Towards a Better Understanding of Online Producer/Consumer Relations :
A Virtual Ethnographic Investigation of 'forum.machinaesupremacy.com'
By Andrew McQuade
Abstract
The 'producer' is a social discourse that has long been associated with massive skyscrapers, greedy capitalist consumer exploitation, and imposing bourgeois hegemonic standards on the proletariat via a monopoly on mass communication. Recently however, the term producer has undergone a shift in meaning, as local 'producers' turn to the internet to make their texts available. The term 'producer' now occupies a number of roles that can include textual production and performance, yet our scholarly conceptions of producer/consumer relations are still defined by ideas of opposition. This article uses virtual ethnography as a means to re-examine producer/consumer relations, by looking at the interactions between the Swedish metal band Machinae Supremacy and their fanbase at 'forum.machinaesupremacy.com'. It outlines current conceptions of fan studies and techno-capitalism and how these have intrinsically polarised producers and consumers, then suggests how we need to refocus our ideas of producer/consumer relations when examining 'glocalised' online distribution networks. I also address some of the problems of Reception based research that fails to validate its claims with textual producers. Following this, the ethnographic part of this investigation into Machinae Supremacy's official forum looks at issues of avatarism, social hierarchy, vernacular discourses of knowledge, 'joint fandoms', emic/etic forms of knowledge, before finally attempting to answer the question of how and why the underground genre of 'Sid-Metal' has succeeded so well in a hyper-real online environment, and the significance of genre discourse within the culture surrounding Machinae Supremacy.
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