Doctor who merchandising fans

1. Interactivity/
Activity
Audience
Audience

2. Merchandising
•Why is merchandising
important?
•Who buys Doctor Who
merchandising?
•Why do different groups buy
different types of consumer
products?
•How and where is
merchandising advertised?

3. Audience
•The new participatory
audience is taking shape at
the intersection between
three trends.
•New Technology
•Subcultures
•Economic trends

4. New Technology
(1) new tools and
technologies enable
consumers to archive,
annotate, appropriate, and
recirculate media content.
How do Doctor Who fans do
this?

5. Subcultures
(2) a range of subcultures
promote Do-It-Yourself
(DIY) media production, a
discourse that shapes how
consumers have deployed
those technologies.
How do Doctor Who fans do
this?

6. Economy
(3) economic trends favoring the
horizontally integrated media
conglomerates encourage the
flow of images, ideas, and
narratives across multiple media
channels and demand more
active modes of spectatorship.
Serves as a site of collective
discussion, negotiation, and
development……. Unanswered
questions will create tension
within cosmopedic space,
indicating regions where
invention and innovation are
required.

7. On Line?
Collective production,
debate and circulation of
meaning.
Science fiction fandom can
illustrate how knowledge
and communities emerged.
•Astounding Stories in
1930’s, forum in newspaper.
•Letters began to be
circulated

8. On line?
•From letters to face to
face conventions.
•Every reader was
considered to be a
potential writer and some
turned out to be that.
•fans were able to
influence as Sci-fi was
understood as a micro
genre aimed at a small but
passionate niche
audience?
•Can fans change the way
sci-fi is created?

9. Fans
•Some argue that fans
can’t change the
production, but they can
actively reshape the
reception.
•Fansites: Debating,
interpreting, networking,
circulating,...
•In their invention, did
fansites exclude anyone?

10. Examples
Doctor Who Slash
Heroes Art
http://www.nbc.com/Hero
es/auction/fan_gallery.sht
ml
Star Trek blogs
http://www.theendoftheun
iverse.ca/taxonomy/term/
13

11. Question
Audience
Create your own piece of
interactive media. How have
you created meaning in
doing this? What meaing
have you created?