vampire space cowboy

The thing younger fans need to understand is that 'content creator' and 'consumer' are social media marketing terms that did not exist as labels in fandom spaces until the past decade.

As a side effect of a lot of fan interaction happening on social media, you started reshaping what a fandom IS in order to fit within what a social media platform wants you to be.

See, social media platforms exist to advertise to you. That's it. That is how they make money. It's their reason for existing. You -- your attention, your time -- are the product they sell to advertisers for profit.

Social media companies divide their users into 'content creators' and 'content consumers'. That's where those terms come from. They're technical terms that originated in the Twitter corporate offices.

'Content creator' is the term for people who make things -- videos, funny posts, thoughtful comments, art, etc -- that other people want to look at. 'Consumers' are the people who use the platform because they want to look at that thing, and end up looking at a lot of ads in the process.

I loathe, loathe, LOATHE how we have taken to applying the terms 'content' and 'consumer' to ourselves outside of their business model. You do not exist to make money for a social media company. A drawing someone made is not 'content' for you to 'consume'.

A fandom is an informal social group. That's all. It's you and a bunch of other people who all like the same thing, and sometimes you enjoy the thing together. You don't have to create anything. You don't 'consume content'. You are hanging out with other people.

Stop forcing yourself into their boxes.

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

Free Harvard courses. Free Courses from Stanford. Free Courses from MIT. Free courses from Yale. Free courses from Princeton.

Free courses on Coursera.

Free Courses on EDx Free Courses on Alison

For paid, there's The Great Courses+/Wonderium. 20$ a month for unlimited courses.

And I also wanted to mention that humanitarian organisations have free courses too, like the Red Cross on international humanitarian law.