Shameful self-promotion
Okay, so I posted a few days ago about the man who wrote an “eighth Harry Potter novel” and is getting some press attention (the link is to the Leaky Cauldron).
I stand by 100% the idea that it’s deeply problematic to present a millions-strong, largely female cultural phenomenon through the façade of a unique creation of a singular male. But I look at this guy’s undoubtedly successful self-promotion and I feel a pang. I want us to feel free to do that. I want more Luminositys!
And even within fandom, much less outside, I fear that not enough of us feel free to do that. Imagine your favorite HP author (or whatever fandom works for you) creating a website like this guy’s, adding art that looks a lot like the books’ art, using music from the films, not putting any disclaimer on it, and then sending out a bunch of press releases either to fannish or general news sources - would it make something twist in your stomach? Why? This guy’s not getting any C&D letters! Compare that to the story about Luminosity’s awesomeness, which (a) apparently came about because the reporter first talked to Henry Jenkins, not Luminosity, and (b) doesn’t include her name, at her request (and this is so very much not a criticism of her understandable position, but a point about the cultural and subcultural context).
I know I don’t feel very free to be forward. This is awfully hard to write: I want you to love the things I produce! Thus, I first want you to see the things I produce! Then, of course, love them. But I fear being seen as a crass self-promoter, dismissed and mocked. This has been brought home quite forcefully to me as I add a new fandom, my first since LJ took over “media fandom” as I know it. But I don’t think it’s entirely personal to me, and I do think it’s gendered. Study after study shows that women ask for much less in job/salary negotiations than equally qualified men, and that we give ourselves harsher self-evaluations, and these then affect what we receive.
In my professional life, I see the same gender divide - women require much stronger social ties before they’ll send out drafts of articles, even though that’s an important way to get noticed by senior scholars. The rise of SSRN (a preprint/reprint archive online) has been helpful there, because it allows people to post work while not “standing out” quite so much by person-to-person self-promotion.
Within fandom, we’re still working out proper conventions for self-promotion even when we do it. Nobody wants to spam uninterested parties. With SSRN, you put your work up, you give it keywords and an abstract, and you select which subject matter “network” and subfields it belongs to. Then various volunteers compile email newsletters that include everything posted that week within the relevant subfield, and - I think, because of something that happened to me - they may put in a work even when the authors didn’t select that particular subfield, if the editors think it’s relevant to their readers.
So SSRN is a bit like fandom newsletters/noticeboards, except that it moves on comparatively glacial academic time instead of fandom Wink of an Eye time. But SSRN newsletters rely a lot more on self-categorization. The norm is that you put your work on SSRN, and then it gets listed as a matter of course wherever you want to list it and maybe elsewhere, if you’re lucky. I haven’t done a comprehensive survey of fandom noticeboards, but it seems as if the mods usually pick up a fair amount in the course of their daily fannishness. This is understandable and efficient and I don’t want it to go away, but a fan whose work isn’t picked up as a matter of course has to speak up, which then interacts with a lot of our cultural training about when to speak up when you think there's already an ongoing conversation.
Technology changes the issues, for good and ill. The way I think of it is that our fannish gift economy asks us to put our wares out on the street, but discourages us from shouting out that we have shiny stuff because we might bother people - it’s the classic dilemma of advertising, to reach only the people who want your products when lots of those people may not yet know what they want! But online, the definitions of “street” and “shouting” are even more contested than the contours of conventional commercial street advertising. (And “gift economy” has problematics of its own, even apart from maybe cutting us off from otherwise available material rewards - if it’s a “gift,” then by giving it to you I create an obligation on you to respond somehow, but what if you think my gift is ugly and uncomfortable? No wonder you don’t want me pressing stuff on you! It’s risky! You don’t want to end up resenting me! There’s a great book by Robert Cialdini, Influence, that has a lot about how advertisers exploit the gift relationship.)
I was thinking about tagging as an answer to this - I bet some/many/most mods are already subscribed to particular del.icio.us tags. They allow newsletters to work the way SSRN does: a clearly structured way to say “include me in your update” that doesn’t require a public comment or individual email. (But is it proper fannish behavior to tag your own entries on del.icio.us? I felt too embarrassed to do it! Am I the only one?) The rules on the userinfo of the handful of communities I looked at generally were very clear on what they didn’t want to see in comments, and how to put fanwork info into a comment, but not about how to slide through via del.icio.us. (The bandom newsletter uses its own del.icio.us account, but doesn’t say it uses others’ tags.) There may be barriers to this that I don’t know about, not being a mod, but I would have loved to see, “if you want us to index your relevant posts, tag them [X] or [Xfornewsletter] through del.icio.us and we’ll check if they meet community rules and include them if they do.” It’s not necessarily a matter of being automatic, more seeming automatic -- as with SSRN, it’s the image that encourages participation.
I stand by 100% the idea that it’s deeply problematic to present a millions-strong, largely female cultural phenomenon through the façade of a unique creation of a singular male. But I look at this guy’s undoubtedly successful self-promotion and I feel a pang. I want us to feel free to do that. I want more Luminositys!
And even within fandom, much less outside, I fear that not enough of us feel free to do that. Imagine your favorite HP author (or whatever fandom works for you) creating a website like this guy’s, adding art that looks a lot like the books’ art, using music from the films, not putting any disclaimer on it, and then sending out a bunch of press releases either to fannish or general news sources - would it make something twist in your stomach? Why? This guy’s not getting any C&D letters! Compare that to the story about Luminosity’s awesomeness, which (a) apparently came about because the reporter first talked to Henry Jenkins, not Luminosity, and (b) doesn’t include her name, at her request (and this is so very much not a criticism of her understandable position, but a point about the cultural and subcultural context).
I know I don’t feel very free to be forward. This is awfully hard to write: I want you to love the things I produce! Thus, I first want you to see the things I produce! Then, of course, love them. But I fear being seen as a crass self-promoter, dismissed and mocked. This has been brought home quite forcefully to me as I add a new fandom, my first since LJ took over “media fandom” as I know it. But I don’t think it’s entirely personal to me, and I do think it’s gendered. Study after study shows that women ask for much less in job/salary negotiations than equally qualified men, and that we give ourselves harsher self-evaluations, and these then affect what we receive.
In my professional life, I see the same gender divide - women require much stronger social ties before they’ll send out drafts of articles, even though that’s an important way to get noticed by senior scholars. The rise of SSRN (a preprint/reprint archive online) has been helpful there, because it allows people to post work while not “standing out” quite so much by person-to-person self-promotion.
Within fandom, we’re still working out proper conventions for self-promotion even when we do it. Nobody wants to spam uninterested parties. With SSRN, you put your work up, you give it keywords and an abstract, and you select which subject matter “network” and subfields it belongs to. Then various volunteers compile email newsletters that include everything posted that week within the relevant subfield, and - I think, because of something that happened to me - they may put in a work even when the authors didn’t select that particular subfield, if the editors think it’s relevant to their readers.
So SSRN is a bit like fandom newsletters/noticeboards, except that it moves on comparatively glacial academic time instead of fandom Wink of an Eye time. But SSRN newsletters rely a lot more on self-categorization. The norm is that you put your work on SSRN, and then it gets listed as a matter of course wherever you want to list it and maybe elsewhere, if you’re lucky. I haven’t done a comprehensive survey of fandom noticeboards, but it seems as if the mods usually pick up a fair amount in the course of their daily fannishness. This is understandable and efficient and I don’t want it to go away, but a fan whose work isn’t picked up as a matter of course has to speak up, which then interacts with a lot of our cultural training about when to speak up when you think there's already an ongoing conversation.
Technology changes the issues, for good and ill. The way I think of it is that our fannish gift economy asks us to put our wares out on the street, but discourages us from shouting out that we have shiny stuff because we might bother people - it’s the classic dilemma of advertising, to reach only the people who want your products when lots of those people may not yet know what they want! But online, the definitions of “street” and “shouting” are even more contested than the contours of conventional commercial street advertising. (And “gift economy” has problematics of its own, even apart from maybe cutting us off from otherwise available material rewards - if it’s a “gift,” then by giving it to you I create an obligation on you to respond somehow, but what if you think my gift is ugly and uncomfortable? No wonder you don’t want me pressing stuff on you! It’s risky! You don’t want to end up resenting me! There’s a great book by Robert Cialdini, Influence, that has a lot about how advertisers exploit the gift relationship.)
I was thinking about tagging as an answer to this - I bet some/many/most mods are already subscribed to particular del.icio.us tags. They allow newsletters to work the way SSRN does: a clearly structured way to say “include me in your update” that doesn’t require a public comment or individual email. (But is it proper fannish behavior to tag your own entries on del.icio.us? I felt too embarrassed to do it! Am I the only one?) The rules on the userinfo of the handful of communities I looked at generally were very clear on what they didn’t want to see in comments, and how to put fanwork info into a comment, but not about how to slide through via del.icio.us. (The bandom newsletter uses its own del.icio.us account, but doesn’t say it uses others’ tags.) There may be barriers to this that I don’t know about, not being a mod, but I would have loved to see, “if you want us to index your relevant posts, tag them [X] or [Xfornewsletter] through del.icio.us and we’ll check if they meet community rules and include them if they do.” It’s not necessarily a matter of being automatic, more seeming automatic -- as with SSRN, it’s the image that encourages participation.