http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/fashion/02fans.html?8dpc=&pagewanted=all

IMO Grant’s right on track — there will be an evolving relationship between media companies and “official” creators and the audience/fans. It’s already happening and will likely continue into the creative space itself (for some properties).

There’s a great article in Wired about this: “Japan, Inc: Inside the Manga Industrial Complex”:

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/15-11/ff_manga

Article in summary: although Japan has more stringent IP laws than the US, in the last 5 years the content owners and the fans have evolved an “unspoken agreement” where fans are allowed to create, sell and distribute derivative works openly (prices however must be at a low level — like $4-6 per zine — and are presumed to cover production costs only). Original content products and derivative fan products are sold in the same bookstores, and there are a couple of huge fan events a year where millions of dollars in derivative works are sold.

The content owners give the following reasons why this makes sense to them (rather than continuing their old approach of opposing fanworks and driving them underground):

1) customer care / customer relationships (these fan creators of derivative content are the biggest customers/fans of the mainstream products),

2) a place for new talent to emerge (although most fans don’t want to go pro, some of them do, and some have crossed over and become very profitable sources of new content),

3) cheap market research – what’s hot and what’s cooling off in the fan world, as measured by production and sales of derivative works, are pointers to market potential. When the fan derivative market is open / ie not driven underground by content owners — then it’s easily viewable and useable for market research purposes.

IMO one big obstacle to this happening in the US is the challenge of sexual and/or violent content. A significant amount of fan-created derivative works have content ranging from PG13 to NC17. This isn’t a problem in Japan, where many mainstream materials have a similarly high level of sex/violence — but it would likely be an obstacle in the US, where we have a convoluted relationship with depictions of sex and/or violence. We already have “traditional values advocacy groups” that are pushing Facebook, LiveJournal etc. to police their user content more strictly; this would become a much more contentious topic if Japanese-level content were widely seen in the US.

There is an interesting followup to be done on the number of pop-revivals we’re hitting as of late (Transformers comic books, Spider-Man movies, etc) where the previous generation of fanboy geeks is now sitting in the seat of creator.

Heroes, which I enjoy, could really use some fan input. Individuals have all these powers but somehow never think to use them appropriately. Flying people just stand there and let themselves get hit, telekinetic lightning projectors somehow let bad guys get close to them, the master of time and space rarely uses his time-stop in the obvious way. The characters make unmotivated pivots from one course of action or alignment to another. The whole thing feels a bit forced, like the characters are being told what to do by some offstage voice rather than following their own motivations and possibilities.

However, enlisting fans as continuity checkers might work. As you note, fans are obsessive in demonstrating their knowledge about the show. It always stunned me in my days as a Buffy fanatic that I knew more about the show than the writers – they’d put something in the show, and I’d be like “Wait, back in season 1, there was this incident that contradicts that!”

Anyway, I noted that the Hollywood crew and the ad peeps present both struggled to let go the creative reigns, and I imagine we will continue to struggle (even while we sing co-creation’s praises). The only ones at MIT that totally embraced user genrated content were the academics who study fan culture.