Fan Culture @ Swarthmore

The Kirk/Spock video of Kathy’s last post caused some controversy in 2006 when it was uploaded to YouTube without its creators’ permission. The people who make and distribute fan videos have maintained a general standard of secrecy about it, for various material/legal reasons, and some were irritated at what they saw as their complicated art being flattened and misread without the context that gave it meaning. (This fan sums it up: “I’ve done the whole show-vids-to-nonfans thing, and most of them are boggled and confused. They’re not seeing the same vids we are.”) Henry Jenkins wrote an excellent post on the affair, which I really highly recommend at least skimming before/after you watch the YouTube link.

Of course, I confess, I’m always interested in the analysis fans themselves have to offer regarding their own situations, so I dug around for some fan commentary on the situation.

Metafandom is a popular digest-style roundup of fannish discussions happening on LiveJournal. (We often call those discussion “fannish meta”: hence the name.) These conversations range from the trivial to the deeply philosophical, fandom-specific or genre-spanning. The digest’s moderators try to be as inclusive as possible, so there’s a lot of noise to wade through, but when any big controversy hits LiveJournal media fandom– whether it’s about racist re-casting of characters in alternate-universe fanfiction, “clip theft” in fan videos, or the mores of fanfiction about real people– you can find traces of the discussion as it went down by looking up Metafandom’s archives.

So I visited the archives on the same day of Jenkin’s blog post, to see what the fans were saying. Scroll down to “Fan Vids”: a smattering of opinions about the visibility of fanvideos– a form of art long underground as a matter of course– in the age of mainstream internet media. This fan and this fan digest the Jenkins post for their readers– I’d especially recommend glancing at the comments to those posts, where other fans praise or criticize some of Jenkins’s individual points. This post, and its comments, shed a little more light on the historical reasons that video-makers dig privacy.

Finally, one of my favorite essays on the subject: this post (by a Swarthmore graduate!) will offer a bridge for us in the coming weeks to Convergence Culture and other discussions about money and fandom (which I am fascinated by from a feminist perspective). She quotes, from the very first post I linked to:

It’s been bothering me increasingly in recent months, as fanvids get posted on YouTube (not by the creators), that my non-fannish friends link to them as just another cool internet video. Of course, how would non-fannish folks recognise the incredible violation of fannish etiquette involved in posting a vid to YouTube? They’re insider creations, not intended for general consumption, and so why would non-insiders know the etiquette involved?

And answers:

Well, first what it is is we have to start adjusting to the fact that we’re not insiders anymore — the world got really small really fast, and we are right there in the spotlight, or, as Punk put it, they can see us now. We’ve been on the cutting edge, “hiding” on the internet with our creations, but here in Web 2.0, the user-created web, we can’t hide anymore, we are the internet. And so of course people are going to try and find ways to popularize us — eventually, they will try and find ways to use us to make money.

She herself gets followup from new posts like this, this, and this one (which I quoted at the very beginning of this post).

At any rate– I hope I’ve given you a sense of the conversation that goes around LiveJournal fandom under the skin of big controversies. We talked a little bit in class about the voice of the subject as represented in ethnography like Seiter’s or Radway’s. I think it’s appropriate here to check in with some fannish voices, to accompany Henry Jenkins wearing his ethnographer’s hat.