Thinking ahead to the Fan Labor panel

[elements]

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

Comments

a few disjointed thoughts

[spare_change]

This is interesting. For me, fandom doesn't matter, not at all, and that's what I like about it. I don't see the need to instrumentalize my trivial pleasures into something bigger in order to take enjoyment from them. In fact, that kind of kills the enjoyment for me

Re: a few disjointed thoughts

[spare_change]

Also, to step away from my own personal investment in fandom for a minute, I think there is a lot of danger in wanting some sort of "compensation" and to be involved in the creative hierarchy in some way. Because what makes fandom so great is that it's such a free-for-all. You can write whatever you want -- no matter how crappy or offensive -- and post it without having to go through the screening of actual publishing. Whereas if fandom becomes more part of the mainstream, then all sorts of censorship processes are going to occur. I mean, fandom isn't just clever feminist reimaginings of everyone's favorite TV series (or whatever), it's also chan and incest and crappy emotional porn. And, in fact, I would argue that more people come to fandom to get their kinks (whether sexual or narrative) met than to produce anything that the mainstream might consider worthwhile.

(Apologies for being so incoherent ... I'm undercaffeinated and jetlagged!) ♥

Re: a few disjointed thoughts

[elements]

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

Re: a few disjointed thoughts

[pir8fancier]

I think this very issue became an "issue" when Fanlib saw all this creativity and wanted to make bucks off of it. The individual expression as dollar signs. I'm very cynical. If they had been vaguely successful, fandom would have died. Because it would have said to the people who own the original copyright that money can be made off of it. Which would have sent them to their lawyers pronto and asked for a piece of their pie. Whether it IS their pie is still up for debate. Derivative, pastiches, etc. That inevitable court case would have happened sooner. It WILL happen because someone who is a lot smarter than Fanlib and who understands fandom (not some lameass male execs) will couch renumeration in some acceptable language, and the lawyers will go to town. Unfortunately, I don't think the future of fandom is in our hands. Until the legal aspects of writing fanfiction is solved, then I think fandom is sort of in a bubble

[jiggery_pokery]

I don't participate in Alternate Reality Games, but several of my friends do. They are interesting for many reasons but interesting in this context because, at their best, they provide ways to contribute to stories in media and physical participations that wouldn't make sense in other story forms. For instance, there can be massive nationwide or worldwide co-operative projects for game purposes that would never happen had it not been for the game. For instance, Find Satoshi is a part of the first season of Perplex City, though the Find Satoshi effort does appear to have stalled somewhat.

This isn't going to be the ideal for every story or every medium, but it's good that the authors of the world have found one in which it makes sense.