ephemeral traces

This week a year ago I started this blog: it was to provide me, more generally, with a real life online presence and, more specifically, with an outlet for a post I’d made on my fannish livejournal that some of the people in my flock had asked me to make public. This particular post (which I soon started to shorthand as the MiT5 post, but which actually had the much more poetic and allusory title “The Women Men Don’t See”) was my personal start of this past year. In it, I made some fairly aggressive accusations of misogyny on all levels of fan studies, suggested some pretty bold connections between the personal, the institutional, and the scholarly situation of women in the field, and got quite loud and angry. Moreover, given that it had been a LiveJournal rant, initially addressed to the few hundred potential readers who actually would have access to it, it was deeply personal and expected to be read within the particular context of my life.

When Henry emailed me and suggested what later came to be the series of blog conversations on gender and fandom, I was amazed and excited and, yes, a bit freaked. After all, I wasn’t anybody–most of my identity for a long time had been invested in my fannish persona and my meta writing over on LiveJournal, and I had just come from a conference, where my lack of institutional affiliation yet again reminded me of all the things I wasn’t. But maybe that was a blessing in disguise: while I wouldn’t want to suggest that people don’t speak up for fear of upsetting more senior colleagues or that I don’t have a personal stake in not upsetting others in my chosen field, I did feel kind of like the court jester who wasn’t situated anywhere in the academic hierarchy.

At the same time, I’m not naive enough to believe that I didn’t have a certain privilege that Henry would care–now, as much as I may critique his ideas here and there and as much as we often like to posit him as “the Man” in our small pond, I know few senior scholars who continually go out of their way to help others and who try to remain careful of their own privilege. At the same time, had I not met him before, had I not already complained to him about gender issues in fandom studies before, he might not have emailed me. But email he did, and however many things the consequent conversations failed to do (and I’m sure anyone who was there could make a list, from the problematic color coding to that damn MIT blog interface, from rounds of gender bingo to moments of sheer personal frustration, from clear limitations in the scholars invited to limitations in the range of topics,…), I’m looking at it a year later and am nothing if not impressed with all of us.

Whereas a year ago I felt like there were two central groupings, so to speak (which were partially gendered and tended to exist in different parts of the Internet), this has changed: not only have those groups mixed but the process has also in effect drawn in more and more scholars. It’s like the blog post series (and is anyone noticing how many terms I’m coming up with to avoid the one I usually shorthand to, namely summer gender fan debate : ) created a critical weight that put people in touch on a one-to-one personal base (and as the person who coordinated the LiveJournal mirror site, I certainly had the privilege to talk to all the people I hadn’t met before) as well as introduced especially younger scholars and their ideas to others, thus allowing each of us to get a sense of the work happening in this field all over the place. It also showed up some serious gaps in fandom studies, but I hope as we continue on, we’ll address them as they come…

Practically, it meant co-writing and panels and workshops, it meant reaching out to those we might not know as well and maybe even reconsidering our own positions. For me, it means co-writing an article with Jonathan Gray, which is a perfect way to merge what I’d consider two different approaches to the field (not least of all characterized by the differences in my and his coedited books : ). It meant creating an SCMS panel with my friend and co-writer Louisa Stein, Jonathan Gray and Jason Mittell, really showing the range of what we consider and define as the object of fan studies (from Jonathan’s authorial paratextual creations to my fan paratexts). It meant witnessing the amazingly smart Console-ing Passions workshop (with Bob Rehak, Suzanne Scott, Louisa Stein, Julie Levin Russo, and Sam Ford) that started out as a response to the conversations but in the end had become so much more, pushing the field in new directions and complicating simple binaries.

Most importantly, it meant questioning my simple binaries, really revisiting the truths as I’d understood them in terms of gender and fandom and reconfirming some and overthrowing others. And it meant the merging of online spaces as more and more of the LJ “fangirls” created blogs but also more of the “fanboys” started hanging out on LJ–with some of them really enjoying the myriad advantages LJ has over most other blogging platforms (such as comment notification, threading, and flocking but, probably most importantly, an ease of communication and intellectual engagement that always struck me as a tad more personal and less performative than blog interactions). In a way, then, I feel like this past year has virtually made the blog obsolete.

And it meant a building block in what has been my biggest project of the last 6 months, namely the creation of Transformative Works and Cultures. I can’t say how our board would look if we hadn’t had these conversations, but I know I wouldn’t have asked many of these scholars, and they might not have seen the need for such a journal, might not have wanted to support such an ultimately feminist project (or seen it as only limiting rather than vital).

Transformative Works and Culture, of course, comes more directly out of a much more important post, a real turning point and watershed moment, namely Astolat’s brilliant An Archive of Our Own post (alluding to yet another famous feminist text) that was the beginning of what is now the Organization for Transformative Works. What our posts share is a deep commitment to the importance of this particular community and its creative energies, both as objects to be preserved and as worthy of study. We share a sense that this is a feminist project in many ways, that gender does affect (though clearly not as simplistically as I often tend to argue) the way we engage with media and the way we choose to appropriate and transform media. That’s why I support OTW and why I can’t wait for TWC to finally showcase what amazing work gets done in this field and why I’m thankful for this last year.

It’s sure been a roller coaster for many of us, see sawing between excitement and panic, depression and elation. And we’re not nearly halfway there yet: this next year will hopefully see many of the fruits of our labor–the archive itself, of course but also the first issue of TWC. And when I read the essays for CP’s fandebate workshop, when I look at the work I’ve seen for TWC and elsewhere, I can’t be but excited that we’re doing great work and are doing it not in isolation any more.

I did a much more detailed conference recap (from canceled flights to getting sick and all the cool people I met : ) in my LJ but felt it might be useful to at least write up some of the more academic aspects of it here. Also, I updated my web site with my conference paper, Paratextual Commentary as Writer Response Theory for the couple of people who asked me for it. Below the cut are my notes on the two full fan panels I saw (between traveling troubles and being sick for much of the conference I sadly missed much of what I wanted to see.)

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The Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies picked Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet as one of their books of the month. offers a very positive review, and we got a chance to present a response.

And I’ll be going to my one conference this year (it sucks to be an independent scholar!!!) next week: SCMS in Philadelphia. I’m on the panel Paratextual Architectures and the Shifting Boundaries of Television with Jonathan Gray, Louisa Ellen Stein, and Jason Mittell, a panel that came together in the comment section to my first real post almost a year ago when Jason suggested proposing a session and we started emailing and thinking abut what we were all interested in. My paper’s entitled Paratextual Commentary as Writer Response Theory.

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Here’s what I’ve been doing for the last few months

New Journal Announcement/CFP

Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC) is a Gold Open Access international peer-reviewed journal published by the Organization for Transformative Works edited by Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson.

TWC publishes articles about popular media, fan communities, and transformative works, broadly conceived. We invite papers on all related topics, including but not limited to fan fiction, fan vids, mashups, machinima, film, TV, anime, comic books, video games, and any and all aspects of the communities of practice that surround them. TWC’s aim is twofold: to provide a publishing outlet that welcomes fan-related topics, and to promote dialogue between the academic community and the fan community.

We encourage innovative works that situate these topics within contemporary culture via a variety of critical approaches, including but not limited to feminism, queer theory, critical race studies, political economy, ethnography, reception theory, literary criticism, film studies, and media studies. We also encourage authors to consider writing personal essays integrated with scholarship, hypertext articles, or other forms that embrace the technical possibilities of the Web and test the limits of the genre of academic writing. TWC copyrights under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.

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This post was supposed to be only a heads-up and general linkage post for vidding week at In Media Res. I’d asked Avi whether he’d dedicate an entire week to vids, and while I can’t say whether anyone watched or liked (we kind of ended up commenting amongst ourselves : ), I’ve been really happy with this cross section of what vids are and can be, from mono to multi, from character study to meta, from old to new, showcasing some amazing vidders and some of my favorite vids.

Francesca Coppa (Muhlenberg College) “Pressure” - a metavid by the California Crew
Tisha Turk (University of Minnesota, Morris) “Not Only Human” - an X-Files vid by Killa and Laura Shapiro
Jacqueline Kjono (independent scholar) “A Day in the Life” - a Dead Zone vid by Shalott and Speranza
Louisa Stein (San Diego State University) “Bricks” - a Supernatural vid by Luminosity
Kristina Busse (independent scholar) “Us” - a multivid by Lim

And I know the little narrative about Kandy Fong’s slide show and the story about fan boys and Machinima at Harvard is getting kinda worn and yet–here’s what came across my friendslist tonight: In an Associated Press article, AP Entertainment writer Jake Doyle begins his article on Fans Make their own Music Videos as follows: “Since the dawn of YouTube, fans have been melding their own amateur video with the music of their favorite bands.”

So, maybe it’s not about fanboys and fangirls…maybe it’s really about “fans” and “users”! And yes, who cares what one dude thinks or says–but I wouldn’t mind if some AP journalist looking for facts might actually see Francesca’s entry on Kandy Fong. It’s not like I’d expect him to read Jenkin’s 1992 chapter on how fans make their own music videos…

Why I Joined the OTW

My name is Kristina and I am coeditor of Transformative Works and Cultures, the journal the Organization for Transformative Works sponsors. But even before and outside of that position, I support the OTW and what it stands for. I’ve been a fan for nearly a decade in more than a dozen fandoms starting with Buffy and now holding onto SGA for a good three years already. I have been a het shipper and a slasher, a lurker and hard to shut up, have fallen for some shows and searched for the fandom and fallen in other fandoms for the fic before I even could distinguish Lance from Justin. I have made close friends in fandom and have found writing partners, and have even been able to meet some of them in real life. I’m also an academic who has written on fandom for almost as long as I’ve been part of it. And it is not only as an acafan who can’t wait to have a journal in our subdiscipline but as a fan who’s dealt with mailing lists, central and not so central archives, and LiveJournal and other blogs that I think the OTW is a pretty marvelous project.

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It’s this time of the year–between the holidays and end of semester and just general winter depression, December is my least favorite time of the year (and it doesn’t help that I just turned 40 and now cannot deny middle age

At the same time, this has been a most exciting time professionally: about a month ago, the Organization of Transformative Works asked me and my former co-editor Karen Hellekson to create an academic journal on fans, fan artifacts, fan cultures, and fandoms: Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC) (link goes to otw_news announcement, since the web site’s not quite done yet). (more…)

I wrote most of this Monday while everyone was at MIT, but clearly hive minds are not restricted to fandom (though, I guess, in academic settings we call it zeitgeist), since there were multiple discussion going on at the same time on authorial concerns (though I’d read Derek’s Unboxing TV piece, so maybe it was already in my mind…collaborative thinking so to speak : ) Anyway, some of the discussions that I found as I was finishing this are Jason’s encounter with the author himself and Cryptoxin’s roundup with some interesting discussions.

Collaborative Authorship, Fandom, and New Media

One of the most interesting discussions in fan fiction studies and media studies has been the renewed focus on authors, authority, and auteurs, on the role that intent and overarching goals and visions play, and the interplay between various creators in collaborative spaces. Film—and even more television—are collaborative by nature, so that the modernist and even romantic notion of the lone artist (ludicrous as it already is given what we know about collaboration among Wordsworth and Coleridge, von Arnim and Brentano, and the entire Bloomsbury circle, to name only some of the more obvious ones) is pretty much impossible to maintain. It might be because of that, however, that the drive towards singular visions, overarching imagination, and single-author creativity remains a sign of quality—as if writing together, sharing thoughts and ideas is somehow inferior.

Think of some of the bigger TV hits of recent years: Whedon, Sorkin, Moore, all become representative and synonymous with the machinery behind them—individual script writers and directors and the entire support structure all become a tool in the hands of the auteur. Likewise, fan writers often emphasize their own authorship and control over the text in ways that seem slightly ironic given the transformative (and thus already collaborative) aspects of their work. There seems to be an anxiety of shared credit and the lesser reputation of joint creation in both these instances that makes me wonder what ideological underpinnings (modernist if I were to guess) we fall prey to when we value the single idea and mind over the joint and mutual.

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This is basically a more concise version of the posts I made yesterday in my LJ. Here are some links that most of you will have seen but just in case you missed one.

In media Res Most importantly, on In Media Res, it’s fandom week. All the entries look interesting (I loved Matt’s today!), but the one that stands out for me not only in terms of analysis but simply as a historical document is yesterday’s “Celebrating Kandy Fong: Founder of Fannish Music Video” by Francesca Coppa. This is the ur-vid, the slide show that evokes the emotional dimension that vids are so famous for, that cuts and juxtaposes in ways that comment intelligently on the source text and our relation to it, that anticipates all the creativity and smarts we’re seeing today (in vids like Lum’s : )

Henry on Lum Henry’s blogged on how Lum got to be nominated as best fan vidder (namechecking Laura and Francesca) HERE. Plus, he uses the opportunity (as do I) to yet again pimp the marvelous 24-7–a DIY Video Summit conference, February 8-10, at USC. Laura Shapiro will be the curator for fan vids, and I can’t think of a better person!

FoE2 This weekend MIT did a acafannish double feature: Friday and Saturday was Future of Entertainment 2, an academia meets industry encounter. It’s presented in the form of feature panels, all of which combine media scholars with production folks and industry specialists. All the panels were liveblogged, and the podcast should be up soon. The sessions most interesting to me were the introduction which highlighted Luminosity’s recent public acknowledgment and the panel on Fan Labor (featuring Catherine Tosenberger). [Opening Remarks are blogged HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE. Fan Labor's blogged HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE.]

Unboxing TV Sunday and Monday is the less public, invite-only symposium Unboxing TV. No podcast there, and probably everyone is too involved for liveblogging, but I’m counting on Jason, Jonathan, Derek, and maybe Louisa to blog about it down the line. [I'll update as they come in: Louisa's From Bouncers to Unboxing; Jason's Understanding vidding; Derek's Unboxing "Unboxing TV"]

Convergence in action And Jason has been blogging on his frustration with Heroes, which apparently was remedied a bit by the pre-Future of Entertainment panel on Heroes. So he’s blogging along like the good fanboy he is–and Tim Kring comes in to comment on his criticism. Now, I haven’t seen this season’s Heroes yet, so I’m reading through my fingers, but I know enough of you have been upset that you might find this interesting. Isn’t that the dream/nightmare we all have????

Gender yet again Gacked from Rivkat, this is yet again a really interesting example of how mainstream fandom becomes irrevocably male. I observed that in the WSJ article last year (which was good on the whole, but had a surprisingly large number of males and, more importantly, all but one of their featured fan writers had gone/were fixing to go pro!), but it’s even more blatant in this piece: Has a local man written an 8th Harry Potter book is a Fox TV story that features: a male fan writer; a male fan; a male legal expert. Oh, yes…and there may be other people doing that here and there (afterthought in the final soundoff). *speechless*

One of my favorite vidders, Luminosity, who is both amazingly gifted and very smart about her work, was interviewed in New York Magazine this week: Luminosity Upgrades Fan Video. They featured two of her recent vids (the gorgeous “Bite Me, Frank Miller” 300 vid to Vogue and her much discussed anti-misogynist collaboration with Sisabet (another brilliant vidder who created some of my all-time favorites) Supernatural vid Women’s Work.

This is a wonderful thing for her, for vidding fandom, and, I’d argue, for media fandom in general. If one of my frustrations of the past year or so has been the mainstreaming of (often male-authored) transformative fan works while female communities continued their long ingrained habit of flying under the radar, this year has also brought so many ways in which we are going public and coming out: Karen’s and my edited volume that foregrounds how all contributors are writing as fans and academics for fans and academics, vidders posting their vids to imeem.com (and, more recently, stage6.com), the summer gender debate at Henry’s blog, theorizing this gender divide in public perception and visibility, and the Organization for Transformative Works, all are steps in media fandom’s road towards greater visibility.

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We’re pretty much at the end of Henry’s summer debate on gender and fan studies and, trying to wrap up my thoughts about it, I went back and looked at where we started and where we’ve been going. Personally, it has been quite positive for me, allowing me to create some friendships and strengthen others, both with males and some females I hadn’t communicated with before. At the same time, many of the concerns I voiced half a year ago are still with me (esp. the systemic feminist concerns that include the personal and that most males tried to immediate separate into different issues but that to me are all interconnected) while others have really come to the fore (in particular race, class, and nationality as inflected by gender within fan cultures). Once the last conversation is posted, I want to link them all, because Henry’s blog can be a tad difficult to navigate (how does he do it??? I barely can post in my LJ substantially once or twice a week, and he is just going and going and going….)

Rather than try to respond to the conversations which, I think and hope, will resonate with many of us for a time to come, I want to return to one of the simplest oppositions that may or may not be gendered, but that certainly are central to at least my approach to fan studies. (more…)

The Ondt was a weltall fellow, raumybult and abelboobied, bynear saw altitudinous wee a schelling in kopfers.

As any good literature student coming through high school and college in the last 25 or so years, I was all but indoctrinated with the intentional fallacy. I’ve found that quite interesting, since the other half of the New Critical doctrine, the affective fallacy has been all but dismissed in its entirety. But even in college in the eighties the desire to separate the text from all paratextual influences was alive and well, at least where I was: my freshman year, I actually had to write a paper where we were given two nameless texts in order to “judge” which one was aesthetically more sophisticated (i.e., “better”) and offer textual support. [It was an assignment in the then current edition of Perrine’s Story and Structure, an otherwise pretty decent Intro to Literature textbook.]

And I know I tend to invoke that fallacy all too often myself, especially in fannish canon debates, where the author’s intentions (be they Joss Whedon and his view on Spike/Angel or JKR’s thoughts on Harry/Hermione before HBP) often get used to bulwark textual arguments. [ETA 10-26-07: And boy is this ever more relevant after Jo's most recent attempt to be the only, the dominant reader of her own text!] At worst, this authorial dictatorship is used to negate potential alternate readings of a fan story: after all, if author intent rules, then she will always have the last word, and if your reading diverges, then you must simply be mistaken. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to unteach that belief especially when I taught high school, but even some of my college students still want to find out “What did the author mean?” So I explain how language is polyphonic, alliterates, and rarely collapses into one meaning and that authors can include unconscious desires, prejudices, etc. without meaning to.

And yet, in recent years I’ve placed more and more emphasis on context, and how texts should not be taken out of their respective environments. I certainly think that argument holds especially true for fannish creations (which I’ve suggest are at times nearly unintelligible without context) but the same is true for most literature to larger or lesser degrees. (more…)

“Some events do take place but are not true; others are—although they never occurred” (Elie Wiesel)

As some of you may know, I come to fandom studies late and via circuitous (or rather, purely nonacademic fannish) routes. My training’s in postmodern literature, and my academic work before fandom all circled around various versions of the relationship between ethics and aesthetics, literature and Truth, and history and storytelling. I think it is this tenuous hold we tend to have on “truth” and “reality” that has been holding my academic fascination with media fandom, both in its analytic responses to media texts as well as in its (as I’ve argued in my first essay on popslash, Digital Get Down [ETA: This is definitely not one of my better pieces, but it's the one that addresses the postmodern issue most explicitly]) quite postmodern construction of shared canon. (This is much more obvious in RPF, where fans literally pick and choose what will be considered canon in their interpretive community [1], but the same can be said for FPF as well, given the wealth of text, often created over an extended length of time with multiple writers.)

If fandom itself can be characterized by several postmodern characteristics (including the destabilizing of truth, reality, identity, and consistency) [2], then postmodern fannish narratives who actually thematize these various challenges to a stable modernist world view and its associated closed narrative are particular interesting. In the following, I want to look at a particular story, its reception, and the way both play out and illustrate some of the arguments I’ve made about fanfiction and, in particular, what I want to call the fantext. [3] Much of this is drawn from my presentation at Console-ing Passions 06 (abstract is here) and the following will spoil Speranza’s Written By the Victors as well as all three so far aired seasons of Atlantis. (more…)

This post started off as an ad hoc vids rec post after a discussion on this blog with Jason. He pointed out the he didn’t teach vids even though he might actually like to, fearing that he might not do justice to the complexly intertextual vidding culture and aesthetics. His comment was at the heart of much of the debate within and outside of female-dominated fan cultures insofar as media fandom has traditionally hidden itself from TPTB which at the same time led to it not being recognized as the amazing subculture it is! In recent years however, more and more fans are starting to come out, display their art, acknowledge their hobbies, and one of those places has been www.imeem.com, a site that hosts streaming video.
Below is a slightly modified version of the rec post I sent Jason. It only contains vids that are on imeem (thus missing some likewise amazing vids that are not shared publicly, however). It also is totally biased by what I watch and like. Moreover, I’m not a vidder nor would I ever dare play one on TV and tend to focus on character and narrative primarily. So, take the following with a grain of salt, but for those who’ve never seen a vid or not seen what vidders have done in recent years, this might be a useful intro. (more…)

There’s been lots of interesting things going on in the blogosphere, and I just wanted to link to some of them:

* Louisa and Robert are continuing the gender and fan studies discussion in Henry’s blog with a conversation on vids and machinima (HERE and ).

* I posted my first entry to Media Commons–Queer Coding in ReGenesis. I’m still puzzling over the forum and its purpose/ability/impact, but I’m all for supporting new things like that. [In fact, while my entry is pretty standard and unimpressive, I was fascinated by the one the day after, Virtual Funeral Crashing, which suggests some interesting and unsettling RL/MMORPG connections and the ethics surrounding that.]

* Karen expands on her discussion with Jason, the first in the gender and fan studies debate (HERE and HERE) with Turning the Table on the Object of Study).

* And on a personal note, nothing spells ambiguity of academia like the emotional high and frustration of getting an essay accepted and being told that they’ve decided to shorten the maximum pages and being faced with a 23 to 10 pages cut!

While the collaborative project for a pan-fannish, fan-run, incorporated, non-profit archive came in response to FanLib, for me it’s also an indication of the issues I’ve been discussing in this blog, i.e., how can we safely share our work with the wider public and, especially after the recent LJ deletions [I've been trying to figure out whom to link to, but maybe Metafandom might still be the best choice at this point.], how can we present ourselves to the world. The question of publicity and its costs has to be on every acafan’s mind as much as it should be on everyone’s mind who talks to a reporter or drops links in high traveled blogs. We’re such a diverse community, and not a one of us can speak for us all and any attempt to generalize is prone to leave a bunch of fans unrecognized [And yes, I know I've done that before, which is why I'm well aware of the danger *g*]

A central archive, then, fulfills a variety of purposes: for the fan (current and future) it can be a repository to post and read (and, depending on how it’ll be implemented, network); for the curious non-fan, it can be an introduction that presents and explains and contextualizes. Ideally, to me, it’s be simultaneously active archive for active fans, repository for interested fans and historians, and an at least somewhat fair (re)presentation of media fandom to outsiders, for interested academics, journalists, random curious bypassers. (more…)

I feel like I ought to speak up on FanLib and Strikeout 07, since there’s little else that’s been occupying my fannish thoughts and my LJ friendslist–and yet I have great difficulties doing so. And it’s not even that so much marvelous analysis and responsive art and in depth research and provocative discussions have already been posted so that I’d feel like I’d simply retrace and summarize what others have said. It’s not even that I’m kind of tired of the former and still not quite certain what to do with the latter–though that’s certainly true. It’s rather that I feel loathe to link into people’s private LJs from this blog. (more…)

Anticipating the conversations that will emerge from Henry Jenkins’s announcement to host a discussion among fan scholars in his blog, Will Brooker and I started a conversation on his participation, the issues we might have to address and just general thoughts on gender in fan studies. In the middle of it, I realized that we’d kind of done on a smaller (and maybe a tad less academic : ) scale what the summer discussions might look like. So I decided to edit our conversation into more readable form (with his input), because I think they raise some interesting issues about gendering of fandom, academia, fan studies and the emotional investments accompanying them. (more…)

I sometimes worry about my own motivations as to why the idea of convergence unsettles me so. The theoretical part of me, of course, is all over it, loving the way the clear producer/consumer dichotomy is disrupted, but the fan in me is much less sanguine about it. I’ve articulated part of my discomfort in my paper for Flow, where I worry about the lines that may get drawn between acceptable and unacceptable fan responses: after all, the flipside to getting the foot in the door, as far as I can see, is getting co-opted and helping exclude those that don’t play by the rules. [In other words, for me it's important to embrace the most vulnerable aspects of our fannish creations rather than dismissing them in an attempt to get accepted by only showing the things most easily acceptable by the outside.] So, a big part of me is all about solidarity and standing by those (texts and fans) that may never get accepted for convergence; another (possibly bigger?) part might simply not want to share my toys and likes being part of a group a bit too much, a group that isn’t what every Jane, Dick, or Harry’s doing. And clearly with fannish behavior instantiating everywhere, that’s not the case any more.

convergence in action These are thoughts I’m constantly trying to negotiate, and they are frequently brought to the surface. At the moment, my flist is still squeeing over one (often-ficced) actor not only using Twitter to share random thoughts from set but also friending back *everyone*. In effect, then, if he were to read his Twitter friends, he’d be overwhelmed with his own image (and that of his co-actor). The other big story is a recent con where the usual slash questions were asked. The debates after almost every con are alike, though I find it interesting that the tone has shifted over the years: the “don’t ask the actors about slash ever” has given way to discussions about the slash closet, pride, and, of course, media convergence and more public fannish behavior. Meanwhile, several people on my flist as well as Nancy Baym have linked to Sex, Drugs, and Updating Your Blog, the NYT account of a convergence fairy tale–struggling artists getting supported by their creative fans who make vids, help them sell his music, but demand attention in turn. (more…)

When it comes to online social networks and anything related to it, I feel like the tortoise and the hare with Danah Boyd: I have any idea, and when I look for research, Danah has already blogged on it. Her most recent essay, Social Network Sites: Public, Private, or What?, address an issue that I’ve been thinking about a lot in the last few months, most specifically, the issue of semi or seeming privacy in public Internet spaces. [Danah's essay goes off in a different direction as she compares mediated and unmediated social sites and the way privacy issue get negotiated, and how educators ought to understand the way youth engage with the social architecture of online publics.]

At the moment, I’m still getting used to this public face I’m putting up for the world in this blog, am torn between the egoboo of close to 4000 hits in a week and the freakout of googling my name and having this blog as one of the first hits. I’ve always been extremely protective of my LJ, in part out of practical reasons but mostly because it’s *my* space in a very personal way. I’ve invested a lot of time and energy and affect in my pseudonym, and it’s something I never felt the need to share beyond my circle, to make public. When I started this blog, I felt quite similarly. (more…)