Introduction

Seven years ago, I was working on a research project that focused on the construction of the Hollywood actor as a popular and public media figure ^[1] . One of my case studies was the actor Mr. Keanu Reeves who I happened to run into. Or actually, he walked into me when I was having lunch in Los Angeles. It was a bizarre coincidence since I had not thought about setting up an appointment with him. It took me about thirty minutes to decide whether I should approach him or not. We ended up talking for a long time about lots of things. Three days later this little encounter was on the E! Online web site:

E! Online: Ted Casablanca's Awful Truth: 10/22/97 The Eyes have it: Keanu Reeves, grunge central, chatting with a Dutch blonde woman in the lobby of Hollywood's famous [], where the decor is as musty as Keanu's muscles .

It turned out to be my first encounter with the construction of celebrityhood and the magnitude of the Internet to 'spread the word.' Keanu Reeves is massively represented on the Internet such as on movie sites, fan sites, message boards , chat rooms, and Web logs.

Pictures of his private belongings are posted, claims about his whereabouts, the books he is reading, girls he is seeing, are denied or confirmed and spread across the virtual community that mainly embraces Keanu's (often 'wannabe') inner circle and fans. It is no wonder Keanu always finds himself awaited by a crowd of people, be it in a hotel lobby, airport, garage or club. He once said, 'It is about getting organized, about being connected.' The introduction of new technologies has had an important impact on the relationship between technological artifacts and the social organization of communication, of getting connected to other like-minded people ('peers') through communication devices.

Interactive Audiences

Digital technologies, especially the Internet, have reactivated debates on 19 ^th and 20 ^th century audio-visual media such as film and television that are seen as points of convergence where technologies, corporations, and people meet (Ang, 1982; Dyer, 1998; Jenkins, 1992). Questions regarding the aesthetic status of new technologically enabled expressive forms such as digital games and Web logs are raised, and challenges regarding the role of commerce in the production of commercial culture are mounted. Digital technologies have made questions regarding originality and reproducibility particularly difficult, and they have blurred the lines among producer, distributor, and consumer to a far greater extent than previous media forms, facilitating what has been termed participatory culture ^[2] . Since the late-1990s researchers have shown an increasing interest in this linkage between new technologies and publics, looking in particular at the formation of new social collectivities and 'bottom-up' redefinitions of cultural practices ^[3] such as fan fiction , the creation of spoofs ('fake ads') and modifications (variation on a game) on the Internet. When in the mid-1990s Mosaic and the Pentium chip were introduced the notion of re-circulation initially associated with digital culture by decentralizing computer networks and enabling the peer-to-peer exchange of sound, image, and text, radically changed. The Internet could be used for more than looking up information or sending e-mail. Instead people formed networks, effectively constructing ' user -created search engines' for the exchange of music files, games (e.g., KaZaA), and increasingly, news and chat. While the present moment is marked by a legal standoff between robust communities of users (cultural co- producers ) and the established media industry (particularly the music and film industry), some elements of the corporate media world have taken a different approach, embracing the new technological use rather than attempting to outlaw it. These corporations have found their way to online participatory networks and are attempting to use them for their own good. Advertisements in the form of games, movies and Web logs are created to promote a company's product or service, but they crucially rely upon blurring the boundaries between production and distribution, encouraging the target audience to work for them. Whether this is a good or bad thing remains to be seen. Thus far, it seems that people don't mind watching the BMW films or play the BMW games or the games at the CokeMusic portal that inherently send information back to the companies. The general attitude towards advertainment is that people neglect the advertising component which means they like the BMW films, they even send the link out to their friends , but they are not going to buy a BMW - at the same time, people often provide false demographics in order to access the advertainment. So it really calls for further study to explore the ethics and workings of this contemporary usage of entertainment formats for advertising purposes.

This study considers this corporate strategy where cultural practice constitutes the spaces of commercially produced Internet advertisements, such as films, games, and Web logs, within which economic action of production and consumption is formatted and framed through viral marketing and explicitly requires the participation of networked consumers.

^[1] See http://www.cinabelle.com/MAthesis.PDF for 'My Face is Never was' - Exploring the Textual Construction of the Celebrity: Productive Intersections between the Actor, Institutions and Audiences (Vandergraaf, 1999).

^[2] Participatory communication explicitly states that it favors decentralization and democracy, the interests of people at the grassroots, interpretative and bottom-up perspectives, local knowledge systems, two-way communication and education, open -ended cyclical and horizontal processes, dialogue and discussion, involvement, awareness, commitment, conscientization, empowerment and social mobilization (http://www.wacc.org.uk/ publications /md/md1997-2/review_article.html).

^[3] These studies have tended to recover aesthetic status and social power by casting the work of participating publics as transgressive (against the perceived economic interests of the commercial culture producers and providers, like Napster) or as at least unintended (not considered by producers or providers but also not perceived as harmful , a la Star Trek fan fiction; see Jenkins 1992).