Thinking ahead to the Fan Labor panel

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The sure-to-be-wonderful MIT Comparative Media Studies Futures of Entertainment 2 conference is starting this morning, and while I'm excited about the entire event, I'm not surprisingly most interested in the panel on fan labor, which is scheduled for this afternoon and features the brilliant Catherine Tosenberger, known and loved by many of us

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Re: a few disjointed thoughts

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I think that's part of what makes me uncomfortable, too. The thing is that we don't seem to have a choice about at least confronting and thinking about this, because media companies are building using fan labor into their business models, and it's important, to me at least, that we not just watch that happen without having a conversation about it within fandom, rather than just at media conferences with sparse attendance from fans.

I think I may not have said things right in terms of the why of why I think fandom does and ought to matter. For me, the one way that it *truly* matters is that it is an end in itself - the other ways people use to "justify" fandom's existence are nice, but they're not the real cigar, at least not for me. Why fandom matters is because fandom matters to us, in whatever ways it matters to us, and I think that the core distillation of that is that fandom is about shared stories. I don't care if our shared stories matter to anyone outside of fandom, and that's where I think I should have said things better, but maybe that helps to say here. Fandom doesn't matter because of anything we give back to the outside world, it matters because of what it is to us.