The Internet provides direct contact with the core audience when creating innovative products and technologies - now companies can communicate with their fans directly; this new era of close symbiosis opens up new opportunities for manufacturers. The influence of fans becomes stronger as fandoms increasingly seek to participate in the fate of the things and phenomena that they idolize. The book's authors explore these evolving interactions in a provocative manner, drawing on a variety of examples, and attempt to explain why some types of communication with fans are successful and others are not. “Right now, fan objects and fans play two different roles in the world of consumption. There are producers and there are buyers. These two categories rarely overlap. But as audiences move from merely consuming fan text to influencing or even adding to that fan text, the gap between audience and fan object narrows. What happens when that gap disappears? You won't have to wait very long for this. We are entering an era of convergence, an era of fandom singularity, in which the boundaries between fan object and fans, between creator and consumer, will blur. This is a future in which the lines of communication between product and customer work in both directions. It's a future where everything is part of the canon." (Zoe Fraade-Blanard, Aron Glaser)