Tvtropes.org and What New Fan Scholarship Has to Offer

In today's Washington Post, an article discusses how world news reporting will henceforth have to rely at least in part on more amateur writers as US newspapers cut back their foreign bureaus. This made me think about how much I rely on fans, fan/scholars, and scholar/fans, to stay current in studying New Media.

Part of the importance of these other "non-academic" sources of knowledge is the sheer mass of media streaming forth. But like the Post article, I sense that the online work is seriously evolving. Further, I want to state that it is not that fan discourse needs to evolve into academic discourse, but that fan discourse is on a separate (if overlapping) trajectory and is becoming important and powerful in ways unavailable to academic discourse (just as the converse is true).

One perfect example of this type of non-academic (or fan-academic?) discourse is tvtropes.org. This wiki uniquely and exhaustively documents tropes that occur on virtually all of television, film, literature, video games, professional wrestling, etc. -- the list of media types is pretty all-inclusive. Because of its volume, this work could not be achieved in a purely academic environment, but its existence as well as the information it catalogs must be important to fans, scholars, and all combinations of the two.