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Work 325Nonmarket Peer ProductionWithin the field of digital-culture studies, theorists are debating how tounderstand the “free” nonmarket labor that supports activities such asopen-source software development, citizen science, game modding, fansubbing,and Wikipedia authoring. For example, Yochai Benkler (2006) sees“nonmarket peer production” as part of a fundamental shift from themarket mechanisms that characterized cultural production in high capitalism.Other theorists see these processes as exploitation of users and consumersfor the commercial gain of media industries (Ross 2007; Terranova2000). These kinds of practices differ in important ways from traditionalforms of volunteerism and community service, yet they may provide someof the same social benefits for youth. When examining youth practice inthis domain, we need to negotiate a complicated tension. On one hand, itis important to value these activities as spaces where youth can engage inactive forms of social organization and develop a sense of efficacy and leadership.Further, these activities are part of a “free culture” sharing economythat has a unique ethic of civic participation aimed at developing publicrather than proprietary goods (Lessig 2004). On the other hand, widespreadyouth participation in unpaid digital cultural production is part of a resilientstructural dynamic in which many constructive activities of youth arenot “counted” as a contribution to economic productivity (Qvortrup 2001).The enthusiasm that media-savvy youth are bringing to nonmarket digitalproduction represents a unique twist to these existing dynamics.As part of Mizuko Ito’s case study on anime fans, she has researched thepractices of amateur subtitlers, or “fansubbers,” who translate and subtitleanime and release it through Internet distribution. Chapter 6 describessome of the ways in which they form tight-knit work teams, with jobs thatinclude translators, timers, editors, typesetters, encoders, quality checkers,and distributors. Although the quality of fansubs differ, most fans thinkthat a high-quality fansub is better than the professional counterpart.Fansub groups often work faster and more effectively than professionallocalization industries, and their work is viewed by millions of anime fansaround the world. Fansubbing, like much of digital-media production, ishard, grinding work—translating dialogue with the highest degree ofaccuracy, timing how long dialogue appears on the screen down to thesplit second, fiddling with the minutiae of video encoding to make thehighest-quality video files that are small enough to be distributed over the