Why I support the OTW
I mean support in the basest form. As in: The fundamental principle or underlying concept of a system or theory; a basis.
A couple of days ago, I joined the OTW kind of official-like (but not really), with a donation, before they officially become a 501(3) non-profit and for those of you following my personal drama, before I paid the water bill. At this point, as far as I know, that donation doesn't get me any special privileges -- they haven't got their membership (official-like) mechanism up and running yet, I'm not serving on any committees, and I've had very little to say about any of it except a few comments on John Scalzi's blog, and maybe one or two others in various journal discussions.
I support it a for a lot of reasons: the legal angle, the archive, the wiki, even the academic journal which I will likely never read but it fills me with glee that we have that too because I love academic geeks as much as I adore the tech geeks who are building the archive.
But, in order (more or less) I think all those things go together. I think the legal side, the archive, the wiki, and the journal all represent something solid in the face of the metaphor that is fandom. We are, in many ways, our own sovereign nation, inside many other sovereign nations. We are a society within a society, a tribe on a reservation forever worried that our borders will be lessened or our most basic services be cut off. We have a culture, and we have many, many subcultures. We have our own jargon and dialects, we have our own history, our own tropes, trends and tactics.
Legally we are unrecognized. Occasionally one or two of our members gets picked off, their dwellings demolished and we can do little but sit by and watch and occasionally offer to help them rebuild elsewhere. We may squabble between ourselves over legitimacy or terminology, over community standards or ethics, morals and values and appropriateness. Sometimes we eat our own.
But we are as we are, and what we are, if you dislike the idea of transformative work as a descriptor, is about changing the things we see and hear and watch and experience and analyze, into something different and new. We distill what is generally considered to be mass market commodities of entertainment and art into new forms of entertainment and art aimed at a far smaller subset of the overall population. We are not passive consumers, but active and engaged ones. We do it for joy or recognition, for pleasing others and ourselves, we build paper tigers of drama and angst and unlikely scenarios and charge them with our paper lances. We tap into our psyches and find there are others waiting for us there. We are sisters and brothers who have an undeniable creative urge to create, to recycle and reuse, to dissect and affect.
We aren't challenging the right of source creators to profit off us for their work, but we challenge the right of anyone else to force us into an economic model that means nothing in our world, that would bring profit to anyone but us in a form that means something to us. And yes, we deny that our existence in some way demeans or diminishes that value of the works of others either artistically or economically.
We have a right to exist. We have a right to be, but that's not a universally held standard, or even a common belief. We have been exposed, and analyzed and dissected and discussed. Often it is the most extreme of us that comes under scrutiny, and sometimes it is the most innocent and pure of us -- the next generation who are finding properties like Harry Potter sparking their imaginations and urging them to create as well. But all of us have been exposed, as have our weaknesses.
Our strength is not in numbers or demographics, it is in the very diversity of who we are as individuals from professionals and academics to the barrista in Starbuck's and the librarian at your local. We are insurance adjustors and office managers, comp programmers and restaurant workers. We've got partners and spouses and kids and cats and dogs and cars in the driveway and mortgages on our balance sheets. We are neither saints nor angels, nor demons nor parasites. We have drives and dark sides and still believe in fairy dust and happy endings. We are no different than the millions of other people who watch and hear and buy and enjoy the same things we do.
Except in this one area -- we are creators as much as consumers and that makes us rare and fine and worthy of preservation and protection and even encouragement.
Legal Assistance is just that, a legal assistance option. It's a barrier behind which fans can stand when needed. It may not always hold, but it's there to give fans the breathing room to discover if they can hold what they own or if they will have to fight for it. It may not always win, but it can prevent us being picked off on the fringes, from being alone in facing those DMCA notices and those C&D's that do happen but too often feel like urban legends in our little island home. As fans, we are unlikely to be able to pick that battle when it comes -- it will come to us, and is likely to challenge our most vulnerable members, not our strongest. We may not be able to pick the battle but we can at least pick the forces that will go to battle for us, from among us.
An Archive of Our Own, which for many is the biggest and best part of this whole thing, is probably the least of my reasons for supporting the OTW. I'll use it, I think it's an excellent idea, and I would love to be able to keep much of what we create in one place, when so much has already been lost. It can be much like the Guttenberg project but for fans and fannish works, a huge repository of the best and worst of us. It is unlikely to nor is it meant to replace every other large archive out there, but it could help bolster the threat of loss that comes with smaller archives, material lost when people lose the will to maintain them, or can no longer bear the cost of it or want to.
The Wiki is something else, and there are other fannish Wiki's (FanHistory.com and the Directorium are two). The history of fandom as I know it is a linear thing, can be traced along the lines of fandom as I followed them from Highlander to Supernatural, and every fandom in between added to my own history. But people who I started with have diverged along that route, or remained in place. The history of fan vids alone could fill its own wiki from slide shows set to music to the current highly sophisticated and enthralling vids created by people who never took a film or editing class in their lives. Fan art as well, from drawings and handworks that were difficult to reproduce and share to the current ability of pretty much anyone to manipulate and overlay images in new way. Not all of it -- not the fiction, or the vids, or the art is necessarily good by any artistic standards, but it is all ours and the creators of those works are also of us, of our kith, and somewhere, sometime I'd like to see where all those bits and pieces of us converge or overlap, or relate to each other and a wiki is the best current tool we have for mapping our country, past and present and future.
The Academic Journal is where a lot of people balk, or rail or show little interest. The fear is that we will be reduced to subjects of study, that our works will be dissected (and not necessarily flatteringly) and that we ourselves, may also be dissected and discussed. We already are -- but most of it comes from without, not from within. We are studied and discussed outside of our own environment, scrutinized by people who have neither the time or the interest to see what's behind the latest legal battle or the most outrageous story to be found on the net. They see a single result and miss the point. They miss the social implications of what's being done and why. They often assume the worst because they go looking for it.
In the most shallow way, and academic journal can offer us a veneer of civility, a look behind the wild and woolly frontier of fandom and connects the underlying cultural and social mores that bind fandom together. In a far more beneficial way, it translates our fannish language into something the broader world can understand, it can show us the things we miss or didn't know about ourselves because so many of us are committed to our own little niches and our own reasons for doing what we do. It can show the broader world exactly how diverse and creative and quirky and necessary we are to a broader society because we keep the tradition that predates fandom -- we tell the stories. And retell them, and tell them again, and we offer them to anyone that wants to listen. We are the tradition that most people take for granted because they've never been deprived of it nor ever thought they could be.
But the biggest reason I support the OTW is this: In the course of these discussions over the past year, I've been made aware of just how far and how diverse fandom is. I've been made aware of parts and types and tribes of fandom I didn't even know were out there, from Rockfandom to machinima, and through all the arguments and resentments and disagreements and name calling, and discussions about terms and terminology and the voice of fears and concerns and open hostility, all I've seen is more people like me. Some of them I'm not even sure I like, but like long lost relatives, they are part of my story and my history and my life and above all I think the OTW sees this too. It won't cover everyone, or appeal to everyone, and some may not even want to tolerate its existence or find it a threat to theirs.
But it isn't just there for the parts of fandom it likes or approves of, but for as much of fandom as it can be there for.
A lot of people, fans and non-fans, academics, corporations, pro authors look at fandom and say, "No. You shouldn't, you can't."
The OTW looks at fans and fandom and says, "Yes. We should. We Can. WE ARE."
Why, yes. We are.
...and that's why I support the OTW.
A couple of days ago, I joined the OTW kind of official-like (but not really), with a donation, before they officially become a 501(3) non-profit and for those of you following my personal drama, before I paid the water bill. At this point, as far as I know, that donation doesn't get me any special privileges -- they haven't got their membership (official-like) mechanism up and running yet, I'm not serving on any committees, and I've had very little to say about any of it except a few comments on John Scalzi's blog, and maybe one or two others in various journal discussions.
I support it a for a lot of reasons: the legal angle, the archive, the wiki, even the academic journal which I will likely never read but it fills me with glee that we have that too because I love academic geeks as much as I adore the tech geeks who are building the archive.
But, in order (more or less) I think all those things go together. I think the legal side, the archive, the wiki, and the journal all represent something solid in the face of the metaphor that is fandom. We are, in many ways, our own sovereign nation, inside many other sovereign nations. We are a society within a society, a tribe on a reservation forever worried that our borders will be lessened or our most basic services be cut off. We have a culture, and we have many, many subcultures. We have our own jargon and dialects, we have our own history, our own tropes, trends and tactics.
Legally we are unrecognized. Occasionally one or two of our members gets picked off, their dwellings demolished and we can do little but sit by and watch and occasionally offer to help them rebuild elsewhere. We may squabble between ourselves over legitimacy or terminology, over community standards or ethics, morals and values and appropriateness. Sometimes we eat our own.
But we are as we are, and what we are, if you dislike the idea of transformative work as a descriptor, is about changing the things we see and hear and watch and experience and analyze, into something different and new. We distill what is generally considered to be mass market commodities of entertainment and art into new forms of entertainment and art aimed at a far smaller subset of the overall population. We are not passive consumers, but active and engaged ones. We do it for joy or recognition, for pleasing others and ourselves, we build paper tigers of drama and angst and unlikely scenarios and charge them with our paper lances. We tap into our psyches and find there are others waiting for us there. We are sisters and brothers who have an undeniable creative urge to create, to recycle and reuse, to dissect and affect.
We aren't challenging the right of source creators to profit off us for their work, but we challenge the right of anyone else to force us into an economic model that means nothing in our world, that would bring profit to anyone but us in a form that means something to us. And yes, we deny that our existence in some way demeans or diminishes that value of the works of others either artistically or economically.
We have a right to exist. We have a right to be, but that's not a universally held standard, or even a common belief. We have been exposed, and analyzed and dissected and discussed. Often it is the most extreme of us that comes under scrutiny, and sometimes it is the most innocent and pure of us -- the next generation who are finding properties like Harry Potter sparking their imaginations and urging them to create as well. But all of us have been exposed, as have our weaknesses.
Our strength is not in numbers or demographics, it is in the very diversity of who we are as individuals from professionals and academics to the barrista in Starbuck's and the librarian at your local. We are insurance adjustors and office managers, comp programmers and restaurant workers. We've got partners and spouses and kids and cats and dogs and cars in the driveway and mortgages on our balance sheets. We are neither saints nor angels, nor demons nor parasites. We have drives and dark sides and still believe in fairy dust and happy endings. We are no different than the millions of other people who watch and hear and buy and enjoy the same things we do.
Except in this one area -- we are creators as much as consumers and that makes us rare and fine and worthy of preservation and protection and even encouragement.
Legal Assistance is just that, a legal assistance option. It's a barrier behind which fans can stand when needed. It may not always hold, but it's there to give fans the breathing room to discover if they can hold what they own or if they will have to fight for it. It may not always win, but it can prevent us being picked off on the fringes, from being alone in facing those DMCA notices and those C&D's that do happen but too often feel like urban legends in our little island home. As fans, we are unlikely to be able to pick that battle when it comes -- it will come to us, and is likely to challenge our most vulnerable members, not our strongest. We may not be able to pick the battle but we can at least pick the forces that will go to battle for us, from among us.
An Archive of Our Own, which for many is the biggest and best part of this whole thing, is probably the least of my reasons for supporting the OTW. I'll use it, I think it's an excellent idea, and I would love to be able to keep much of what we create in one place, when so much has already been lost. It can be much like the Guttenberg project but for fans and fannish works, a huge repository of the best and worst of us. It is unlikely to nor is it meant to replace every other large archive out there, but it could help bolster the threat of loss that comes with smaller archives, material lost when people lose the will to maintain them, or can no longer bear the cost of it or want to.
The Wiki is something else, and there are other fannish Wiki's (FanHistory.com and the Directorium are two). The history of fandom as I know it is a linear thing, can be traced along the lines of fandom as I followed them from Highlander to Supernatural, and every fandom in between added to my own history. But people who I started with have diverged along that route, or remained in place. The history of fan vids alone could fill its own wiki from slide shows set to music to the current highly sophisticated and enthralling vids created by people who never took a film or editing class in their lives. Fan art as well, from drawings and handworks that were difficult to reproduce and share to the current ability of pretty much anyone to manipulate and overlay images in new way. Not all of it -- not the fiction, or the vids, or the art is necessarily good by any artistic standards, but it is all ours and the creators of those works are also of us, of our kith, and somewhere, sometime I'd like to see where all those bits and pieces of us converge or overlap, or relate to each other and a wiki is the best current tool we have for mapping our country, past and present and future.
The Academic Journal is where a lot of people balk, or rail or show little interest. The fear is that we will be reduced to subjects of study, that our works will be dissected (and not necessarily flatteringly) and that we ourselves, may also be dissected and discussed. We already are -- but most of it comes from without, not from within. We are studied and discussed outside of our own environment, scrutinized by people who have neither the time or the interest to see what's behind the latest legal battle or the most outrageous story to be found on the net. They see a single result and miss the point. They miss the social implications of what's being done and why. They often assume the worst because they go looking for it.
In the most shallow way, and academic journal can offer us a veneer of civility, a look behind the wild and woolly frontier of fandom and connects the underlying cultural and social mores that bind fandom together. In a far more beneficial way, it translates our fannish language into something the broader world can understand, it can show us the things we miss or didn't know about ourselves because so many of us are committed to our own little niches and our own reasons for doing what we do. It can show the broader world exactly how diverse and creative and quirky and necessary we are to a broader society because we keep the tradition that predates fandom -- we tell the stories. And retell them, and tell them again, and we offer them to anyone that wants to listen. We are the tradition that most people take for granted because they've never been deprived of it nor ever thought they could be.
But the biggest reason I support the OTW is this: In the course of these discussions over the past year, I've been made aware of just how far and how diverse fandom is. I've been made aware of parts and types and tribes of fandom I didn't even know were out there, from Rockfandom to machinima, and through all the arguments and resentments and disagreements and name calling, and discussions about terms and terminology and the voice of fears and concerns and open hostility, all I've seen is more people like me. Some of them I'm not even sure I like, but like long lost relatives, they are part of my story and my history and my life and above all I think the OTW sees this too. It won't cover everyone, or appeal to everyone, and some may not even want to tolerate its existence or find it a threat to theirs.
But it isn't just there for the parts of fandom it likes or approves of, but for as much of fandom as it can be there for.
A lot of people, fans and non-fans, academics, corporations, pro authors look at fandom and say, "No. You shouldn't, you can't."
The OTW looks at fans and fandom and says, "Yes. We should. We Can. WE ARE."
Why, yes. We are.
...and that's why I support the OTW.