Expectations of Privacy in the Fandom
For those of you who may not be aware, in the sci-fi/fantasy convention market these days there is a photographer by the name of Froggy who has kind of changed the industry in the past few years. Used to be that when you were doing an autograph session with an actor/celebrity from one of your favorite shows at a con, you could take a photo with them at no additional cost. Then came Froggy and he kind of changed all of that. Many cons contract with him as the exclusive photographer for these photo-ops and it’s done on a charge-per-photo basis now (separate from most autograph ops).
A lot of people don’t necessarily like the fact that he’s taken what used to be part of the autograph experience and turned it into its own little shindig to generate a large profit margin. I’m not really interested in debating the rightness/wrongness of how he’s shaken up the industry and how the con experience works in relation to photo ops, but for those of you who were unaware, something very relevant to the fandom happened in the past few days.
Froggy posted his Dragon*Con photos live on a public flickr account to allow people to pick out their photos and download them from the batches. What I have beef with is that he posted them *publically.* As in, anyone on the internet can view/download whatever photos they want from the albums. Now, he’s taken then album down after complaints from his clientele about publicly posting privately purchased photos, but before the album was taken down a selection of these photos were posted to mainstream media sites. We know, that once something is in the public sphere, there’s no shoving them back in the box. Those photos are out live in the world now.
I’ll preface by saying I am not in this photo set, this incident does not directly affect me. But what I see wrong about this whole thing is that many fans separate their public real life and their private fandom life and we have a right for other people to not breach that barrier if we choose to maintain it. My facebook isn’t linked to this LJ and never will be, this is my private fandom place to interact with other fans who get what this stuff is all about and won’t mock me or question why I do this or make me feel like a freak for what I choose to do with my free time.
It’s like my family, sometimes. My mom knows to an extent what I do in the fandom. She knows I cosplay for cons (hell, that’s a part of my fandom experience that I *do* feel comfortable sharing with other folks). And she vaguely knows that I write fan-fiction. Her extent of that knowledge, though, is only so far as to know that I take characters from a show, write new stories about them, and share them with folks on the internet. There is no knowledge that I write homoerotic relationships sometimes or that I get off on hurt/comfort fics as my primary fandom kink. I have never let her read any of my fics. And she just doesn’t get that this is something *private* for me that I’ve chosen to share with her. She ran into my old English teacher from high school a few weeks back and was telling me how she told him that I still write, that I write fan-fiction, and that I should send him some of my stories. She didn’t see anything wrong with this, despite the fact that I’ve told her again, and again, and again that my fandom participation is something that *I* choose to share with someone and she has no right to go spreading that information around. It isn’t mainstream, and most of the time, the first conversation I want to have with someone is not going to be about the fandom stuff that I do. To me, that is very sensitive material and I share it with only a select few individuals who have my total trust.
I think that what Froggy has done here violates the privacy of fandom participants in a way that really grates against everything I believe in. Yes, these people paid for photos. If you peruse the comments here on a thread by someone posting to the Dragon*Con community about this issue, other *fans* are telling the original poster that their complaints lack validity. Here’s one of my favorite comments that really had my blood boiling:
“I'll just point out that I'm not the one feeling stupid to have my pix posted on the web. You are. Enough to feel the need to point out that you created a LJ just to point out how violated you feel, and you're name's not even attached. Yep, you bought the photo, you're to blame just as much as him.”
When a fan pays for an experience to meet a celebrity actor/writer/whatever who has created something in fandom that swells them with so much excitement that they cannot help but share that enthusiasm with others, it’s their own business. They have a right to expect that that transaction will be kept private and not smeared across the internet for all to see and for non-fandom participants to gawk at. And let’s not kid ourselves here, the media is portraying celebrity photo ops as something odd and foreign and strange, something worthy of stopping and gawking at. It comes in the form of headlines like “Luke Perry Posing with Strangers in Front of What Looks Like a Sears Background”.
These photos have been picked up by some very mainstream sources (jezebel, buzzfeed, dlisted) and the publicity they are receiving is probably far more than any con-goer would want. I’m not one of the individuals in this photoset directly affected by this situation, but I can sympathize. Some of these pictures are being spread virally across the net and fellow fandom participants are sweating that maybe their photo falls under the eyes of someone they know and it outs them. These fans have been put in a very awkward spot, waiting and hoping that someone doesn’t connect their real life to their fandom life.
I don’t like what’s happened here. I don’t like that these photos were posted in a public place where anyone could download them. I don’t like that the media picked it up, spread it virally, and is once again portraying this thing we do as something weird out there in a little land of its own. But the thing that really gets me is that another fan, who should be sympathetic, is jumping on the bandwagon with these media outlets and saying to the original poster, “Serves you right. Pay for a photo op, get what’s coming.” To me, at least, it doesn’t seem that far of a jump to branch this logic outward to, let’s say, “serves you write for putting your sexually explicit fic on the ‘net. What sort of expectation of privacy could you really have for something like that?”
There is a fine line that most of us tread in the fandom and a paradox that we cannot avoid no matter how much we try. We post this stuff live on the ‘net to share with other fans; this interaction is the basis of our fandom experience. By making it publically available to anyone (hopefully fans) who is out there and wants to read our stuff, we run the risk that we are outed in real life too. Oh, sure, there are ways we try to avoid this: we don’t link our facebook profiles to our LJ’s, we bitch when LJ tries to implement a set of buttons that enable readers to hotlink our stuff to their own public profiles in the web, and we work hard to keep third parties from eroding the so-carefully erected barrier we’ve built between our real lives and fandom lives. It’s a tenuous barrier at best, and I do instill other fans/readers with a huge trust, hoping that they won’t go spreading around the materials I produce to share with other fans. They aren’t meant for the mainstream public who don’t get this stuff. And when something like this happens and a third party has put some fellow fans in a very awkward and stressful spot, I would hope other fans would stand behind those individuals instead of casting stones.
A lot of people don’t necessarily like the fact that he’s taken what used to be part of the autograph experience and turned it into its own little shindig to generate a large profit margin. I’m not really interested in debating the rightness/wrongness of how he’s shaken up the industry and how the con experience works in relation to photo ops, but for those of you who were unaware, something very relevant to the fandom happened in the past few days.
Froggy posted his Dragon*Con photos live on a public flickr account to allow people to pick out their photos and download them from the batches. What I have beef with is that he posted them *publically.* As in, anyone on the internet can view/download whatever photos they want from the albums. Now, he’s taken then album down after complaints from his clientele about publicly posting privately purchased photos, but before the album was taken down a selection of these photos were posted to mainstream media sites. We know, that once something is in the public sphere, there’s no shoving them back in the box. Those photos are out live in the world now.
I’ll preface by saying I am not in this photo set, this incident does not directly affect me. But what I see wrong about this whole thing is that many fans separate their public real life and their private fandom life and we have a right for other people to not breach that barrier if we choose to maintain it. My facebook isn’t linked to this LJ and never will be, this is my private fandom place to interact with other fans who get what this stuff is all about and won’t mock me or question why I do this or make me feel like a freak for what I choose to do with my free time.
It’s like my family, sometimes. My mom knows to an extent what I do in the fandom. She knows I cosplay for cons (hell, that’s a part of my fandom experience that I *do* feel comfortable sharing with other folks). And she vaguely knows that I write fan-fiction. Her extent of that knowledge, though, is only so far as to know that I take characters from a show, write new stories about them, and share them with folks on the internet. There is no knowledge that I write homoerotic relationships sometimes or that I get off on hurt/comfort fics as my primary fandom kink. I have never let her read any of my fics. And she just doesn’t get that this is something *private* for me that I’ve chosen to share with her. She ran into my old English teacher from high school a few weeks back and was telling me how she told him that I still write, that I write fan-fiction, and that I should send him some of my stories. She didn’t see anything wrong with this, despite the fact that I’ve told her again, and again, and again that my fandom participation is something that *I* choose to share with someone and she has no right to go spreading that information around. It isn’t mainstream, and most of the time, the first conversation I want to have with someone is not going to be about the fandom stuff that I do. To me, that is very sensitive material and I share it with only a select few individuals who have my total trust.
I think that what Froggy has done here violates the privacy of fandom participants in a way that really grates against everything I believe in. Yes, these people paid for photos. If you peruse the comments here on a thread by someone posting to the Dragon*Con community about this issue, other *fans* are telling the original poster that their complaints lack validity. Here’s one of my favorite comments that really had my blood boiling:
“I'll just point out that I'm not the one feeling stupid to have my pix posted on the web. You are. Enough to feel the need to point out that you created a LJ just to point out how violated you feel, and you're name's not even attached. Yep, you bought the photo, you're to blame just as much as him.”
When a fan pays for an experience to meet a celebrity actor/writer/whatever who has created something in fandom that swells them with so much excitement that they cannot help but share that enthusiasm with others, it’s their own business. They have a right to expect that that transaction will be kept private and not smeared across the internet for all to see and for non-fandom participants to gawk at. And let’s not kid ourselves here, the media is portraying celebrity photo ops as something odd and foreign and strange, something worthy of stopping and gawking at. It comes in the form of headlines like “Luke Perry Posing with Strangers in Front of What Looks Like a Sears Background”.
These photos have been picked up by some very mainstream sources (jezebel, buzzfeed, dlisted) and the publicity they are receiving is probably far more than any con-goer would want. I’m not one of the individuals in this photoset directly affected by this situation, but I can sympathize. Some of these pictures are being spread virally across the net and fellow fandom participants are sweating that maybe their photo falls under the eyes of someone they know and it outs them. These fans have been put in a very awkward spot, waiting and hoping that someone doesn’t connect their real life to their fandom life.
I don’t like what’s happened here. I don’t like that these photos were posted in a public place where anyone could download them. I don’t like that the media picked it up, spread it virally, and is once again portraying this thing we do as something weird out there in a little land of its own. But the thing that really gets me is that another fan, who should be sympathetic, is jumping on the bandwagon with these media outlets and saying to the original poster, “Serves you right. Pay for a photo op, get what’s coming.” To me, at least, it doesn’t seem that far of a jump to branch this logic outward to, let’s say, “serves you write for putting your sexually explicit fic on the ‘net. What sort of expectation of privacy could you really have for something like that?”
There is a fine line that most of us tread in the fandom and a paradox that we cannot avoid no matter how much we try. We post this stuff live on the ‘net to share with other fans; this interaction is the basis of our fandom experience. By making it publically available to anyone (hopefully fans) who is out there and wants to read our stuff, we run the risk that we are outed in real life too. Oh, sure, there are ways we try to avoid this: we don’t link our facebook profiles to our LJ’s, we bitch when LJ tries to implement a set of buttons that enable readers to hotlink our stuff to their own public profiles in the web, and we work hard to keep third parties from eroding the so-carefully erected barrier we’ve built between our real lives and fandom lives. It’s a tenuous barrier at best, and I do instill other fans/readers with a huge trust, hoping that they won’t go spreading around the materials I produce to share with other fans. They aren’t meant for the mainstream public who don’t get this stuff. And when something like this happens and a third party has put some fellow fans in a very awkward and stressful spot, I would hope other fans would stand behind those individuals instead of casting stones.