• With both fans and entertainment projects utilizing social media, it's important to understand the playing field. Mashable cited Dr.Who for knowing "How to Keep Secrets in a Social Media World" while The Guardian looked at Tom Hiddleston's publicity skills. "Hiddleston though doesn't seem to be going through the motions, which is why it works. Like Jennifer Lawrence, his is an unfiltered realness that is fast becoming the ultimate asset in post-Twitter, post-PR Hollywood."
• Aside from celebrities utilizing social media to go straight to the audience, Mirror Online's use of a One Direction fan to write about 1D day will likely be one of many efforts to connect to fans' by utilizing their voices in published pieces.
• Not Literally Productions used fandom's practices to create a parody version of Icona Pop's "I Don't Care," titled "I Ship It", and are offering the single for sale, moving from social media to commerce.
• The Verge discussed how facilitating more connectivity among fans can backfire. Sony PlayStation 4's 'Playroom' allowed users to broadcast themselves to other gamers. "Sony was seen to be rushing to slam its ear to the ground, picking up current video-game trends without truly understanding them." As a result, "[t]he rise, rapid descent, and subsequent banning of The Playroom on Twitch is a lesson for Sony. Racing to be part of the fastest-growing subsection of the largest entertainment medium in the world is more difficult when the people who inhabit that space already are entrenched, and have their own specific ways of doing things. As for the worrying content: it may just be human nature that given a camera and a means to communicate, we'll do so in a way that is by turns ingenious and disturbing."

What social media fandom trends have you been seeing? Write about them on Fanlore! Contributions are welcome from all fans.

We want your suggestions! If you know of an essay, video, article, podcast, or link you think we should know about, comment on the most recent OTW Fannews post. Links are welcome in all languages! Submitting a link doesn't guarantee that it will be included in a roundup post, and inclusion of a link doesn't mean that it is endorsed by the OTW.

• All sorts of works inspire the desire for more. Anthony Tommasini writes in The New York Times about the future lives of opera characters. "There is a lively realm of fan fiction focused on movie and television characters, in which viewers share ideas on how some breakup or betrayal might turn out. Opera fans, by contrast, are fixated on characters who have been around for generations, even centuries...Yet we, too, like to speculate on what happens after the final curtain falls. Several recent books grapple with Puccini’s 'Madama Butterfly,' imagining what happens to the 3-year-old boy, nicknamed Trouble, born to the caddish Lieutenant Pinkerton and Cio-Cio San, the geisha who commits suicide. Online, opera lovers are pretty playful about their fantasies of what might happen in favorite works, especially Wagner’s epic 'Ring.' One wag envisions a fifth installment to the cycle in which the Rhinemaidens, fed up after years of devotion and celibacy, open a classy brothel where clients must pay for services in gold."
• Meanwhile Washington Post writer Alexandra Petrin complains about a new authorized Jeeves and Wooster novel. "I am trying to imagine a reader who wants to read this book. The only one I can conjure up is someone who actually has read all the existing Jeeves and Wooster tales and is baying desperately after more. And this isn’t that. This is caffeine when what you want is cocaine. I think? I am not very up on my drugs. Look, this is fanfiction. I am not an expert except in the sense that all former nerdy 14-year-old girls are experts. And fanfiction is not what they wrote. It is what you remember. It is what you loved, what spoke to you. It is what Faulks describes in the introduction. There is much good fan work out there, approved and un-. But as an introduction to the work in question, I cannot recommend it."
• Salon posted a discussion of Jane Austen related works. "If 'Longbourn' is the porridge that coldly chastises Austen and 'Sense & Sensibility' is too warmly attached to its predecessor to breathe, then 'The Lizzy Bennet Diaries' (followed by 'Emma, Approved,' still ongoing) is just right." This is because "the best part of the series may be what it leaves to the audience. Costumed reenactments of off-screen scenes, alternate video diaries filmed by other characters, as well as tweets and Tumblrs posted in tandem with the videos, turn the viewing experience into a 'reading' experience, with fans asked to go back and forth between different media and draw inferences and make judgments on their own. It’s enough intertextuality to make even the most academic Janeite geek out."
• While Amazon's Kindle Worlds has added a comics universe for its pay-to-play fanfiction program, the real buzz has been about a Batman fancomic posted freely online. "There is a lot of backlash at Hollywood with all the remakes and stuff, but if you look at the state of comics, I think it’s far worse; nothing ever changes. I don’t like that. Of course there is always great stuff out there, but what I mean is, when Stan Lee created all those wonderful marvel characters in the 60′s, he was coming up with them on a monthly basis, we forget that it was once all NEW stuff. I would love to read what the amazing writers of both Marvel and DC would come up with if they could do anything they wanted with the characters."

What stories have you most wanted to see more of? Write about their fanworks on Fanlore! Contributions are welcome from all fans.

We want your suggestions! If you know of an essay, video, article, podcast, or link you think we should know about, comment on the most recent OTW Fannews post. Links are welcome in all languages! Submitting a link doesn't guarantee that it will be included in a roundup post, and inclusion of a link doesn't mean that it is endorsed by the OTW.

• The University of Buffalo hosted a lecture by intellectual property scholar Madhavi Sunder titled Learning by Doing. Sunder says. “'Copyright owners have tolerated much fan activity on the theory that lawsuits can turn fans’ love to hate. But the emergence of an ‘experience economy’ may lead some owners of cultural property to reconsider their laissez-faire attitude toward play'...But, Sunder says, that impulse raises caution flags about 'the commoditization of fundamental human experiences and play.'...And because IP law is 'fundamentally about promoting knowledge and learning,' Sunder says, lawyers need to be careful to protect that goal, even when they are asked to help corporations turn such play into a commodity to be bought and sold.'"
• One place rife with automated takedowns, which are particularly likely to be issued indiscriminately, is YouTube. Fortunately, as NPR put in its story title Record Label Picks Copyright Fight — With The Wrong Guy, IP scholar Lawrence Lessig had a video of a lecture taken down due to a small music clip within it. "At first, YouTube took it down. But being a copyright attorney, Lessig knew his rights. He was entitled to use these clips in a lecture under a legal doctrine known as fair use...Liberation Music eventually backed down. But Lessig decided to invoke another part of the copyright law, 'which basically polices bad-faith lawsuits,' he says — threats made fraudulently or without proper basis. Lessig is suing Liberation Music because he wants labels to stop relying on automated systems to send out takedown notices."
• As vidders well know, hosting sites for their fanworks tend to be more limited than those for other media, and they have often booted fan content entirely when the sites changes their marketing focus. The latest site to evict fan videos is Blip.tv, which deleted content within the past week. The OTW has some tips about alternatives for video makers and the top pick is Critical Commons. Though academic in nature, they welcome fanworks, support fair use, and provide a good alternative to commercial sites such as Vimeo and YouTube. The site already hosts some key works that are part of vidding history.
• A new software program, Plotagon, offers a way to create a paint-by-numbers fanwork. "Available for Mac and PC, the basic 'city' version of Plotagon software is free and includes five actors and six environments. To create a Plotagon movie, users simply choose characters and an environment, type a script, add a few stage directions and press 'play.' Plotagon movies can be shared online and viewed at Plotagon.com/movies." Properties include Alice in Wonderland and Pride and Prejudice.

What fanwork and intellectual property stories have you seen? Write about it on Fanlore! Contributions are welcome from all fans.

We want your suggestions! If you know of an essay, video, article, podcast, or link you think we should know about, comment on the most recent OTW Fannews post. Links are welcome in all languages! Submitting a link doesn't guarantee that it will be included in a roundup post, and inclusion of a link doesn't mean that it is endorsed by the OTW.

• Entertainment Weekly kicked off a new pop-culture-related column with a look at TV show finales and cited former OTW board member Francesca Coppa. "Mentally, it is difficult to imagine someone from the 50s declaring themselves a 'fan' of a TV show the way someone self-identifies as a 'Fan' of Walking Dead or Vampire Diaries or Firefly or, hell, NCIS: LA. This is partly because we inaccurately agree that TV wasn’t as good in the ’50s and partly because we assume people in the ’50s had better things to do...But modern fandom has roots in that time period. Francesca Coppa’s fascinating essay 'A Brief History of Media Fandom' (available in the Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet) traces our contemporary idea of media fandom — fan clubs, fanfiction, fan conventions — to a pair of TV shows from the 1960s: Star Trek and The Man from U.N.C.L.E."
• As a possible example of the fan complaints cited in the EW piece, Hypable jumped on the criticism by Once Upon a Time fandom about poor marketing efforts by its network. "ABC has had to pull back the Once Upon a Time season 3 cast photos due to unexpected fandom backlash. Once Upon a Time fans love their show and its characters, and have reportedly responded so negatively to the season 3 cast photoset that ABC has pulled the photographs from their press site."
• The EW piece was not flattering to fandom, but writing in Flavor Wire Jason Diamond dismisses Jillian Cantor’s Margot as fanfiction, as if that were equivalent with poor taste. "Shalom Auslander, in 2012′s Hope: A Tragedy, wrote a book that I consider in even poorer taste, placing a still-alive Anne Frank in the modern-day attic of somebody’s house, trying to squeeze humor from this Philip Rothian plot device. Like Cantor, and unlike Mangum’s album or Quentin Tarantino’s fictional Jewish revenge film Inglourious Basterds, his book upset me because it trivialized, rather than made moving art in tribute to, the real lives of Holocaust victims."
• Perhaps this negativity explains why, in this ABC piece Cafe Tacvba Fans Downplay Their Fandom, though the reporter concludes otherwise. "Eager to collect fandom statements on what makes a Cafeta fan a real, super, ultimate fan, I flew into New York City from Miami to attend its Monday night concert. Being a fan for the past 15 years and this probably being my 25th time going to a Cafe Tacvba show, I thought I was a super fan. But after talking to folks, I wonder if I'm committed enough to call myself one. There, I was not able to find anyone who would even self-identify as a "super fan"...Turns out Cafe Tacvba fans are so devoted to them, they believe they are not worthy of their fandom. They downplay their devotion, because proclaiming they are Cafe Tacvba super fans would entail great responsibility."

What fandom criticisms have you seen? Write about it on Fanlore! Contributions are welcome from all fans.

We want your suggestions! If you know of an essay, video, article, podcast, or link you think we should know about, comment on the most recent OTW Fannews post. Links are welcome in all languages! Submitting a link doesn't guarantee that it will be included in a roundup post, and inclusion of a link doesn't mean that it is endorsed by the OTW.