So, while I agree that it's far easier to be a "typical" fan now, the bar has definitely been raised on what it means to be a "real fan".

As for marketing and intellectual property rights destroying fandom, it certainly has, to a degree. When I see action figures, posters, novel adaptations, and "Happy Meal toys" advertising something that isn't in the theatres yet, I think marketing's gone a bit too far for that movie. Some of the Star Wars merchandise I saw around the time of Episode I and Episode II was a little ridiculous... I mean, digital watches with different character faces on each side? Come on!

But marketing also helps fandom. A good example of that is the DVD sales from the Babylon 5 television series. Warner Brothers almost canceled that series before it finished its five-year run because they bought into the myth that Nielsen Ratings apply to science fiction shows. Once they began releasing the show on DVD, they found that the sales were incredibly good, better than for many of their other intellectual properties that had higher ratings. As a result, they commissioned J. Michael ("Joe") Straczynski to write and produce a direct-to-DVD Babylon 5 movie. Without all the merchandising and marketing from the original series, and the willingness of fans to pay for the show on disc, that movie wouldn't exist. And if this movie sells well, we can anticipate more. So, while all this marketing can make a science-fiction work seem trivial (reversible digital watches?), if the fans vote with their wallets, the marketers will listen and create more.

The issue of intellectual property rights is a thornier one. On the one hand, I want creative people like Joe Straczynski to be able to earn a good living from their work. They deserve to. On the other hand, someday Joe will be dead and buried (though I hope not for a long, long time). Once he's gone, I don't believe that Warner Brothers has a right to be able to continue controlling the Babylon 5 name a century from now. By that time, hopefully, it will have joined the same kind of cultural history status that the work of Mark Twain enjoys... something that defines what America is, but enters the public domain. The whole concept of copyrights came about to protect the creative people from predatory publishers and media houses, not to protect publishers and media houses from the general public.

It's ironic that Disney is at the forefront of trying to extend intellectual property rights to "practically forever", given that many of the stories on which their movies are based come from public domain roots. The Aladdin movie is loosely based on Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, for instance. In this sense, marketing (or rather, the desire to continue earning money from a work long past a respectable life span) has gone too far. Disney, and the companies like it, should be willing to let works enter the public domain. It should challenge them to keep coming up with new material, rather than recycling and rehashing old works. Unfortunately, technology has made it cheaper and more profitable to repackage the old stuff than to develop something new.

So I do see Case's point that being a fan has become somewhat trivialized and commercialized. On the other hand, just as Disney and its ilk should be working to push their creative limits, so should any respectable fan community.