Nobody here but us rabbits ...
Been reading UNDERSTANDING FANDOM (Mark Duffett, 2013), a primer for media fan culture, that touches on the origins of fandom, stereotypes, how people become fans, what that looks like in the digital era. Some of this is familiar to me, having read TEXUAL POACHERS (Jenkins), and others, all of it being kicked off by reading ENTERPRISING WOMEN (an ethnography of Star Trek fans and their work as fan writers) a few years ago.
I'm near the end of the book, Chapter 9's "The Fan Community, Online and Off" and I'm impatient, wishing impossibly that the book could move forward in time and cover the last ten years of fandom and the Internet (for obvious reasons). And yet suddenly there's a prescient nugget from 1994, a summary/paraphrase used in a BBC documentary that was based on an essay by internet user humdog (Carmen Hermosillo), that blew me away.
I'll share the quoted version from the text, but the full (and source) essay is here.
"It is fashionable to suggest that cyberspace is some island of the blessed where people are free to indulge their individuality. This is not true. I have seen many people spill out their emotions - their guts - online, and I did so myself until I began to see that I had commodified myself. Commodification means that you turn something into a product that has money value. In the nineteenth century, commodities were made in factories by workers, who were mostly exploited, but I created my interior thoughts as commodities for the corporations that owned the board that I was posting to, like Compuserve or AOL. That commodity was then sold on to other consumer entities as entertainment. Cyberspace is a black hole. It absorbs energy and personality and then re-presents it as an emotional spectacle. It is done by businesses that commodify human interaction and emotion, and we are getting lost in the spectacle."
(humdog/Carmen died in 2008, potentially as a result of getting lost in the spectacle. You can read about that here, a website that once had actual journalism but whose front page is full of the kind of junk bloating the Internet these days. Alas.)
This whole chapter has satiated my impatience, yet also made me angry.
With the internet, fandom became both performance and text. Your performance as fan contributed to the intertextual discourse, a series of nesting dolls of communication and consumption that everybody else profited on but you.
In the ten years since publication, the commodification of users has been hyper-distilled into a concentrate. We morphed ourselves into content creators, regardless of platform (which we never own) and audience (no matter how small). We are all broadcasting all the time, unless we step back and don't perform at all. As the web marched on, as industries stripped back their own efforts to monetize users only too happy to use themselves, suddenly that opt-in commodification became mandatory. Necessary. (I'm thinking, particularly, of the publishing industry right now.)
If you don't perform at all, if you don't self-commodify, do you even exist?
... these are a lot of random thoughts I'm still thinking and poking at. I've been dipping my toes into Fandom Studies for a couple of years now, mostly Jenkins and a few others, and have moved on to foundational uni texts, looking for something holistic. After UNDERSTANDING FANDOM, I'm moving on to FANDOM: IDENTITIES AND COMMUNITIES IN A MEDIATED WORLD (ed Gray, Sandvoss, Harrington, 2017) and A COMPANION TO MEDIA FANDOM STUDIES AND FAN STUDIES (ed Booth, 2018). (Matt Hills gets referenced a lot in Duffett's book; might have to look him up.)
But damn, even in the last four years, how much has changed?
If you've got recs, I'd love to hear 'em!
Who else is in this hole?? 🐰
prguitarman
janainaart
gummygunk
romaincrisis
tangentwithtanner
titsay
baratheonpilled
izzy806
