Pitting creators against fandom

apaintedmaypole:

eleveninches:

tomato-greens:

robinade:

thebkwyrm:

eleveninches:

robinade:

eleveninches:

thebkwyrm:

onehoarsecryfordiscipline:

kerrikins:

lucyzephyr:

“For the record: I have never quoted fans without permission” please someone else with the spoons to do it call Aja out on this, I’m too afraid of her and not up for it but this is blatantly untrue, and one of my friends was use w/o notice OR permission in one of Aja’s articles. Said friend was…

I understand that this must have been very hard for your friend and I get that, but realistically, when you post something in a public sphere then you have to accept that you may be linked to/discussed. Prime time news quotes stuff that’s on public blogs/Twitters all the time! This is not unique to Aja. If it was a locked Livejournal entry, obviously that would be incredibly different. But if anyone can wander upon it by accident, through reblogs or through tags, then a journalist linking to it should not be completely unexpected.

Anyone who wants their content to remain completely private should not be posting on Tumblr. There is no way to lock that content down or protect it.

please back off and don’t contact me again. I’m already changing my URL. I cannot deal with this.

This is an EXCELLENT example of the nature of public social media and the inability to delete content. The minute someone reblogged the original post, it doesn’t matter how many times the username is changed or the original entry deleted.  It won’t go away; the post will remain, as will the responses to it.  Regardless of the original posters feelings on the matter, responses can continue, because people may never see the original post, just the reblogs. 

It’s the nature of social media.  Anyone can reply to a public Tumblr post, even people who disagree with you.

this is a beautiful reply.

Wow, so it’s not enough to try and force a fandom into the limelight— very disrespectfully against their wishes, by the way, which is a very shitty thing to do. As a person, everyone has the choice whether or not to single people out. No one gets to hide behind the idea that it’s “the nature of public media.”

And then when this issue causes someone some genuine fucking distress, you’re going to gloat about it. Awesome.

And by awesome I mean spectacularly appalling.

I’M NOT AJA. seriously concerned about what’s going on now sdfhsdfhdfh is all the aja hate actually… erin hate… misdirected…?

For the record, also not Aja.  And also mystified by what’s going on - I’m not gloating about anyone’s anything, I’m just pointing out how Tumblr (and much of social media) works.  If that causes someone distress…well, sorry?  But I didn’t invent Tumblr.

Sorry for the case of mistaken identity. Your url (thebkwyrm) is very similar to Aja’s, so I thought it was her. What you said before really pissed me off because— if it had come from Aja— really did come across as gloating. But it was you sharing your opinion, which you are obviously entitled to. I do still think it was disrespectful to pursue a conversation when one of the participants was clearly asking for space, but that was your choice to make.

Eleveninches, sorry as well. I never intended to give the impression that I thought you were Aja.

I beg to disagree with you. It is not disrespectful to pursue that conversation because of the nature of tumblr––we don’t really reply to each other; we rather respond to the things that people have said and wait to see what happens. Now I have explicitly replied to you, robinade, but I have no way of knowing you’ll see this. I have no way of knowing anyone who will see this. That’s the nature of tumblr, and the problem, I think, is that we haven’t updated the way we think about fandom––we haven’t moved on from an LJ sensibility, from the sense of privacy that a seemingly enclosed community creates. Well, guess what––while I don’t think we were ever as private as we pretended we were (heyyyyy Henry Jenkins!), we’re no longer enclosed. 

Seriously, most of the internet is a public space. Since we’re speaking so condescendingly about choice here, when you choose to post content in an unlocked space––whatever that content may be––on the interwebz, you don’t get to choose who sees it, reblogs it, responds to it, reads it aloud to their friends, quotes it in an article, etc., etc. It may be more comfortable to pretend that no one can see it but the anonymous faces of fandom, especially if you’re like me (not high-profile, not particularly desirous of becoming very high-profile if it leads to being embroiled in dramarama), but that doesn’t mean that that conceit is a true one.

I personally love the fourth wall in every way there is to love it, from its literary theoretical implications to its practical application in my life as a fandom-dweller. But it is imperative to understand that the fourth wall is an illusion we’ve built and maintain for the sake of propriety and discretion, not an actual protective agent. You cannot retroactively want information you have released publicly to disappear into the private sphere, and you cannot track or control everyone who has access to that public information. It’s just the nature of the game. While pretending that fandom and RL is mutually exclusive is pretty much par for the course––it’s what I do!––the only thing that will protect your anonymity is what you choose or choose not to put publicly online. Once it’s out there, it’s fair game. Thinking the fourth wall is real is not only a fallacy, it’s foolhardy––the fourth wall has never existed. 

 I’ve never written RPF so I guess the stakes are lower for me, but I hung out in bandom for three years and I know how it works.  

For the record, I don’t know Aja except for the, like, three conversations we had while we were both hanging around Inceptionville, but she’s always struck me as a decent person. While I may not always agree with her (just like I may not always agree with ANYONE who posts their opinions for public perusal), she has never seemed to have it out for fandom or be deliberately malicious towards people, or anything like that. I don’t really know why so many people love to hate on her. 

DAMN THAT GOT LONG

 

^ this

This last comment (okay, technically, second to last) feels really crucial to me. Publicly posted speech on the Internet is generally not protected speech. Once it is publicly available, it is generally open to anyone (academics, press, your neighbor…) for further commenting and quoting. There are certain contexts in which academics recommend taking additional steps to shield a speaker/community in some way, but these rarely apply to public posts in fan-type contexts. (And, wow do academics like to fight about when/where they might need to take additional steps to protect certain speakers.)

None of this really applies to the press. That’s an entirely different context with much looser guidelines. It’s important to emphasize, however, that many in the press take a lot of care with this as well. For example, a common technique is to only use publicly posted content and to give the speaker an opportunity to comment/reflect on their words in the context of the article being written.

The fannish fourth wall is an illusion. In many ways it is a very productive illusion that serves both sides of the wall well. However, anyone who genuinely does not want to have their comments shared outside of their personal fan spaces/networks needs to lock down their posts. 

The Daily Dot was willing to pull an article on an RPF/S fandom out of respect for the community’s discomfort with being reported on. Speaking frankly? That’s a big concession from a internet news site who’d love the ad revenue that came from folks clicking onto that article. I see that as a positive sign and an attempt to keep communication channels open. I’m still not really sure how I feel about all this, but its worth recognizing that they’re listening. 

Being uncomfortable with how The Daily Dot reports on fan cultures? Or being uncomfortable with the act of reporting on fan culture as a way of earning money? That’s a subject which is well worth talking about across fan communities right now. Fans are being carefully watched and marketed to from many different points in entertainment and media industries right now. The monetization of fan cultures is an issue that’s worthy of careful discussion. However, discomfort alone does not mean that anyone needs to ask permission to talk about fans, quote fans, or report on fan cultures. 

in love with this whole thread, especially the part where elevenshop happened. :D

(But seriously, this: The Daily Dot was willing to pull an article on an RPF/S fandom out of respect for the community’s discomfort with being reported on. Speaking frankly? That’s a big concession from a internet news site who’d love the ad revenue that came from folks clicking onto that article. I see that as a positive sign and an attempt to keep communication channels open. I’m still not really sure how I feel about all this, but its worth recognizing that they’re listening. <— Thank you <3)