scroll if you think this is a teal deer sighting.

[ethrosdemon]

Let me just preface this by saying that these opinions seems to be fairly strident, but the truth of the matter is that I am pretty ambivalent about the whole OTW enterprise. I just come off sounding more emphatic than I am because that's my rhetorical style

Comments

[technosage]

Do you think it's the acafen who have outed us, K? I think WFI, Disney, JKR and others began the enterprise. Or, really the Star Trek Franchise with its annual sanctioned fan fiction anthology sold in bookstores. I think that's over ten years' old now.

I hear what you're saying and I don't disagree, particularly as pertains to the observer and the observed. Yet one of the reasons to study subcultural groups is to understand how they function - for some, it'd be naive to say most or all, the purpose going forward being to create other, workable societies, small and large scale. To move forward in the enterprise in improving the human condition (one hopes) and increasing freedom.

Academia becomes self-referential and serves only itself, yes. Creating dikes that need damming, yes. But even so, the work of academics may be used by those who do wish to be, to borrow a word, transformative.

I'm ambivalent on the entire enterprise of OTW, except in that the legal climate of fandom does trouble me, and having a "union" or an automatic "

1st thing

[ethrosdemon]

I will maybe address this argument by argument.

I think that OTW has drawn the attention of gadflies that were circling other areas previously. Sure, people have known fandom EXISTED for a long time. This is very different from knowing a group exists to SUE THEM and that appears to be confrontational. This sort of attention is very unwanted by me personally. I can't represent anyone else but myself. JK saying "fanfic that isn't perverted is ok" is not at all the same as fandom itself saying "we own this because we changed it." I mean, if I was a producer--

Ok, so part of the problem here is that the timing is very bad. The content providers for media fandom are already feeling very angry due to the writers' strike. Media is about to change drastically because of the strike, how this will fall out is unknown, but getting involved in the battle over digital media seems like a bad idea to me.

Re: 1st thing

[technosage]

I hear you, but I'm not certain I agree. We have a series of battles already ahead of us. Even before OTW, I'd have predicted test cases on fan fic within the next four years, if not sooner.

As a legal matter, copyright is highly contentious with or without fan fiction involved. There's an ongoing question of the validity and utility at all in our era, let alone the extension of copyrights granted by Congress.

I can't really address OTW and its agenda specifically, mostly because like you, I've kept it largely off my radar. OTOH, I have the impression it's growing out of the same geist as the Creative Commons movement.

Sure, the timing is bad. The problem is that the timing is also inevitable - because of the things that are going on. It's not correlative. There's a complex causal relationship between the strike and things like Creative Commons, OTW, and the constant struggles of creator-owned comics and the rise of indie films.

Re: 1st thing

[ethrosdemon]

Yeah, it's a synergetic system going on here with digital material and copywrite. To a certain degree, because of the international nature of the internet, many of these issues as they relate to fandom may or may not ever matter.

[tiferet]

I think they're making this choice for themselves; you don't have to participate. I never wanted to live in a secret world and hide who I am; I only do it when it's absolutely necessary. Why should they let you decide that they have to go on doing things secretly?

How much of a secret do you really think it is nowadays anyway?

[ethrosdemon]

We always already were secretive. Status quo is normative, change is what has to be advocated for, not maintaining current status.

I'm not trying to fight with you.

Hm, that is impossible to say. I think that we are mainly known-of to people who find that relevant, but I think we're treated as a benign group of wackos.

[tiferet]

I don't really want to fight either

[destina]

I think they're making this choice for themselves; you don't have to participate.

By making OTW a public organization, with very public (and highly publicized) goals, they are making this choice for all of fandom. So whether or not fans participate in OTW, OTW appears to speak for the masses, to be representative of fandom, to 'protect fannish interests'; this is how they've designed themselves, and how they are marketing themselves, inside fandom and apart from it. It's rather difficult to say "they don't speak for me" when the very issue here is public perception of fandom, visibility on the mainstream radar, and protection of fannish interests - the world at large sees fans as a single entity.

I never wanted to live in a secret world and hide who I am; I only do it when it's absolutely necessary. Why should they let you decide that they have to go on doing things secretly?Ideally, each fan should be able to enjoy fandom on her own terms. If a fan wants to be public, she can be. But the problem is a bit different for fans who

[p_zeitgeist]

I can't speak to the wider world, but as a data point, I don't think it can be said that acafen are what outed the community to TPTB. I say that because I have some links to TPTB, and while I believe in keeping things separated and therefore do not propose to go into any detail, I nevertheless can say that TPTB have been aware of media fandom for a long, long time. A long time. The degree of understanding of the subculture has varied from person to person, of course: there have been plenty of people who knew it was there but thought of it as being like, oh, sports fandom. But there've also been people right along who knew about the less publicly-acceptable aspects of fandom

[ethrosdemon]

I pretty much agree with you. My argument here wasn't exhaustive. Of course TPTB knew about fandom/fan culture! I was talking more about the desire to "mainstream" fandom, which is an impulse I've never really understood.

Yes, the non-elected representation of fandom by people who are considering "authority figures" is troubling. Mostly, I don't care so much because I don't read/listen to/watch any of the material where I might come across that. But I definitely feel sympathy w/ people who are like "WHAT? Who the hell are YOU?"

[destina]

I don't agree with all your points, but I surely do agree with how you feel about it. *g*

[ethrosdemon]

I think that the tendency towards being disgruntled with all of this is probably latent in a lot of people.

[spare_change]

Wow. This is a really great post, and helped clarify some things in my own mind. As an academic myself, I’ve had serious ethical and methodological issues with the way academic research gets conducted in fandom for a long time now. At one point, I was optimistic enough to try to address these with various acafans, but these conversations were ultimately so frustrating and unproductive that I decided to just keep them as friends and ignore the occasional acafennish content in their posts

[kbusse]

Like, for example, few fans out the work of other fans in order to further their own professional careers.

Just a quick fact check. While I know that there are academics who out fans, all of the acafan I know are indeed fan enough and very adamant about not doing so.

Personally, I have never cited or referenced anything without asking the author for permission, not because I needed to do so from an academic perspective but from a fannish one. It allows me to decide what link they'd like to use and what handle they would prefer IF THEY AGREE TO BE CITED.

So, I'm not really sure what position we're supposedly jumping between, but I know my own (and those of the acafen I know involved in the project) is a pretty form fans first.

[ratcreature]

Yeah, though sometimes you agree to be cited for someone student thesis, assuming it's going to be like the bibliography of some paper that the professor gets (who apparently whined about just citing with pseuds so you agreed to RL names as it's not that you are that closeted), only to find out two years later that they now apparently do some grad student project related to this that has a google-enabled wiki incorporating said bibliography thus linking your RL name to your online identity for everyone searching. But yeah sure, you agreed to be cited so you can't even complain, after all you were just stupid. *is still disgruntled*

But then I just never learn. Time and time again it sucked for me when I agreed to cooperate with some academic or another in their sociology pet project in fandom and elsewhere, because it always went differently from how they presented it at first.

[kbusse]

Again, speaking for myself only. I'm pretty sure when I go from conference paper to publication I ask again. I let people read what I write about them. If they feel I misrepresent them, I talk about it with them (and have changed phrasing).

And as a fan, I'd be doubly careful that there's no suddenly traceable link to you. I've had one situation where someone uploaded her story to a public archive so I could link so I wouldn't have to cite her personal web site.

I mean...I do believe that I'm a fan before I'm anything else. But then I also don't profit from publishing as spare_change suggests. *shrugs*