Whether it's the Trollope Society or the Aqua Teen Hunger Force fan club, fandoms often become forums in which participants move beyond their shared love of a particular piece of content to start discussing real world issues. However, it's only relatively recently that people have started using them for concerted political action.

Examples? Well, there are the Palestinian activists who dressed as the Na'vi to protest against the Israeli wall. The Dongria Kondh who appeal to the maker of 'Avatar', James Cameron, as they struggle to save their land. And The Harry Potter Alliance, which raises funds for the people of Haiti. (Below is a video of a panel lead by professor Henry Jenkins, explaining more about what he calls 'transmedia activism'.)

Large content property owners have a mixed record of dealing with their fandoms at the best of times - many vacillate between love and loathing. So while many writers and artists tend to be 'of the left' and therefore sympathetic to the kind of protests we've seen so far, studios and producers tend to see the world through a different lens. Cuddling up to fandoms when they want to sell them something, sending out 'cease and desist' letters when they feel the fandom has overstepped the mark (see Leeland Chase and the Endor Holocaust).

So, while most current protests have been small scale and have come from the left, what if the Tea Party movement decides that they all want to dress up as Jedi and portray Obama as Darth Vader? How would George Lucas respond? What if the Tea Party movement created a website with videos of Obama inter-cut with Star Wars content? A bit like those Joker posters? What if they did it again and again, in a more concerted way? In other words, what if they push Lucas into taking a position?

It's not quite the same, but Amnesty UK has been using Google maps as a campaigning tool to protest Shell's environmental and human rights record in the Niger delta.

Uploading pictures and asking activists to mention Shell's record in the Niger delta in the review sections of Shell garages in the regular Google maps. Using what is a quasi-public, new media space to tell a political story.

My instinct is that if Google tried to intervene it would just throw petrol on the fire (sorry), so we may well see nothing from Google about this, however, Google is a corporate entity, the service has terms of agreement, Shell spends money with Google (in the UK, if you search for "Shell" you'll see they've paid for an adwords campaign), so I'm sure that there must have been some discussion of the issue. And while this campaign may not push Google into action, I suspect we'll see more of these types of campaigns run on services owned by the likes of Yahoo, Microsoft, Google and others. It will be interesting to see how they react when campaigners start pushing the limits of what these services can do, mashing up data and geolocation information, calling large corporates or corrupt individuals to account. 

At the moment this is all pretty small scale, but I predict that it will get bigger as activists figure out that you can get a lot of media attention by appropriating and transposing narratives and mobilising fandoms to make a political point.