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This paper explores how consumers use the media products of mass culture to co-create the meanings of popular culture. Specifically, we examine both why and how Harry Potter fans utilize the primary texts written by J. K. Rowling to co-create their own fan fiction. Towards this end, we utilize Kenneth Burke's dramatistic method to explore the pattern of literary elements in both the original texts and the fan fiction. We argue that the primary impetus for consumers to engage in the co-creation of these texts is found in their ability to emphasize different ratios of literary elements in order to express their individual and collective desires. Through this process, fans utilize and contribute to the meta-textual meaning surrounding these primary focal texts and propel the original products of mass culture to the cultural texts of popular culture.

As the internet has evolved through the emergence of social media, so too have the communicative practices of The Archers listeners. Many of them now use Twitter to comment, discuss the show or participate in the omnibus episode ‘tweetalong’. Primarily, this chapter recognises the hundred-plus Twitter accounts which have been created by listeners to authentically roleplay characters, organisations, animals and even objects from the show. I frame these practices and ground the chapter in academic discourses of ‘fan fiction’. Reflecting on my own activity as @borsetpolice, I look at the role and place of this fan fiction from the individual practitioner’s perspective but also the wider listener base. In this chapter, I develop an argument that these practices contribute towards the community of listeners online, as well as the show itself. I explore the types of activities and accounts involved, where they often focus around major storylines, and then reflect in detail on the individual’s motivations and practice. I situate this in terms of an opportunity to become involved in an online community that aspires towards everyday rural ideals, and how this can be understood as a significant affective experience for listeners. This need for escapism into ‘banal’ worlds, the desire to participate, and the sense that fan fiction is a game that we take part in are also drawn out as significant.

An investigation of what happens when fans take material related to popular TV science fiction/fantasy programmes without permission, give the copyright holder full credit, and use it to promote the show from which they have taken the material. The web sites relating to two TV series were chosen for study: Forever Knight and the X‐Files. A large number of owners of relevant fan sites were surveyed by questionnaire. The investigation showed that the approaches taken by the copyright holders in the two case studies differed quite markedly. Fox (X files) takes a harder line than Sony (Forever Knight) appear to have done. The issue of rights ownership is becoming increasingly important, especially with the advent of the Internet. Though considered by many to be something of a trivial area, fan activities have in fact been at the forefront of the copyright conflict taking place on the Web.

The purpose is to examine the behaviors of consumers engaged in fan activity and determine if there are attitudinal and behavioral characteristics common across the differing fan subcultures.

The characteristics affecting fan behavior are examined through the literature and a series of structured interviews with fans which are then evaluated for the presence or lack of the sought for characteristics of fanaticism.

The research indicates that there are certain common characteristics to be found in fans interested in different topics and that these characteristics influence the behaviors of those involved in fan behavior.

Given the prevalence of fan influences in popular and consumptive culture, opportunity exists for research beyond the exploratory work done here including larger interview populations from a greater number of fan subcultures.

Marketing professionals may use the identified characteristics as a guide in marketing popular culture to those markets best attuned to accept and embrace it.

This paper provides exploratory research in an area of popular culture that has previously been examined as categories of fans, rather than as an inclusive subculture of fanaticism.

This paper is designed to seek out the everyday narratives of copyright. To find these narratives, I analyze the comments section of websites where users can post their reactions to copyright-related stories. I argue that understanding how people who are not legal scholars frame the use of copyright as they discuss sharing, owning, and controlling the copy is a good place to begin to develop a sense for the everyday life of copyright law.

In this chapter, I explore how the queer-coding, gendering and policing of the monstrous female villain figure of twenty-first-century fairy tale media is interrogated and renegotiated in the transformative narrative tradition of femslash fan-fiction. With fan studies often focusing on the most popular, vocal fandom spaces and cultures, femslash (female-female) fan-fiction has been undertheorized in academic scholarship, just as queer female desire is routinely invalidated by the mainstream media properties that inspire femslash fans (Cranz, 2016; Gonzalez, 2016; Ng & Russo, 2017; Stanfill, 2017). By romantically and sexually pairing female villains with the heroines against whom they are canonically cast as antagonists, femslash fans of Once Upon a Time and The Devil Wears Prada subvert the heteronormative and anti-feminist plot machinery that pits women against each other. The engagement of femslash fan authors with the depiction of the characters Regina Mills and Miranda Priestly as literal and figurative ‘Evil Queens’ in their source texts highlights the extent to which both women are situated as ‘villains’ because of their position as ‘unhappy queers’ who obstruct heteronormative happy endings (Ahmed, 2010; Pande & Moitra, 2017; Strauch, 2017). While in the Swan Queen fiction somewhere, someone must know the ending (maleficently, 2012), Regina is only the Evil Queen in her son's imagination, as he tries to make sense of her infidelity, The Lily and the Crown (Telanu, 2013) recasts Miranda Priestly as Pirate Queen Mír, guilty of mass-murder, rather than merely acerbic barbs (as in the film). Through close readings, I argue that the way these texts ask their readers to consider the limits of both villains' desirability, by playing with the terms of their respective criminality, shows the extent to which nuancing and negotiating the ‘evil’ of these ‘queens’ is structurally embedded in these femslash fandoms. The femslash fannish investment these texts reflect, in both the figure of the queer female villain and those who desire her, proposes an alternative version of happiness to the heteronormative happy ending, one that does not attenuate the queer codes that position these ‘Evil Queens’ as monster-outsiders to it, but embraces that monstrosity as a site of power, progress and futurity.

The purpose of this paper is to interrogate the concept of meaning and the meaning making process in consumer behavior. While the study of the consumption focuses increasingly on how consumers create meaning in a marketing dominated world, it views this process as relatively unproblematic. This paper challenges that perspective and argues that this process is inherently ambiguous.

This paper is primarily conceptual in nature. It utilizes a post-structural perspective to theoretically examine the concept of meaning and the meaning making process. It then applies this analysis to the consumption and production of popular culture. Three exemplars from the domain of digital fandom are provided to explore the conceptual arguments in the paper.

The paper argues that if the meanings of all texts are fundamentally unstable and that meaning itself is endlessly deferred in the meaning making process, then as the consumer becomes the author of the text, the instability and ambiguity of meaning and the meaning making process transfers equally to the consumption process. Rather than view this as a negative aspect of consumer culture, this paper argues that some consumers relish this ambiguity and the freedom that it gives them to manipulate these products, their textual meanings, and the readers’ identities.

The primary limitation of this paper is that it is conceptual in nature. Future research should empirically examine different cases of meaningless consumption to provide more evidence of this interesting and potentially pervasive aspect of consumer behavior.

There is virtually no research that examines meaningless consumption. The value of the paper is that it challenges a core concept in cultural theories of consumer behavior and extends our understanding of consumption.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a model for the behaviors of consumers engaged in fan activity and test to see if that model simulates the movement of consumers among the proposed levels of fan behaviors.

Support for the proposed model is examined through the literature, a series of structured interviews with fans are evaluated using first qualitative, then quantitative methodologies for evidence of the hypothesized model.

The research indicates moderate support for the three‐level model first proposed by Hill et al.

Given the moderate support found for the model, further research could serve to offer stronger evidence, as well as to examine the extinguishing process by which a fan exits the subculture.

The research identifies members and levels of the fan subculture that marketing professionals should target when offering products and services aimed at those segments.

This paper tests a model which has previously only existed as a theory, utilizing methodologies that integrate qualitative and quantitative research.