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Misha’s Minons: A Case Study in Online Community formation and hierarchy.

Case Study: Misha's Minions

Cathrine Agnew & Irene McGinn

Introduction

We decided to study the community formation and hierarchical structure of Misha’s Minions, a community that arose from the twitter feed of actor Misha Collins (http://twitter.com/mishacollins). This twitter feed, created approximately one year ago, is constructed differently to other celebrity twitter feeds that we have encountered.  Rather than sharing details of his life and work, Misha Collins has created an alternate reality in which he is an overlord and his twitter followers are his minions. Taking inspiration from Misha, his fans (minions) took this idea and created a community around it.  In this community they are directly inspired by the ‘tweets’ (twitter posts) that Misha posts, but they have gone further than that, creating forums, facebook groups, maps, arts and writing that all contributes to the alternate reality established by the twitter feed.

We decided to conduct this study because one of Matt Hills’ main criticisms of many previous studies on fan culture is that they assume the pre-existence of a community rather than investigating this conception.

Previous studies have nothing to say on the emergence of fan cultures, precisely because they always assume a pre-constituted fan community and hence a set of fan ‘norms’ against which the fan as subject can be measured and placed, and through which the fan as subject can be determined. (Hills 2002 pxiv)

This struck us as an area we would be interested in looking into further which is why we decided to concentrate our study on the area of community formation and hierarchy. Misha’s Minons seemed to be a perfect community for this kind of study because its origins appeared to be relatively clear, in that the community grew from the twitter feed of a particular actor. We could therefore look at the forums on the related sites from the very first post.

We identified the sociological framework developed by Pierre Boudieu as containing a number of concepts that could perhaps be gainfully applied to the development of online communities. We also looked at theorists who had used Bourdieu’s work in areas similar to ours such as Sarah Thornton and John Fiske.

In order to do this we undertook a qualitative analysis of the related forums and then augmented our conclusions from this analysis with a short quantitative survey. We found that social capital appears to hold more weight within this community than other forms of capital and that the hierarchy does not conform to normative structures.

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2010
11/25
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Essays
Fandom
Gender
Reception
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The effects of new media on how film is produced and consumed.

Old televisions left for scrap

From the horizontal integration of multinational corporations, which guarantees extensive media crossovers, to the digitization of Hollywood, which has affected the business, production, and marketing of cinema, big-screen films are indebted to a similar intimate congress among media. (Klinger 2006 p236)

In recent years we have seen many changes in technology.  Processing power has increased, software is getting more and more integrated and complex and the hardware that is needed to run programs is getting smaller and more cost-effective.  For the film industry this means new editing software, more powerful digital imaging programs and new formats like digital projection, DVDs and Blueray. Digital cinema provides a clearer picture, a better cinematographic experience and faster and easier distribution and is now becoming an industry standard. (Taylor 2006) DVDs and Blueray have replaced the now-obsolete VCR as the new home entertainment standard and home cinemas with bigger screens and better sound have changed the home viewing experience. The media integration and convergence that new technologies are creating encourages increased franchising and intertextuality, a lucrative development that production companies are only too glad to encourage.  Now blockbuster films have all sorts of associate ancillary products, from video games to special edition DVDs to theme park rides and action figures.

A lucrative franchise is known in the commercially driven film industry (particularly in Hollywood) as one of the best ways to make money.  Hollywood blockbuster films may cost millions of dollars to make but studios are willing to put money into them if they expect them to provide a high financial return.  Successful blockbuster films are what fund Hollywood studios.  The studios can afford to take some financial risk in other areas, funding many smaller films that are not guaranteed to recoup money if they have a couple of blockbusters in hand. This is because the revenue from blockbusters is not simply dependant on income from seats sold in theatres. Lucrative sponsorship and product placement deals as well as the sale of merchandise, like games and special edition DVDs, supplement this income. These films are known as ‘tentpole pictures’ (Bordwell 2006 p12) because they are the productions that ‘hold up’ the rest of the studio in the same way as a central pole in a tent keeps the rest of the tent upright.
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2010
06/17
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Essays
Film
Multimedia
Reception
Technology
Television
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