Oh, Foucault! Foucault and fangirling? TL;DR post of oddness.
First and most important things first:
♥♥♥♥♥
Happy Birthday, rhythmia &hearts!
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I hope it is a magical day filled with sparkles and rainbows and joy and . . . joyness.
So since you once said this would amuse you, I finally got around to putting the random Foucault vs. Fangirl post together. I'm sure you will soon regret that. This got . . . long and rambly . . .
This post will not be for everyone ^^” And I would like to be clear that my intention is not to offend anyone with my musings and observations. I'm neither condemning not endorsing panopticism in the community (which would be pointless, as it's here and here to stay), merely having fun with how my work life and fandoms briefly seemed to intersect, and several of my flist seemed at least mildly interested when I mentioned it. And this is what happens when you do that. I'm sorry?
So In February, I mentioned a sudden urge to talk about fan behavior in terms of Michel Foucault’s “Panopticism,” the third chapter of Discipline and Punish, a book on power and control of social behavior, and the history of prisons. So, here is a completely random mash-up of two parts of my life which I generally keep pretty separate from each other.
I hope at least one person besides me finds this at all amusing or interesting.
Note the skepticism from the peanut gallery.
So anyway, I was thinking about this in February, when before and after Sho’s appearance at the NYCC, posts were flying all over the communities as to how fangirls should or shouldn’t act in public, and then, after the con, all of the commentary and criticisms flying back and forth over definitions of good and bad fan behavior, and (more interestingly to me) what criteria should be considered when judging and evaluating fan behavior. It was really fascinating, and intersected with “Panopticism,” which I was teaching at the time.
I wish this were my class^^"
At the time I made the post commenting on this, I was focused mostly on the recent NYCC drama, but since then, have been thinking about how online fandoms (in general and the Arashi fandom in particular, since that’s the one I’m obviously most familiar with) function in terms of these ideas, and perhaps, where they differ to some extent, which I’ll get to eventually.
In other words, this is what comes of me surfing fandom communities when I’m supposed to be working ^^”
Ok, where to start? I guess I’ll start with a brief breakdown of Foucault’s argument. Bear with me; I promise it will be relevant eventually. Plus, it’s really interesting stuff. At least I think so ^^”
”The exile of the leper and the arrest of the plague do not bring with them the same political dream. The first is that of a pure community, the second that of a disciplined society. Two ways of exercising power over men, of controlling their relations, of separating out their dangerous mixtures.”
Foucault starts by describing two historical models for dealing with those who are felt to be different and dangerous to communities. These examples are the leper and the plague town.
The leper, he says, is dealt with by categorization (as a leper), rejection, and expulsion from the community, so as not to infect the rest of the community. Hence, the leper colonies outside of medieval city gates, etc. The healthy city is thus maintained and defined as healthy in the first place by the exclusion of the leper. This practice, he suggests, represents the political dream of having a ‘pure’ community.
On the other hand, he claims, the plague town represents a different political dream, the dream of a ‘disciplined’ society. He looks at an ordinance from the seventeenth century which described the procedures to be taken when plague appeared in a town. All the people were to be registered and secluded in their homes, which would be stocked with food and wine by using wooden canals (to keep people from needing to leave the home. Each block would have people who would have to watch the houses and make sure no one left, verifying every day that each person who was supposed to be in a particular house was. At regular intervals were people watching those people and to whom the block watchers would report. In turn those people would be watched and have to report, and so on, until all the reports came back to the governor of the town. No one from one area of town would be allowed to cross into another territory. Anyone in a place they weren’t supposed to be would be executed.
For this reason, he suggests, people, knowing they were visible to watchers and that there were dire consequences to being seen misbehaving, would not misbehave in the first place. They’d stay where they belong and thus not spread infection if they were knowingly or unknowingly infected with the plague.
”If it is true that the leper gave rise to rituals of exclusion . . . then the plague gave rise to disciplinary projects. Rather than the massive, binary division between one set of people and another [healthy vs. lepers], it called for multiple separations, individualizing distributions, an organization in depth of surveillance and control, an intensification and a ramification of power [as in the plague town]. “
Foucault argues that the plague town represents a more sophisticated way of dealing with dangerous ‘mixtures’ in society than simple categorization and expulsion, as in the case of the leper. Instead, the plague town brings in analysis, a process which involves the following: registration and recording of all individuals, observation of the population, which results in categorization into multiple valued and devalued groups in a hierarchy, labeling of people into these groups, and disciplining of those who fall into the less-valued categories.
To some extent, what this does is make people feel more in control of perceived disorder by categorizing, labeling, identifying, judging, and isolating the perceived disorderly elements in a community.
Still with me? *wonders if anyone is still reading at this point*
If you are still reading, you definitely deserve a reward:
Prettiness! And fanservice! Something for everyone \o/
Where this starts to get really interesting is the beginning of the nineteenth century, when, Foucault argues, these two models of social control became somewhat combined with the rise of special institutions which separated out disorderly or potentially disorderly elements in a community (exclusion, like with the lepers) and which, instead of just booting the unruly elements, confined them in special institutions like hospitals, asylums, prisons, schools, workhouses, where they were monitored, categorized (diagnosed, graded, judged, disciplined, punished) and (sometimes) potentially rehabilitated or educated back into more valued categories:
"The constant division between the normal and the abnormal, to which every individual is subjected, brings us back to our own time, by applying the binary branding and exile of the leper to quite different objects; the existence of a whole set of techniques and institutions for measuring, supervising and correcting the abnormal brings into play the disciplinary mechanisms to which the fear of the plague gave rise. All the mechanisms of power which even today, are disposed around the abnormal individual, to brand him and to alter him, are composed of those two forms from which they distantly derive."
Basically, he says, the practice of labeling and excluding the leper gets tacked on to the scrutiny, evaluation, and modification of the plague town, and a whole new disciplinary model is born.
The perfect model of this system of social mechanisms which disciplined the problematic, he suggests, is the Panopticon, a model prison/institution invented by Jeremy Bentham.
“Visibility is a trap.”
This is Bentham’s basic idea of the Panopticon:
A top view with cross-section:
A view from above:
An actual prison built on the panoptic principle:
The basic structure of the Panopticon requires that prisoners be isolated in solitary cells at the outside ring of the building. In the center is a tower where a warden would be. The cells are all backlit, and the tower is dark, which means every individual in the cell is visible to the tower, but the inmates can’t see the person in the tower. If you think about it, it’s like police lineups-you have a light behind the possible criminals, so they’re visible to the viewers, but the criminals can’t see or recognize their potential accusers.
This imbalance, that there are people who can see but who are not seen, and those who are seen, but can't see those watching them, Foucault argues, creates a serious power imbalance where inmates are relegated to the status of objects under scrutiny (and judgment) and come to think of themselves in this way.
"He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection."
In this system, the person who thinks she might be watched and judged will thus behave in the way she thinks the watcher would want her to, in effect policing herself to avoid being disciplined or punished. This is what Foucault means by saying that the person makes the constraints of power "play spontaneously upon [her]self" and that she "becomes the principle of [her] own subjection."
Be careful! Sho is watching you!
And OhMiya, too!
Did I mention people are watching you?
In such a system, you don’t even need for there to be a watcher in the tower-the inmates can’t tell if anyone is in the tower, and as long as they can’t tell, they must assume that someone is watching and act accordingly. What this does is it gets the inmate to internalize the desires of the person in power and act as she believes the person in power would expect/want her to:
”Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.”
Whew! So that’s the Panopticon. Now to ‘panopticism,’ which is where we will finally get back to fandom.
*celebration ensues*
The Panopticon is a building that encapsulates the idea that visibility makes one vulnerable to categorization, judgment, and discipline. The uncertainty as to whether one is or is not visible at any one moment actually increases this vulnerability and hence anxiety. (If you can definitely tell when you are being watched, it stands to reason you can tell when you’re not, and you would only behave when you knew you were being watched. If you can’t tell, though, you never feel safe misbehaving.)
Panopticism is the idea that the Panopticon is designed to put into action: if you make people constantly feel like they're under surveillance, but they can't see who's watching them or even if they are being watched, they will behave in the way that they think the invisible watcher (who, because they are observing yet can't be observed, is structurally in a position of power), wants them to, so as not to be labeled as bad or problematic and then punished, categorized and/or exiled from the community. It's essentially about getting people to police themselves by making them feel that they're maybe/probably being policed by someone else.
Foucault argues that this principle is no longer contained within buildings and institutions set up to control specific disorderly elements (the criminal, sick, mentally ill, young and rowdy, poor and discontent), but rather has been let loose as a general principle within society at large. He calls the result of this the “panoptic society.” What this means is that panopticism no longer is used to control the deviant or threatening exceptions in society, but that it has become a general means of modifying the behavior of all individuals within a community, and that part of its function is to maintain and ensure that the nondisruptive elements of society stay that way.
Behold Nino trying in vain to protect his bandmates from the discomfort of the panoptic gaze:
The panoptic society is different from the Panopticon partially because it’s about controlling the behaviors of everyone, not just ‘dangerous’ elements, but it's also different from the Panopticon because the ‘central authority’ as such no longer exists-instead of worrying about a central tower, individuals are constantly possibly being observed and categorized judged and labeled by each other, as well as by authority figures. In turn, these individuals participate in the scrutiny, categorization and judgment of others as well. Authority is no longer localized in a specific location, but free-floating and dispersed throughout the community. This system is actually much more repressive, because it makes anyone and everyone essentially authorized to observe, categorize and punish anyone else. There is no sense of privacy or relief from the judgmental eye.
(I can't help but think about Gakkou e Ikkou, when Sho and Aiba were observed in the green room. While it's awesome in terms of the way it confirms fans' desires to be reassured that the idols behave 'in private' much as they do while performing, think about the ramifications for the idols of shows like this--it tells them that even when they think they are not performing, that they are relatively safe, they may be being observed, scrutinized and recorded, and that that information may become publicly available. O___o)
When my students first approach panopticism as a concept, they tend to externalize the panoptic gaze and associate it with institutions of power: the police, teachers, the government, parents--surveillance is what other people, people "in power" do. And we have lots of examples of this in our experience: traffic speed cameras, hidden security cameras, plain-clothes cops, police cars that look like everyday cars, 'secret shoppers' (if you work in retail jobs, you know what I mean--> this is when your bosses tell you that some customers will actually be employees of the larger company who are evaluating you. Since you can't tell which customer is the evaluator, you essentially have to treat every customer as if they were--which encourages you to always conform to job expectations.) Students recognize this and the implicit coercion it suggests.
And then we'll read something that troubles their definitions of normative behavior later, (especially with non-normative gender or sexuality or sometimes age--for some reason 30-somethings who play video games or watch anime really offend my students. idek. This is why I don't even think of mentioning fandom to them ^^") and they'll immediately become dismissive and nasty about people "like that." This is when I spring the whole "Hey look what you're doing: guarding the boundaries of normativity and making anyone who doesn't agree feel outcast so they step back in line! That is how panopticism works" lecture on them, and watch them get all weirded out when they realize that panopticism isn't just about what "authority" does; it's most effective because it's what we do it every single day. We are 'the man.' Many shudder and forget they ever figured it out T__T
A student of mine came up with a really great example from the French Revolution of how insidious a process this can be and how it works. Authorities during the Reign of Terror let it be known that there were spies for the revolution government sprinkled throughout the community, ordinary, familiar people who would report any comments against the new regime and turn the ‘traitors’ in. Because they were supposed to be ordinary people, one would have to assume that anyone might be a spy and act as one believed the regime would want so as not to be betrayed. This would, authorities hoped, keep people from joining together to plot, because someone present might be a spy. And in this system, it works just as well even if there never had been a spy. Preemptive prevention. This is much more effective than having clearly identifiable policemen. Uncertainty heightens obedience. And that is how panopticism works.
Sho looks smug here because he already knew about this and was waiting for everyone else to catch up ^^;
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Foucault died in 1984, so he didn’t live to see the extent to which panopticism has indeed become a pervasive influence in our day to day life now: traffic cameras, closed-circuit TV, security cameras, cellphone cameras, and online platforms for distributing the information gleaned from these sources such as YouTube videos, but also online networking which increases horizontal as well as vertical visibiity: MySpace, Facebook, Livejournal, Vox, Twitter, etc.
The current ever-present possibility that at any point one might be watched, recorded, and later exposed is a huge liability which functions to make people behave, even when they think they are a) in a private setting or b) safely anonymous.
Sometimes, people think they are safe and are proven wrong, as in the case of John McCain during the 2008 US election season: He was recorded at a veteran’s gathering singing “Bomb Iran” to the tune of “Barbara Ann” and within hours, the video was online, picked up by news stations, where his seemingly flippant attitude to a war against Iran led to much criticism.
Busted!
McCain was unrepentant, explaining that this is 'just what veterans do' when they get together, but if he didn’t get the message, many others did-careful what you say, even when you think you’re in a safe supportive environment-cameras are everywhere and anything you say in any setting potentially may show up where you wish it might and lead to judgment and serious consequences.
In a further twist, people actually tend to get highly critical of people who are 'stupid' enough to think they are not being observed--McCain 'should have known better,' and by extension, so should we all. Not acting as if you are constantly under scrutiny thus becomes seen as a failure of intelligence, even of duty.
All of this FINALLY gets us back to fangirling and February.
Good lord; it's about time.
As I mentioned before, shortly before the con, I noticed a flurry of posts and comment threads on various Arashi-related communities discussing 'correct' or 'appropriate' behavior at NYCC as well as various justifications for these suggestions.
A couple of examples:
This one actually had the link hidden behind the text “Let’s try to behave,” and this one is a mod post to the same effect, with other proscriptions, somewhat more mildly phrased, but still centering around anxieties as to how both outsiders and insiders would judge the fandom.
These posts and the comments beneath are really fascinating, because they attempt to define parameters of what constitutes ‘good,’ ‘acceptable,’ or ‘appropriate’ fangirl behavior as if these definitions are already set and agreed upon within the community when if these definitions were, the warnings and requests would not be necessary in the first place.
By stating the boundaries in this way, however, they attempt to create agreement on those definitions through other fangirls’ desire to be labeled good or acceptable fangirls within the online Arashi fandom community through agreement and obedience, and the posts carry the implicit threat of being labeled ‘bad’ fangirls if they don’t comply, with potential social consequences.
I think the attempt itself has to do with the desire to maintain a respectable group identity both to those outside the community-other con-goers, organizers, and of course, Sho and by extension, Arashi. With this in mind, posters attempted to leverage individual fears of judgment and ostracization in order to achieve the goal of maintaining an acceptable group image within the community.
And, not to stir up memories of conflict, but . . . when disagreement on those boundaries and parameters flared up, they were aggressively pursued, and the language involved concentrated on the definition of common sense, courtesy, community, fairness, nationality and nationalism, and finally wealth, entitlement, and privilege.
Comment threads on that first link show the eruption of competing definitions of value as soon as the boundaries of acceptable behavior within the Arashi fan community were perceived to have been violated.
What's interesting is the way that courtesy to the rest of the community was invoked by pretty much all participants in a heated conversation over fangirling etiquette, both on online communities and at events, but the definitions of courtesy differed depending on whether it was considered impolite to post on the event to spare the feelings of those who could not attend (in particular non-Americans or Non-Japanese studying in Japan), or whether the statement of this opinion, by appearing to resent American fans and their good fortune, was itself a violation of community norms. Mutual discourses of evaluation, judgement and rejection ensued, and a public withdrawal from the community occurred.
After the con, accusations flew about bad behavior at the con: pushing, squealing, screaming, ‘unfair’ acquisition of premiere tickets, ‘inappropriate’ questions at the Q & A, attempts to press gifts on Sho which the giver knew was not allowed, etc. These criticisms were often met by reassurances that the vast majority of the fangirls were ‘good,’ and only a few notable exceptions (“Peru-girl,” “crazy uchiwa girl,”) were ‘bad.’ Here’s an index of con reports if you want to check out some of the reactions and aftermath.
The question of visibility as a trap becomes interesting here because both of the perceived poster-girls of fangirl misbehavior were physically identified in fan forums by pointing out which video clips they were visible in (Peru-girl), and by posting pictures of them in posts about the con (Crazy Uchiwa Girl, who I now have a huge urge to abbreviate to CUG in the future ^^”).
I think that posting their pictures or drawing attention to the physical appearance of both of these women had several desired results that make a lot of sense in the context of “Panopticism” and the creation of a panoptic (and hence disciplined) population within the online Arashi community.
First, visually identifying ‘bad’ fangirls is a disciplinary act to publicly punish the miscreants by letting people know who they ’really’ are and by taking away the perceived safety of anonymity.
*SMACK*
Second, it singles out the potential pariahs of the group-‘bad’ fangirls who are identified to alleviate the fears of the rest of the community who don’t want to be identified with them. By labeling bad fangirls, the rest of the community to some extent can rest easy that they are good fangirls, especially by comparison. (This pattern is also pretty visible in the comment thread responses to the "Let's try to behave" pre-event post as well.)
We are awesome! Unlike those other rude loser-fans.
Thirdly, and most importantly, public exposure and rejection of the transgressors acts as an implicit threat against the rest of fandom: it warns potential transgressors that there is no assured anonymity in the online communities: misbehave, and people will find out who you are and you will be publicly shamed.
This works to reinforce group definitions of normative and acceptable behavior by increasing the sense of potential visibility and thus accountability, and this in turn is meant to modify future member behavior through fear of criticism, attack, or expulsion from the community.
This is not a behavior unique to fangirl communities, but seems a characteristic behavior in line with other acts of "internet vigilantism" which attempt to hold people accountable for 'unacceptable' behavior by stripping away the anonymity that allows people to act in transgressive ways in public as community intimacy disappears in modern society. Again, cases like the internet harassment of "Dog-poop Girl" not only work to punish and shame perceived deviance within the community, but also attempt to prevent future misbehavior by providing and object lesson as to what will happen to the disobedient (explanation under the link if you aren't familiar with this narrative; actually, the link is pretty awesome even if you know the story; there are 8 prominent examples of internet vigilantism in it).
Thus, the act of pointing out ‘bad’ behavior itself acts as a sort of declaration that the accuser is a ‘good’ fangirl, but what is more interesting to me is the way that various individuals again soon launched arguments about what the boundaries of those categories were and whether the criteria were valid in the first place.
This is something Foucault doesn’t directly address, because his communities are already implicitly set within existing and acknowledged, if sometimes disobeyed or transgressed, categories of value (criminal vs. law-abiding citizen, sick vs. healthy, orderly vs. disorderly, sane vs. insane, etc). In online communities, however, the geographic, national, age, wealth and other distinctions between members, as well as the unstable visibility of those distinctions within the community, leads to potential contention over the terms of value within the community, competition between subgroups for control of self-definition, as well as inadvertent alienation of members whose other identifying characteristics and affiliations might not be known or recognized by other members of the group.
So in this case, Peru-girl soon issued a statement defending her actions on the basis of her cultural heritage. To condemn her behavior, she suggested, was unfair and insensitive at best, and racist and hateful at worst.
This turned into a struggle over the terms of value: was it racist to expect her to conform either to Japanese or North American standards of ‘good’ behavior? Was it, as other Peruvian and Latina fans suggested, racist to duck behind cultural heritage to excuse behavior she knew at the time was not acceptable within the fan community she identified with? Are there (or should there be) different standards of ‘good’ fangirl behavior based on nationality, age, length or intensity of fandom, visibility or status within the fan community? If so, does the online fangirl community share any common markers of identity or rules to abide by?
The comments and responses here and elsewhere in the aftermath of NYCC bring up the question of what being a member of a fan community means because they often implicitly make claims about whether you can simultaneously be defined within and through multiple communities or ways of identifying oneself or not and what the consequences of that are for the individual and the larger community.
Related to this cluster of issues were the accusations that American fangirls were all ‘entitled’ and ‘spoiled,’ suggesting that American fangirls by definition were bad fangirls in comparison to the rest of fandom, and labeling bad fan behavior as being bad according to the yardstick of relative wealth and sense of entitlement as fans. Responses to these accusations included agreement and rebuttals from self-identified Americans and non-Americans, and these responses highlight the way that the conversation shifted to competing categories of self-identification and self/other policing. When responders felt compelled to identify as either American or not, they took up the question of how nationality affects inclusion or acceptance within an amorphous international online community. Do they identify themselves as Americans or as part of the fangirl community first? How do they relate those two categories?
For example, a responder who identifies as American and agrees with criticism of American fans implicitly exempts herself from the criticism by agreeing with it. In doing so, she publicly declares herself a 'good' fan by choosing fan identification and group identity over nationalism.
The debates are interesting because almost always they appeal to hierarchies of value, goodness, manners, politeness, common sense, but the specifics of these categories are all over the place, and each person assumes or tries to assert authoritative definitions of the community and to get acceptance or validation of them by the larger community, and thus gain visibility and acceptance as a proper or good fangirl through rejection of ‘bad’ fangirls. This tendency is rampant in the con reports as many people clearly pitched their posts after some of the more inflammatory ones so as to position themselves as the more measured, rational attendees. I know I was aware of this when I posted ^^"
But this is not just applicable to NYCC-it’s something we see all over the place in fandom, and in particular recently--> people setting up boundaries of ‘good’ fangirling, punishment for violation, and most importantly public performance of rejection of the bad category in order to police behavior. Sound familiar?
Here I’m thinking of the cases where violators of subbing rules are publicly identified and harassed, or blamed for the loss of fan resources, and thus they are labeled threats to the larger community and publicly rejected, vilified and reviled, sometimes ostentatiously ostracized within the communities.
A public performance of disgust:
Now what’s different here from Foucault’s model perhaps, is that members of online communities enjoy a assumption of relative anonymity (though as I’ve said, this is getting less so), and as long as only online identities are revealed and not rl identities, people have the potential to rejoin under a new name and escape at least individual discipline. They do so, of course, by giving up what visibility and contacts they had built up in the community, which different mambers may be more or less invested in.
This might limit the sense of control those who would like to maintain or police the community would prefer, which may have to do with why wholesale punishments of the entire community are nearly ritualistically carried out from time to time by mods, subbers, and other members of the community.
When community members complain about why everyone must be punished for the misdeeds of a very small subsection of fandom, I think they miss the point of the exercise - the point here is to create a situation that these members have already become complicit with by participating in it and by accepting the terms of policing-by accepting the labeling of certain behaviors as inherently ‘bad’ and immoral, harmful to the community at large, and thus choosing to be ‘good’ fangirls who don’t misbehave, members make those categories seem self-evident and stable, rather than contentious, unstable, still a work in progress by the community.
The tendency we see sometimes to find out, identify and then publish the identity of the offender who is then harassed until they either comply with community desires or disappear is part of this system in two ways-it disciplines the individual misbehaver, but perhaps more importantly (like in the case of McCain), it sends a message to the potentially misbehaving among us that we all run the risk of exposure and ostracization if we step out of line.
*SMACK*
Thus, whether or not we actually think of sharing files, not attributing files to original posters, etc. as inherently wrong (an assertion which seems a bit disingenuous or at least inconsistent considering that nearly all online fangirl behavior starts with and even requires unauthorized reproduction and appropriation of the work of others-->tv shows, magazines, cds, dvds), we act as if we do, restraining ourselves from the behaviors to avoid negative consequences, or we find ways to avoid visibility (using email or pm rather than comments to share restricted links, etc).
A quick digression: Perhaps the inconsistency concerning attitudes toward intellectual work and property has to do with identifying ourselves first as a fandom community with its own internal rules and mores which we do not recognize regarding Japanese commercial pop culture from which the English-speaking fan community is implicitly excluded? But to argue that respect for subbers/scanners' rules is simply common courtesy for the labor of others ignores the inherent contradiction that the material is only available to us because the providers choose not to extend that 'courtesy' to the original creators of the content. And I'm happy they don't ^^" I like having my steady stream of Arashi crack, and appreciate that someone would make it available . . . is it the lack of profit motive that makes it seem acceptable? Brain=pretzel now. Sorry.
Anyway, by abiding by these rules, we not only protect ourselves from retaliation and ostracization within the community, but also contribute to the illusion of a community which unanimously shares the same idea of good and bad fangirl behavior.
Posts which disagree (and I think most of us have seen them at one time or another) tend to be f-locked, with the assumption that friends won’t rat each other out. Comments to the same effect tend to lurk under collapsed threads for the same reason, though many dissenters figure out less easily-discovered ways to hide truly inflammatory or ‘seditious’ remarks.
The other options, of course, include anonymous disagreement, critique or disobedience, often expressed and contained in sanctioned and safely cordoned off areas for ‘wankery’ like je_secrets, or in anonymemes, which theoretically provide a more stable screen of anonymity, but which often play with the fragility of that safety when people suggest that they know who an anonymous poster or commenter is, or, as recently happened on je_secrets, a member went so far as to identify a specific poster through tracking her photobucket account.
The comments in response to this are ambivalent, toggling between joining in the mockery of the original poster (guilty of the crime of contributing over a third of the submissions), and criticism of the commenter who exposed her by labeling the action ‘scary,’ ‘a waste of time,’ or stalking, each of which attempt to recast the axis of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ fangirl behavior around different ideal norms, just as in the conversations before and after NYC. Implicit in much of the criticism, however, I think, is also the anxiety that by attempting to identify and expose people within a site set up to provide the freedom and safety of relative anonymity, the commenter a) violated the rules and purpose of the community and b) makes everyone more anxious about observation.
So, is there a point to all of this rambling? Maybe not except that it’s interesting to look at our fan behaviors not as individual opinions and actions but as part of a larger move to define our community, the rules of that community, and to recognize that they way we do this is related to larger patterns in an increasingly panoptic environment.
One of the most interesting things about a truly panoptic society is that it makes us (or attempts to make us) police ourselves by imagining that everyone around us is also potentially judging and policing our behavior-and it encourages us to do the same to them.
It’s always easier to point the finger at ‘authority’ as oppressive or repressive, but in a panoptic system, it’s our own judgments of others and our assumption that they are doing the same to us that makes the system run, and attempts to limit our behaviors within a specific set of boundaries, boundaries which tend to favor the status quo.
This is not to say that this pattern of behavior is inherently bad or good, but that this is how we operate in a system where we know at any time we might be spotted, identified, called out, and made responsible in ways we might not be comfortable with. Being self-conscious of that might change the way we interpret our communities and our own behaviors within it.
Also, it turns your brain into a pretzel sooner or later, which is kind of interesting . . . if you like pretzel-brain . . .
Sorry, rhythmia: worst birthday present ever ^^” I'm still thinking through this, and hence was really repetitive . . . imaginary dead horses flogged all over the internet ^^"
Anyone want to chat about fandom, net identity, etc.? Assuming a) anyone is still reading and b) I still have friends in fandom who haven't just fallen asleep at their computers ^^
♥♥♥♥♥
Happy Birthday, rhythmia &hearts!
♥♥♥♥♥
I hope it is a magical day filled with sparkles and rainbows and joy and . . . joyness.
So since you once said this would amuse you, I finally got around to putting the random Foucault vs. Fangirl post together. I'm sure you will soon regret that. This got . . . long and rambly . . .
This post will not be for everyone ^^” And I would like to be clear that my intention is not to offend anyone with my musings and observations. I'm neither condemning not endorsing panopticism in the community (which would be pointless, as it's here and here to stay), merely having fun with how my work life and fandoms briefly seemed to intersect, and several of my flist seemed at least mildly interested when I mentioned it. And this is what happens when you do that. I'm sorry?
So In February, I mentioned a sudden urge to talk about fan behavior in terms of Michel Foucault’s “Panopticism,” the third chapter of Discipline and Punish, a book on power and control of social behavior, and the history of prisons. So, here is a completely random mash-up of two parts of my life which I generally keep pretty separate from each other.
I hope at least one person besides me finds this at all amusing or interesting.
Note the skepticism from the peanut gallery.
So anyway, I was thinking about this in February, when before and after Sho’s appearance at the NYCC, posts were flying all over the communities as to how fangirls should or shouldn’t act in public, and then, after the con, all of the commentary and criticisms flying back and forth over definitions of good and bad fan behavior, and (more interestingly to me) what criteria should be considered when judging and evaluating fan behavior. It was really fascinating, and intersected with “Panopticism,” which I was teaching at the time.
I wish this were my class^^"
At the time I made the post commenting on this, I was focused mostly on the recent NYCC drama, but since then, have been thinking about how online fandoms (in general and the Arashi fandom in particular, since that’s the one I’m obviously most familiar with) function in terms of these ideas, and perhaps, where they differ to some extent, which I’ll get to eventually.
In other words, this is what comes of me surfing fandom communities when I’m supposed to be working ^^”
Ok, where to start? I guess I’ll start with a brief breakdown of Foucault’s argument. Bear with me; I promise it will be relevant eventually. Plus, it’s really interesting stuff. At least I think so ^^”
”The exile of the leper and the arrest of the plague do not bring with them the same political dream. The first is that of a pure community, the second that of a disciplined society. Two ways of exercising power over men, of controlling their relations, of separating out their dangerous mixtures.”
Foucault starts by describing two historical models for dealing with those who are felt to be different and dangerous to communities. These examples are the leper and the plague town.
The leper, he says, is dealt with by categorization (as a leper), rejection, and expulsion from the community, so as not to infect the rest of the community. Hence, the leper colonies outside of medieval city gates, etc. The healthy city is thus maintained and defined as healthy in the first place by the exclusion of the leper. This practice, he suggests, represents the political dream of having a ‘pure’ community.
On the other hand, he claims, the plague town represents a different political dream, the dream of a ‘disciplined’ society. He looks at an ordinance from the seventeenth century which described the procedures to be taken when plague appeared in a town. All the people were to be registered and secluded in their homes, which would be stocked with food and wine by using wooden canals (to keep people from needing to leave the home. Each block would have people who would have to watch the houses and make sure no one left, verifying every day that each person who was supposed to be in a particular house was. At regular intervals were people watching those people and to whom the block watchers would report. In turn those people would be watched and have to report, and so on, until all the reports came back to the governor of the town. No one from one area of town would be allowed to cross into another territory. Anyone in a place they weren’t supposed to be would be executed.
For this reason, he suggests, people, knowing they were visible to watchers and that there were dire consequences to being seen misbehaving, would not misbehave in the first place. They’d stay where they belong and thus not spread infection if they were knowingly or unknowingly infected with the plague.
”If it is true that the leper gave rise to rituals of exclusion . . . then the plague gave rise to disciplinary projects. Rather than the massive, binary division between one set of people and another [healthy vs. lepers], it called for multiple separations, individualizing distributions, an organization in depth of surveillance and control, an intensification and a ramification of power [as in the plague town]. “
Foucault argues that the plague town represents a more sophisticated way of dealing with dangerous ‘mixtures’ in society than simple categorization and expulsion, as in the case of the leper. Instead, the plague town brings in analysis, a process which involves the following: registration and recording of all individuals, observation of the population, which results in categorization into multiple valued and devalued groups in a hierarchy, labeling of people into these groups, and disciplining of those who fall into the less-valued categories.
To some extent, what this does is make people feel more in control of perceived disorder by categorizing, labeling, identifying, judging, and isolating the perceived disorderly elements in a community.
Still with me? *wonders if anyone is still reading at this point*
If you are still reading, you definitely deserve a reward:
Prettiness! And fanservice! Something for everyone \o/
Where this starts to get really interesting is the beginning of the nineteenth century, when, Foucault argues, these two models of social control became somewhat combined with the rise of special institutions which separated out disorderly or potentially disorderly elements in a community (exclusion, like with the lepers) and which, instead of just booting the unruly elements, confined them in special institutions like hospitals, asylums, prisons, schools, workhouses, where they were monitored, categorized (diagnosed, graded, judged, disciplined, punished) and (sometimes) potentially rehabilitated or educated back into more valued categories:
"The constant division between the normal and the abnormal, to which every individual is subjected, brings us back to our own time, by applying the binary branding and exile of the leper to quite different objects; the existence of a whole set of techniques and institutions for measuring, supervising and correcting the abnormal brings into play the disciplinary mechanisms to which the fear of the plague gave rise. All the mechanisms of power which even today, are disposed around the abnormal individual, to brand him and to alter him, are composed of those two forms from which they distantly derive."
Basically, he says, the practice of labeling and excluding the leper gets tacked on to the scrutiny, evaluation, and modification of the plague town, and a whole new disciplinary model is born.
The perfect model of this system of social mechanisms which disciplined the problematic, he suggests, is the Panopticon, a model prison/institution invented by Jeremy Bentham.
“Visibility is a trap.”
This is Bentham’s basic idea of the Panopticon:
A top view with cross-section:
A view from above:
An actual prison built on the panoptic principle:
The basic structure of the Panopticon requires that prisoners be isolated in solitary cells at the outside ring of the building. In the center is a tower where a warden would be. The cells are all backlit, and the tower is dark, which means every individual in the cell is visible to the tower, but the inmates can’t see the person in the tower. If you think about it, it’s like police lineups-you have a light behind the possible criminals, so they’re visible to the viewers, but the criminals can’t see or recognize their potential accusers.
This imbalance, that there are people who can see but who are not seen, and those who are seen, but can't see those watching them, Foucault argues, creates a serious power imbalance where inmates are relegated to the status of objects under scrutiny (and judgment) and come to think of themselves in this way.
"He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection."
In this system, the person who thinks she might be watched and judged will thus behave in the way she thinks the watcher would want her to, in effect policing herself to avoid being disciplined or punished. This is what Foucault means by saying that the person makes the constraints of power "play spontaneously upon [her]self" and that she "becomes the principle of [her] own subjection."
Be careful! Sho is watching you!
And OhMiya, too!
Did I mention people are watching you?
In such a system, you don’t even need for there to be a watcher in the tower-the inmates can’t tell if anyone is in the tower, and as long as they can’t tell, they must assume that someone is watching and act accordingly. What this does is it gets the inmate to internalize the desires of the person in power and act as she believes the person in power would expect/want her to:
”Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.”
Whew! So that’s the Panopticon. Now to ‘panopticism,’ which is where we will finally get back to fandom.
*celebration ensues*
The Panopticon is a building that encapsulates the idea that visibility makes one vulnerable to categorization, judgment, and discipline. The uncertainty as to whether one is or is not visible at any one moment actually increases this vulnerability and hence anxiety. (If you can definitely tell when you are being watched, it stands to reason you can tell when you’re not, and you would only behave when you knew you were being watched. If you can’t tell, though, you never feel safe misbehaving.)
Panopticism is the idea that the Panopticon is designed to put into action: if you make people constantly feel like they're under surveillance, but they can't see who's watching them or even if they are being watched, they will behave in the way that they think the invisible watcher (who, because they are observing yet can't be observed, is structurally in a position of power), wants them to, so as not to be labeled as bad or problematic and then punished, categorized and/or exiled from the community. It's essentially about getting people to police themselves by making them feel that they're maybe/probably being policed by someone else.
Foucault argues that this principle is no longer contained within buildings and institutions set up to control specific disorderly elements (the criminal, sick, mentally ill, young and rowdy, poor and discontent), but rather has been let loose as a general principle within society at large. He calls the result of this the “panoptic society.” What this means is that panopticism no longer is used to control the deviant or threatening exceptions in society, but that it has become a general means of modifying the behavior of all individuals within a community, and that part of its function is to maintain and ensure that the nondisruptive elements of society stay that way.
Behold Nino trying in vain to protect his bandmates from the discomfort of the panoptic gaze:
The panoptic society is different from the Panopticon partially because it’s about controlling the behaviors of everyone, not just ‘dangerous’ elements, but it's also different from the Panopticon because the ‘central authority’ as such no longer exists-instead of worrying about a central tower, individuals are constantly possibly being observed and categorized judged and labeled by each other, as well as by authority figures. In turn, these individuals participate in the scrutiny, categorization and judgment of others as well. Authority is no longer localized in a specific location, but free-floating and dispersed throughout the community. This system is actually much more repressive, because it makes anyone and everyone essentially authorized to observe, categorize and punish anyone else. There is no sense of privacy or relief from the judgmental eye.
(I can't help but think about Gakkou e Ikkou, when Sho and Aiba were observed in the green room. While it's awesome in terms of the way it confirms fans' desires to be reassured that the idols behave 'in private' much as they do while performing, think about the ramifications for the idols of shows like this--it tells them that even when they think they are not performing, that they are relatively safe, they may be being observed, scrutinized and recorded, and that that information may become publicly available. O___o)
When my students first approach panopticism as a concept, they tend to externalize the panoptic gaze and associate it with institutions of power: the police, teachers, the government, parents--surveillance is what other people, people "in power" do. And we have lots of examples of this in our experience: traffic speed cameras, hidden security cameras, plain-clothes cops, police cars that look like everyday cars, 'secret shoppers' (if you work in retail jobs, you know what I mean--> this is when your bosses tell you that some customers will actually be employees of the larger company who are evaluating you. Since you can't tell which customer is the evaluator, you essentially have to treat every customer as if they were--which encourages you to always conform to job expectations.) Students recognize this and the implicit coercion it suggests.
And then we'll read something that troubles their definitions of normative behavior later, (especially with non-normative gender or sexuality or sometimes age--for some reason 30-somethings who play video games or watch anime really offend my students. idek. This is why I don't even think of mentioning fandom to them ^^") and they'll immediately become dismissive and nasty about people "like that." This is when I spring the whole "Hey look what you're doing: guarding the boundaries of normativity and making anyone who doesn't agree feel outcast so they step back in line! That is how panopticism works" lecture on them, and watch them get all weirded out when they realize that panopticism isn't just about what "authority" does; it's most effective because it's what we do it every single day. We are 'the man.' Many shudder and forget they ever figured it out T__T
A student of mine came up with a really great example from the French Revolution of how insidious a process this can be and how it works. Authorities during the Reign of Terror let it be known that there were spies for the revolution government sprinkled throughout the community, ordinary, familiar people who would report any comments against the new regime and turn the ‘traitors’ in. Because they were supposed to be ordinary people, one would have to assume that anyone might be a spy and act as one believed the regime would want so as not to be betrayed. This would, authorities hoped, keep people from joining together to plot, because someone present might be a spy. And in this system, it works just as well even if there never had been a spy. Preemptive prevention. This is much more effective than having clearly identifiable policemen. Uncertainty heightens obedience. And that is how panopticism works.
Sho looks smug here because he already knew about this and was waiting for everyone else to catch up ^^;
____________________________________________________________
Foucault died in 1984, so he didn’t live to see the extent to which panopticism has indeed become a pervasive influence in our day to day life now: traffic cameras, closed-circuit TV, security cameras, cellphone cameras, and online platforms for distributing the information gleaned from these sources such as YouTube videos, but also online networking which increases horizontal as well as vertical visibiity: MySpace, Facebook, Livejournal, Vox, Twitter, etc.
The current ever-present possibility that at any point one might be watched, recorded, and later exposed is a huge liability which functions to make people behave, even when they think they are a) in a private setting or b) safely anonymous.
Sometimes, people think they are safe and are proven wrong, as in the case of John McCain during the 2008 US election season: He was recorded at a veteran’s gathering singing “Bomb Iran” to the tune of “Barbara Ann” and within hours, the video was online, picked up by news stations, where his seemingly flippant attitude to a war against Iran led to much criticism.
Busted!
McCain was unrepentant, explaining that this is 'just what veterans do' when they get together, but if he didn’t get the message, many others did-careful what you say, even when you think you’re in a safe supportive environment-cameras are everywhere and anything you say in any setting potentially may show up where you wish it might and lead to judgment and serious consequences.
In a further twist, people actually tend to get highly critical of people who are 'stupid' enough to think they are not being observed--McCain 'should have known better,' and by extension, so should we all. Not acting as if you are constantly under scrutiny thus becomes seen as a failure of intelligence, even of duty.
All of this FINALLY gets us back to fangirling and February.
Good lord; it's about time.
As I mentioned before, shortly before the con, I noticed a flurry of posts and comment threads on various Arashi-related communities discussing 'correct' or 'appropriate' behavior at NYCC as well as various justifications for these suggestions.
A couple of examples:
This one actually had the link hidden behind the text “Let’s try to behave,” and this one is a mod post to the same effect, with other proscriptions, somewhat more mildly phrased, but still centering around anxieties as to how both outsiders and insiders would judge the fandom.
These posts and the comments beneath are really fascinating, because they attempt to define parameters of what constitutes ‘good,’ ‘acceptable,’ or ‘appropriate’ fangirl behavior as if these definitions are already set and agreed upon within the community when if these definitions were, the warnings and requests would not be necessary in the first place.
By stating the boundaries in this way, however, they attempt to create agreement on those definitions through other fangirls’ desire to be labeled good or acceptable fangirls within the online Arashi fandom community through agreement and obedience, and the posts carry the implicit threat of being labeled ‘bad’ fangirls if they don’t comply, with potential social consequences.
I think the attempt itself has to do with the desire to maintain a respectable group identity both to those outside the community-other con-goers, organizers, and of course, Sho and by extension, Arashi. With this in mind, posters attempted to leverage individual fears of judgment and ostracization in order to achieve the goal of maintaining an acceptable group image within the community.
And, not to stir up memories of conflict, but . . . when disagreement on those boundaries and parameters flared up, they were aggressively pursued, and the language involved concentrated on the definition of common sense, courtesy, community, fairness, nationality and nationalism, and finally wealth, entitlement, and privilege.
Comment threads on that first link show the eruption of competing definitions of value as soon as the boundaries of acceptable behavior within the Arashi fan community were perceived to have been violated.
What's interesting is the way that courtesy to the rest of the community was invoked by pretty much all participants in a heated conversation over fangirling etiquette, both on online communities and at events, but the definitions of courtesy differed depending on whether it was considered impolite to post on the event to spare the feelings of those who could not attend (in particular non-Americans or Non-Japanese studying in Japan), or whether the statement of this opinion, by appearing to resent American fans and their good fortune, was itself a violation of community norms. Mutual discourses of evaluation, judgement and rejection ensued, and a public withdrawal from the community occurred.
After the con, accusations flew about bad behavior at the con: pushing, squealing, screaming, ‘unfair’ acquisition of premiere tickets, ‘inappropriate’ questions at the Q & A, attempts to press gifts on Sho which the giver knew was not allowed, etc. These criticisms were often met by reassurances that the vast majority of the fangirls were ‘good,’ and only a few notable exceptions (“Peru-girl,” “crazy uchiwa girl,”) were ‘bad.’ Here’s an index of con reports if you want to check out some of the reactions and aftermath.
The question of visibility as a trap becomes interesting here because both of the perceived poster-girls of fangirl misbehavior were physically identified in fan forums by pointing out which video clips they were visible in (Peru-girl), and by posting pictures of them in posts about the con (Crazy Uchiwa Girl, who I now have a huge urge to abbreviate to CUG in the future ^^”).
I think that posting their pictures or drawing attention to the physical appearance of both of these women had several desired results that make a lot of sense in the context of “Panopticism” and the creation of a panoptic (and hence disciplined) population within the online Arashi community.
First, visually identifying ‘bad’ fangirls is a disciplinary act to publicly punish the miscreants by letting people know who they ’really’ are and by taking away the perceived safety of anonymity.
*SMACK*
Second, it singles out the potential pariahs of the group-‘bad’ fangirls who are identified to alleviate the fears of the rest of the community who don’t want to be identified with them. By labeling bad fangirls, the rest of the community to some extent can rest easy that they are good fangirls, especially by comparison. (This pattern is also pretty visible in the comment thread responses to the "Let's try to behave" pre-event post as well.)
We are awesome! Unlike those other rude loser-fans.
Thirdly, and most importantly, public exposure and rejection of the transgressors acts as an implicit threat against the rest of fandom: it warns potential transgressors that there is no assured anonymity in the online communities: misbehave, and people will find out who you are and you will be publicly shamed.
This works to reinforce group definitions of normative and acceptable behavior by increasing the sense of potential visibility and thus accountability, and this in turn is meant to modify future member behavior through fear of criticism, attack, or expulsion from the community.
This is not a behavior unique to fangirl communities, but seems a characteristic behavior in line with other acts of "internet vigilantism" which attempt to hold people accountable for 'unacceptable' behavior by stripping away the anonymity that allows people to act in transgressive ways in public as community intimacy disappears in modern society. Again, cases like the internet harassment of "Dog-poop Girl" not only work to punish and shame perceived deviance within the community, but also attempt to prevent future misbehavior by providing and object lesson as to what will happen to the disobedient (explanation under the link if you aren't familiar with this narrative; actually, the link is pretty awesome even if you know the story; there are 8 prominent examples of internet vigilantism in it).
Thus, the act of pointing out ‘bad’ behavior itself acts as a sort of declaration that the accuser is a ‘good’ fangirl, but what is more interesting to me is the way that various individuals again soon launched arguments about what the boundaries of those categories were and whether the criteria were valid in the first place.
This is something Foucault doesn’t directly address, because his communities are already implicitly set within existing and acknowledged, if sometimes disobeyed or transgressed, categories of value (criminal vs. law-abiding citizen, sick vs. healthy, orderly vs. disorderly, sane vs. insane, etc). In online communities, however, the geographic, national, age, wealth and other distinctions between members, as well as the unstable visibility of those distinctions within the community, leads to potential contention over the terms of value within the community, competition between subgroups for control of self-definition, as well as inadvertent alienation of members whose other identifying characteristics and affiliations might not be known or recognized by other members of the group.
So in this case, Peru-girl soon issued a statement defending her actions on the basis of her cultural heritage. To condemn her behavior, she suggested, was unfair and insensitive at best, and racist and hateful at worst.
This turned into a struggle over the terms of value: was it racist to expect her to conform either to Japanese or North American standards of ‘good’ behavior? Was it, as other Peruvian and Latina fans suggested, racist to duck behind cultural heritage to excuse behavior she knew at the time was not acceptable within the fan community she identified with? Are there (or should there be) different standards of ‘good’ fangirl behavior based on nationality, age, length or intensity of fandom, visibility or status within the fan community? If so, does the online fangirl community share any common markers of identity or rules to abide by?
The comments and responses here and elsewhere in the aftermath of NYCC bring up the question of what being a member of a fan community means because they often implicitly make claims about whether you can simultaneously be defined within and through multiple communities or ways of identifying oneself or not and what the consequences of that are for the individual and the larger community.
Related to this cluster of issues were the accusations that American fangirls were all ‘entitled’ and ‘spoiled,’ suggesting that American fangirls by definition were bad fangirls in comparison to the rest of fandom, and labeling bad fan behavior as being bad according to the yardstick of relative wealth and sense of entitlement as fans. Responses to these accusations included agreement and rebuttals from self-identified Americans and non-Americans, and these responses highlight the way that the conversation shifted to competing categories of self-identification and self/other policing. When responders felt compelled to identify as either American or not, they took up the question of how nationality affects inclusion or acceptance within an amorphous international online community. Do they identify themselves as Americans or as part of the fangirl community first? How do they relate those two categories?
For example, a responder who identifies as American and agrees with criticism of American fans implicitly exempts herself from the criticism by agreeing with it. In doing so, she publicly declares herself a 'good' fan by choosing fan identification and group identity over nationalism.
The debates are interesting because almost always they appeal to hierarchies of value, goodness, manners, politeness, common sense, but the specifics of these categories are all over the place, and each person assumes or tries to assert authoritative definitions of the community and to get acceptance or validation of them by the larger community, and thus gain visibility and acceptance as a proper or good fangirl through rejection of ‘bad’ fangirls. This tendency is rampant in the con reports as many people clearly pitched their posts after some of the more inflammatory ones so as to position themselves as the more measured, rational attendees. I know I was aware of this when I posted ^^"
But this is not just applicable to NYCC-it’s something we see all over the place in fandom, and in particular recently--> people setting up boundaries of ‘good’ fangirling, punishment for violation, and most importantly public performance of rejection of the bad category in order to police behavior. Sound familiar?
Here I’m thinking of the cases where violators of subbing rules are publicly identified and harassed, or blamed for the loss of fan resources, and thus they are labeled threats to the larger community and publicly rejected, vilified and reviled, sometimes ostentatiously ostracized within the communities.
A public performance of disgust:
Now what’s different here from Foucault’s model perhaps, is that members of online communities enjoy a assumption of relative anonymity (though as I’ve said, this is getting less so), and as long as only online identities are revealed and not rl identities, people have the potential to rejoin under a new name and escape at least individual discipline. They do so, of course, by giving up what visibility and contacts they had built up in the community, which different mambers may be more or less invested in.
This might limit the sense of control those who would like to maintain or police the community would prefer, which may have to do with why wholesale punishments of the entire community are nearly ritualistically carried out from time to time by mods, subbers, and other members of the community.
When community members complain about why everyone must be punished for the misdeeds of a very small subsection of fandom, I think they miss the point of the exercise - the point here is to create a situation that these members have already become complicit with by participating in it and by accepting the terms of policing-by accepting the labeling of certain behaviors as inherently ‘bad’ and immoral, harmful to the community at large, and thus choosing to be ‘good’ fangirls who don’t misbehave, members make those categories seem self-evident and stable, rather than contentious, unstable, still a work in progress by the community.
The tendency we see sometimes to find out, identify and then publish the identity of the offender who is then harassed until they either comply with community desires or disappear is part of this system in two ways-it disciplines the individual misbehaver, but perhaps more importantly (like in the case of McCain), it sends a message to the potentially misbehaving among us that we all run the risk of exposure and ostracization if we step out of line.
*SMACK*
Thus, whether or not we actually think of sharing files, not attributing files to original posters, etc. as inherently wrong (an assertion which seems a bit disingenuous or at least inconsistent considering that nearly all online fangirl behavior starts with and even requires unauthorized reproduction and appropriation of the work of others-->tv shows, magazines, cds, dvds), we act as if we do, restraining ourselves from the behaviors to avoid negative consequences, or we find ways to avoid visibility (using email or pm rather than comments to share restricted links, etc).
A quick digression: Perhaps the inconsistency concerning attitudes toward intellectual work and property has to do with identifying ourselves first as a fandom community with its own internal rules and mores which we do not recognize regarding Japanese commercial pop culture from which the English-speaking fan community is implicitly excluded? But to argue that respect for subbers/scanners' rules is simply common courtesy for the labor of others ignores the inherent contradiction that the material is only available to us because the providers choose not to extend that 'courtesy' to the original creators of the content. And I'm happy they don't ^^" I like having my steady stream of Arashi crack, and appreciate that someone would make it available . . . is it the lack of profit motive that makes it seem acceptable? Brain=pretzel now. Sorry.
Anyway, by abiding by these rules, we not only protect ourselves from retaliation and ostracization within the community, but also contribute to the illusion of a community which unanimously shares the same idea of good and bad fangirl behavior.
Posts which disagree (and I think most of us have seen them at one time or another) tend to be f-locked, with the assumption that friends won’t rat each other out. Comments to the same effect tend to lurk under collapsed threads for the same reason, though many dissenters figure out less easily-discovered ways to hide truly inflammatory or ‘seditious’ remarks.
The other options, of course, include anonymous disagreement, critique or disobedience, often expressed and contained in sanctioned and safely cordoned off areas for ‘wankery’ like je_secrets, or in anonymemes, which theoretically provide a more stable screen of anonymity, but which often play with the fragility of that safety when people suggest that they know who an anonymous poster or commenter is, or, as recently happened on je_secrets, a member went so far as to identify a specific poster through tracking her photobucket account.
The comments in response to this are ambivalent, toggling between joining in the mockery of the original poster (guilty of the crime of contributing over a third of the submissions), and criticism of the commenter who exposed her by labeling the action ‘scary,’ ‘a waste of time,’ or stalking, each of which attempt to recast the axis of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ fangirl behavior around different ideal norms, just as in the conversations before and after NYC. Implicit in much of the criticism, however, I think, is also the anxiety that by attempting to identify and expose people within a site set up to provide the freedom and safety of relative anonymity, the commenter a) violated the rules and purpose of the community and b) makes everyone more anxious about observation.
So, is there a point to all of this rambling? Maybe not except that it’s interesting to look at our fan behaviors not as individual opinions and actions but as part of a larger move to define our community, the rules of that community, and to recognize that they way we do this is related to larger patterns in an increasingly panoptic environment.
One of the most interesting things about a truly panoptic society is that it makes us (or attempts to make us) police ourselves by imagining that everyone around us is also potentially judging and policing our behavior-and it encourages us to do the same to them.
It’s always easier to point the finger at ‘authority’ as oppressive or repressive, but in a panoptic system, it’s our own judgments of others and our assumption that they are doing the same to us that makes the system run, and attempts to limit our behaviors within a specific set of boundaries, boundaries which tend to favor the status quo.
This is not to say that this pattern of behavior is inherently bad or good, but that this is how we operate in a system where we know at any time we might be spotted, identified, called out, and made responsible in ways we might not be comfortable with. Being self-conscious of that might change the way we interpret our communities and our own behaviors within it.
Also, it turns your brain into a pretzel sooner or later, which is kind of interesting . . . if you like pretzel-brain . . .
Sorry, rhythmia: worst birthday present ever ^^” I'm still thinking through this, and hence was really repetitive . . . imaginary dead horses flogged all over the internet ^^"
Anyone want to chat about fandom, net identity, etc.? Assuming a) anyone is still reading and b) I still have friends in fandom who haven't just fallen asleep at their computers ^^