*rapidly reaching LJ drama saturation*
Got myself a greatestjournal this afternoon. I don't foresee switching there any time soon, but figured it'd make a good backup just in case. Please feel free to friend it if you have one too!
That said, I hope it never comes to fandom having to move off LJ. I like it here. It's the center of my fannish life.
Seeing dangerous nutjobs and the Six Apart CEO peeking in over our shoulders and deciding to label us prurient.... That leaves me more or less speechless. Because we may read and write adult subject matter, and we may use the word "porn" a lot, and we are not a community for all ages or maturity levels, but....
I don't know. It seems to me that fandom is about way more than pornography. And before this and the Fanlib thing, I took it for granted that that was obvious. That anyone on the outside looking in could see fandom for what it is to the people who're in it. One of the cool things about the responses to Fanlib was reading people's descriptions and definitions of fandom, talking about the ways it is a community, and how it transcends traditional, patriarchal, authoritarian writing/publishing economies. And so on.
Now, though, I'm starting to think of fans as an acculturated group that is best understood through experience. Spectators are just not going to get us.
Fanlib is maybe the ultimate (and mostly costly, if it tanks) example of that.
But WFI and Six Apart are also guilty of acting on the basis of false assumptions of what fandom is. They've misjudged us (and it seems clear to me that they didn't waste too much time giving us the benefit of a doubt or second-guessing their own biases values), and then came in and disrupted our communities by trying to (like Fanlib) impose their worldview upon us.
This sort of thing is why I cringe to think of fandom ever going mainstream. Because most people aren't going to "get" it, and fandom is going to have to spend a lot of energy defending itself from people and groups (not just copyright holders) who take it upon themselves to shut us down. And the more time we spend doing that, the less time there'll be for fic, art, squee, vidding, cons, ficathons, archiving, chatting, and (lest we forget) porn erotica.
Okay, all that said, and if you haven't already, please consider joining fandom_counts to show LJ exactly how many of their users consider themselves members of fandom.
That said, I hope it never comes to fandom having to move off LJ. I like it here. It's the center of my fannish life.
Seeing dangerous nutjobs and the Six Apart CEO peeking in over our shoulders and deciding to label us prurient.... That leaves me more or less speechless. Because we may read and write adult subject matter, and we may use the word "porn" a lot, and we are not a community for all ages or maturity levels, but....
I don't know. It seems to me that fandom is about way more than pornography. And before this and the Fanlib thing, I took it for granted that that was obvious. That anyone on the outside looking in could see fandom for what it is to the people who're in it. One of the cool things about the responses to Fanlib was reading people's descriptions and definitions of fandom, talking about the ways it is a community, and how it transcends traditional, patriarchal, authoritarian writing/publishing economies. And so on.
Now, though, I'm starting to think of fans as an acculturated group that is best understood through experience. Spectators are just not going to get us.
Fanlib is maybe the ultimate (and mostly costly, if it tanks) example of that.
But WFI and Six Apart are also guilty of acting on the basis of false assumptions of what fandom is. They've misjudged us (and it seems clear to me that they didn't waste too much time giving us the benefit of a doubt or second-guessing their own biases values), and then came in and disrupted our communities by trying to (like Fanlib) impose their worldview upon us.
This sort of thing is why I cringe to think of fandom ever going mainstream. Because most people aren't going to "get" it, and fandom is going to have to spend a lot of energy defending itself from people and groups (not just copyright holders) who take it upon themselves to shut us down. And the more time we spend doing that, the less time there'll be for fic, art, squee, vidding, cons, ficathons, archiving, chatting, and (lest we forget) porn erotica.
Okay, all that said, and if you haven't already, please consider joining fandom_counts to show LJ exactly how many of their users consider themselves members of fandom.