When I first went online fannishly I joined Virgule-L, a slash mailing list. At the time women were few on the net and were routinely harassed. Topics surrounding slash were taboo, so in order to join Virgule-L you had to use your full real name, attest to both your age and gender and sign a statement that if you shared your email account (which many of us back then did with the rest of the household) that they would not read the emails.
oh and you were forbidden to mention the mailing list online
As list admin, I had to police these policies and as you can imagine it quickly became tedious and then futile as fandom overran us and stampeded online.
Bur for decades I, like most fans, felt we should be playing in "fandom only safe spaces."
Which is why I found LJ so terrifying - you were not just talking about fandom issues - everyone was blogging about their cats, their kids, their SO, their bunions...TMI in the open.
And I still felt we were protected by what I call "herd immunity" (or the "great school of fish in the sea protects the individual fish" - it was not privacy per se, but obscurity we relied upon.
But even obscurity is being eroded more and more with content aggregators linking our identities and activities and selling the info (or offering it up for free for ad revenue). I posted today about a fan who outed themselves to me via their LinkedIn account and that is only one of the many social media outlets.
So my attitude has shifted away from trying to police fandom, to trying to get fandom to recognize the shape of things that are, to trying to get fans to use the limited privacy tools that we have as best as we can, and to stop snapping at each other for something none of us can control.
to answer cathexys question about how I used to feel about fandom visibility
oh and you were forbidden to mention the mailing list online
As list admin, I had to police these policies and as you can imagine it quickly became tedious and then futile as fandom overran us and stampeded online.
Bur for decades I, like most fans, felt we should be playing in "fandom only safe spaces."
Which is why I found LJ so terrifying - you were not just talking about fandom issues - everyone was blogging about their cats, their kids, their SO, their bunions...TMI in the open.
And I still felt we were protected by what I call "herd immunity" (or the "great school of fish in the sea protects the individual fish" - it was not privacy per se, but obscurity we relied upon.
But even obscurity is being eroded more and more with content aggregators linking our identities and activities and selling the info (or offering it up for free for ad revenue). I posted today about a fan who outed themselves to me via their LinkedIn account and that is only one of the many social media outlets.
So my attitude has shifted away from trying to police fandom, to trying to get fandom to recognize the shape of things that are, to trying to get fans to use the limited privacy tools that we have as best as we can, and to stop snapping at each other for something none of us can control.