Extract

1.   Up Close and Personal: Exploring the Bonds Between Promoters and Backers in Audiovisual Crowdfunded Projects

TALIA LEIBOVITZ, ANTONI ROIG TELO, AND JORDI SÁNCHEZ-NAVARRO

Introduction

The nature of cultural production and consumption continues to undergo profound changes. New platforms, new media, and new types of cultural agents, coupled with easier access to the means of production and promotion, have generated a multitude of emergent media forms, redefining the production and consumption of cultural products, and altering the relationships between media, industries, and audiences (Jenkins, 2006; Deuze, 2008; Schafer, 2011). As a means of communication and production, and as a source of entertainment, the Internet has been a driving force behind the transformations in processes of creation and exchange (Braet & Spek, 2010), forcing us to reconsider traditional boundaries between the various agents involved in cultural production.

Beyond celebratory discourses, this new ecology must be characterised in terms of change, but also of continuity, even if in an unstable and conflictive relation between practices, business models, and cultural agents. In the end, this is about the proliferation of spreadable content, the emergence of new cultural agents, transformations of cultural consumption patterns, but also power relations, the roles of public and private cultural institutions in promoting culture, controversies on diversity and public participation, audience fragmentation, and uncertainty over business models.

Participation has become a key concept in the understanding of these emerging media practices in a context of cultural...