In the digital society development era, young people are a central figure many involved in a variety of digital activities, not merely as an addictive information technology (IT) user, but also as a generation that is accustomed to information. Nowadays, people interact with each other through the digital platform. In the study of social sciences, the emergence of groups of young fans of novels, films, and other global popular culture industry products are part of the study of digital fandom. Young people who are interested into digital fandom are not only as a group who consume and love cultural texts, interpret cultural texts, but they are also a group of fans actively involved, interacting and actively producing cultural texts in the virtual community, they created in the form of fan sites. Fans of The Mortal Instruments, for example, are one of the communities that host young people on a fan site that is a collection of novels by the famous Cassandra Clare.
Young fans of global famous culture enthusiasts are the prosumer who not only become the passive consumer who enjoys cultural texts as part of the pleasure activity, but they are also part of an active fan group as producers who create cultural texts and even paratexts the result of their creativity as part of the net generation. Some fans are not only co-creation, but also co-production participated in a part of the work of capitalism organization behind the development of cultural industry products, so it is increasingly indifferentiable between consumers and producers.
Young people usually spend time doing a variety of fun activities in cyberspace. Surfing and searching for information about the idol figures they love are one of the activities that young people commonly do. More than just accessing and consuming information, young people who are incorporated in the digital fandom produce digital texts that they commonly share with other friends. In its position as a consumer and producer, the young millennials were eventually referred to as prosumer.
Filling the free time by searching for the desired information is what the young people in the millennial era often do. On the one hand, children who access the information and study the information they want, they will have a social benefit. On the other hand, children who utilize time searching for information, even producing information relating to popular culture that they love, are unconsciously putting the child in position as an extension of the capitalist’s hand producing cultural industry products. Young people are famous culture fans like this is what in the author’s research is called as free digital labor.
Young people in the postmodern era is not a completely free subject of the ideological hegemony of capitalism. Even with Web 2.0 and media support that spreadability, fans get the opportunity to create their site, produce and circulate cultural text content in a chat room to express their hobbies, and show their traditional identity (user-generated content). Every reaction developed and expressed by young people as part of the online fandom, especially the expressions they show in cyberspace, for capitalists is the capital to reproduce popular culture products they soon offer to consumers.
Author: Rahma Sugihartati Department of Information Science and library Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, Universitas Airlangga
Link: Rahma Sugihartati, Youth fans of global popular culture: Between prosumer and free digital labourer, Journal of Consumer Culture 0 (0) 1-19. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1469540517736522.
