Mission, passion and fun as motivations of amateur creativity on the Internet

Marta Juza, Michał Piotr Pręgowski

English version of the article

As a very ambiguous and multi-faced social phenomenon, the Internet can be approached as an open storage of various content. Such content is produced either by the industry and distributed by mass media, or – independently – by Internet users themselves. The mainstream content often becomes an impulse to create and publish grass root content, as well as – in effect – to participate actively in culture. Fan creativity is one of the most important displays of such participation. The authors focused on motivations for the creativity of Polish fans of two global products: Star Trek and the National Hockey League (NHL). These brands share an important characteristic: low mass-media exposure and sparse but very active circle of fans.

KEYWORDS

participatory culture, fan creativity, fan motivations, hacker ethics