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morgandawnPosted in full at: https://ift.tt/2OkknFi on November 02, 2018 at 04:18PM
“
In the earliest days of fandom, we owned the servers. Of course, the “servers” then were just smiles and words, pen and paper, staples and stamps. We were intimate and secretive—and also small. Fan works passed hand to hand, and there were no unintended audiences, no critical outside eyes. We controlled channels of distribution; we controlled which ears heard our stories. We wrote for an “insider audience” (Bacon-Smith 1992) with an entirely different value and culture than the traditional writing market; it was our own thing.
It is hard to say when the first fan work may have appeared on a server outside our control. The early days of the internet brought us Usenet and email-based mailing lists as popular modes of communication and dissemination. The internet altered the very substance of fandom; fan artifacts were no longer physical, and geographical boundaries no longer existed (Busse and Hellekson 2006). Without these barriers, participation in fan creation communities grew by leaps and bounds. It also meant that posting a story online required relinquishing some control; you weren’t giving it to a person at a fan convention, you were giving it to the world at large, to anyone who could connect to a Usenet server. And suddenly, for the first time, the platform mattered.
The problem with platforms is that they have their own agenda. When deciding on policies, for example, a platform (or, rather, its stakeholders) has its own concerns—about leeway, liability, profit, and public perception (Gillespie 2010)—and these concerns are probably not the same as those of its users.
”
- Owning the servers: A design fiction exploring the transformation of fandom into “our own” by Casey Fiesler Tags:not a reblog, quotes, fandom meta, fandom history, the reason ao3 exists, and it is why vidding fandom needs to follow, and do the same for fanvids, vidding, fanvids, DWCrosspost
Tumblr post (this is likely a reblog, and may have more pictures over there)
“
In the earliest days of fandom, we owned the servers. Of course, the “servers” then were just smiles and words, pen and paper, staples and stamps. We were intimate and secretive—and also small. Fan works passed hand to hand, and there were no unintended audiences, no critical outside eyes. We controlled channels of distribution; we controlled which ears heard our stories. We wrote for an “insider audience” (Bacon-Smith 1992) with an entirely different value and culture than the traditional writing market; it was our own thing.
It is hard to say when the first fan work may have appeared on a server outside our control. The early days of the internet brought us Usenet and email-based mailing lists as popular modes of communication and dissemination. The internet altered the very substance of fandom; fan artifacts were no longer physical, and geographical boundaries no longer existed (Busse and Hellekson 2006). Without these barriers, participation in fan creation communities grew by leaps and bounds. It also meant that posting a story online required relinquishing some control; you weren’t giving it to a person at a fan convention, you were giving it to the world at large, to anyone who could connect to a Usenet server. And suddenly, for the first time, the platform mattered.
The problem with platforms is that they have their own agenda. When deciding on policies, for example, a platform (or, rather, its stakeholders) has its own concerns—about leeway, liability, profit, and public perception (Gillespie 2010)—and these concerns are probably not the same as those of its users.
”
- Owning the servers: A design fiction exploring the transformation of fandom into “our own” by Casey Fiesler Tags:not a reblog, quotes, fandom meta, fandom history, the reason ao3 exists, and it is why vidding fandom needs to follow, and do the same for fanvids, vidding, fanvids, DWCrosspost
Tumblr post (this is likely a reblog, and may have more pictures over there)