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morgandawnFandom usually jumps into technologies, uses them, and then acts surprised when we realize that we have no clue what we're doing or how the use of the new tech has changed an aspect of our fandom culture. Right now a few authors are posting notices that you need permission to link to their fanworks in "public spaces". Or that they'd prefer their readers comment on their fic where it was originally posted. Each author gets to unilaterally define what is public with the expectation that every reader will follow because that is part of the "social contract". So for today Goodreads = public and is not a place to list or review fanfic. Tumblr is OK (for now) because it is not seen as a "public" space.*
It used to be easier to know what to expect of other fans but the moment we went online, the fannish social contract was voided due to sheer size and complexity of online interactions. Add the fact that new platforms and new ways of interacting keep coming out every 20 minutes and you have a hot conceptual mess filled with poorly understood expectations.
I know that when we went online in the 1990s few of us had any idea that fans would be publicly posting their porn fanfic** to open access websites (no. stop. think of the children!), displaying their explicit art where anyone could see (blush), and tweeting their love of RPS and knotting fic (OMGWTFBB!). By those standards, we have all breached the original fannish social contract of keeping fandom a "safe space" simply by interacting with one another in public and online. And I suspect that 20 years down the road, we will again struggle to recognize "fandom" as it continues to be reshaped by technology.
So I would rather see us practice mindfulness and awareness that the tools and platforms we use change us and our culture instead of snapping at one another because we've changed and that we no longer know what to expect from one another.
Because to be honest, I have no clue any more. And I'd be wary of anyone who claims otherwise.
*Keep in mind that most fans don't bother to turn off Google indexing on their tumblr blogs (or their LJ...or their DW..or their twitter or their.....). And even if they do, every time someone else reblogs your content, if *their blog* is searchable by Google it will still be "public".
**A few of us did have in inkling but we all kept it quiet because we did not want to scare our fellow fans with our crazy visions of the future filled with flying fans sporting jetpack keyboards and tinhats.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-17 06:21 am (UTC)And some of the freakout is understandable, but... it's not like fans are dragging f'locked fic or password-archive stories into googleable blog sites. They're grabbing public, searchable data from one place and posting it in another public, searchable social space.
And this drama happens EVERY time fandom stretches past its current boundaries and spills over into some space formerly not known for fannish content.
Maybe we need a Fanlore page for "When Fandom Content Winds Up In Mainstream Spaces," because the same cycle happens over and over. The only reason it hasn't killed fandom is that the new activity *always* brings in more new fans than old ones decide to go into lockdown mode. (Of course, much of the old guard refuses to recognize the new fans as "real enough" until they've had their own "OMG my fanfic is showing up WHERE" moment.)
(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-17 06:51 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-17 07:22 am (UTC)Because I believe discussions go better with real examples rather than general statements, here are some examples:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15992088-sharp-teeth
(author links visible in the profile attached to the book)author links now removed from the profile, so here is another example: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18103472-asunderhttps://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5027408.DarkEmeralds( a more direct example of an author profile with links)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23676350-goddamn (an entry with no author info)
Entries pulled from here, so feel free to poke around
https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/14985.M_M_Supernatural_And_J2_Fanfiction
Re cover credit - there is no place to credit the cover art (it is something you have to manually type in the description field which means cover credit is more miss than hit in what I've seen). The cover sizes are small thumbnails which most likely would fall within fair use. Again, on tumblr posts, cover credit also seems to be hit and miss, but that is no excuse.
All these issues are fixable once the author claims their profile (or you can ask a Librarian to fix it). The "data" that is being included is very typical of what many fans put up on tumblr or blogs or websites or tweets when they rec a story. It is the location that is the issue and the location "issue" is not specific to Goodreads but can and will crop up anywhere on the net.
Which is why I agree with elf that it would be helpful to have an FAQ: "So someone has posted something about you on the Internet".
Re the good old days on concrit - well in my day, you did not have to ask permission to submit an LOC or write a review. And even when we migrated to the Internet, reviews and feedback were offered without so much as a by your leave. So clearly the good old days have mutated too. ;-)
(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-17 09:04 am (UTC)It's like if someone creates a facebook profile under my name and doesn't tell me about it. It might be legal, but it sure as heck isn't ethical.
Entries pulled from here, so feel free to poke around.
Thanks for the link. I did poke around a bit. It looks like perhaps the librarians are adding info to the author profiles? Most of them had livejournal, twitter and/or AO3 account info attached.
Gekizetsu is on my flist and I know her, so I looked at her profile. It lists her real first name and quotes about the origin of her name and some nicknames that aren't posted publicly anywhere that I could find, and a link to her completely flocked LJ. I've asked her if she knows about it on twitter. I'll let you know.
Felisblanco is trying to publish The Doors of Time, so I'd imagine that she might be upset to see it already on GR and not under her control? Not to mention that Petit Madame's fanart is included as Felis's profile pic. (Enlarges pretty darned big if you click on it.)
The fic "Twist and Shout" is actually uploaded to Goodreads as a downloadable file. Not sure if the author knows about that one.My bad. I read it wrong. It links to AO3.Fleshflutter's fics all have reposted fanart uploaded as covers that can be enlarged to a fairly large size. 3-4 times larger than a thumbnail. (If you hover over the image on the book's page, it gives you the option to enlarge cover.) The art does seem to be credited though.
The Redemption Road author is listed as "various", no one is actually mentioned by name, so there's pretty much nothing they can do about that fic if they wanted it pulled, and no artist credit for the cover.
There's also these: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/2120086-fanfiction-deletion?page=2&ref=ru_lihp_cm_tp_11_mclk-exp71cell166_exp69cell155-up2043844976#comment_111040928
https://www.goodreads.com/user_status/show/54428714?page=2#comment_111100055
So as long as the GR "culture" is doing stuff like this without people's knowledge or consent, I don't have much sympathy. That's not even getting into making things googleable that might not have been previously. (Most of my friends know about anti-spider and anti-indexing options.) I think it's overstepping bounds, maybe not legally, but at the very least ethically. And just because fandom is expanding and changing, it doesn't make these behaviors right. I think the GR people need to adapt more to fanculture, not the other way around. Their whole controlling "we can do whatever we want, so gtfo" attitude is hugely abrasive and offensive. You don't go into someone's home, take things and then bitch about them when they find out and are unhappy about it. It's just basic common courtesy.
But it all boils down to "you can't fix it if you don't know it's broke." (And that's not even getting into the
evil empireAmazon connection! ;)(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-17 03:12 pm (UTC)In your metaphor of going into someone's home and taking things, you are creating AO3 and Tumblr as personal protected spaces. I know I've made that argument for LJ before, when most of us did spider and index block and conversations on here were quite separate from the non fannish world so to speak. But can we still make that argument? Are the GR readers actually strangers or are they merely other fans employing another interface? And, for that matter, are we actually having a private party here when we frequently cross retumblr back and forth with TPTB?
I fully understand and agree that exposing non accessible information in public places is wrong. I actually even agree that hard to find connections published in searchable in easily accessible places is wrong (i.e., if someone lists their hometown in a random LJ post that doesn't mean it should be put on their GR page). I also agree that images are a different issue, especially when they are fully reproduced and not credited.
But the outrage that I hear in the various posts and see in your comment here suggests that there are distinct communities (fans and GR readers) and that fans exist in a contained space from which GR readers "take things." Leaving aside the entire who is taking what (and again, I'm hugely sympathetic to the argument that taking material from published copyrighted texts and transforming them is not the same as taking material from within your own community and doing the same) , can we really demand that readers not comment on stories, that they can't write reviews?
I know I get very frustrated when people read my (published nonfiction) work out of context. In fact, I've gotten quite annoyed at GR reviews before. But that can't and shouldn't keep that reader from reading my book from the wrong perspective so to speak. I firmly believe that fanfic should be read within its own context and that it can lose much if not most of its meaning when taking out of that context. But "that context" may be as specific as the inside jokes on Tumblr while it's being written. It may be the fannish mood at the moment after a given episode. Different readers, different fans have all kinds of contextual clues that are not always the same and may be quite different from the author's. And yes, lacking those contexts readers may misjudge the works severely. But who gets harmed by that? Someone misread your story and posts it on a platform for other readers. What is the actual harm?
As for the Amazon connection, definitely true. Not sure what that'd mean for anyone still posting on LJ. And who owns Tumblr? Being on DW and AO3 is a moral decision for me, true. But I think fandom has long used commercial platforms just like it has been used by them, and I wouldn't begrudge any community their use of platform (and i'm not sure Amazon truly benefits from fanfic reviews)
Sorry TLDR...I'm trying to sort my kneejerk reactions, because I'm actually very invested in the community created works and the context driven readings and yet I'm amazed why the vehemence of the reactions.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-18 04:10 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-18 04:26 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-18 05:05 am (UTC)I don't mind giving my thoughts, but please keep in mind that they're only my thoughts on why GR doesn't seem like part of "fandom" to me and why it's different to tumbr and other established fandom spaces. I don't speak for anyone else in fandom. Also I am not trying to "determine what interfaces are and are not fandom." I won't argue with you that there are fans on goodreads, but there is a certain fandom etiquette that's been understood since I joined fandom (ah, the old Gundam Wing egroups days) and most of the folks on GR are not just ignoring that, they don't even know or care that it exists. In fact one librarian was openly hostile about it. So there is definitely culture clash going on, but I don't think it's entirely restricted to or caused by the platform. I think it might even be an inevitable part of the mainstreaming of fandom and this is just the latest iteration.
First I am not really sure this is actually an expansion of fandom. On GR, there's no podfic. There's no meta. There's no vidding or pic spams or even much squee. Heck, from looking at the Goodreads TOS I don't think rpf would be allowed on the site. How about Swordspoint fanfic? Or Outlander fanfic? GR is a select, small slice of fandom being extracted for the purpose of critiquing. Can you imagine if jesswave or Elsa Rolle had suddenly started reviewing fanfic? Or Publishers Weekly or Kirkus? NYT? To me that's the same idea taken to an extreme. I don't like it on a big scale. I don't like it on a small scale. (I do not like green eggs and ham!) Goodreads is about promotion, and that's pretty antithetical to fandom, IMO. Tumblr still falls under sharing with friends to me. You have to search out people with commonalities who post things you like to follow on your dash. I personally feel like I know the people on my tumblr much better than my goodreads friends, yet I've been on goodreads probably three times as long. They're strangers, even the people I interact with on a daily basis.
Second of all, the idea that authors (and maybe artists?) should be forced to have a profile on goodreads to control how their work is presented-- could you imagine if all authors were suddenly forced to get fanfic.net accounts? Or a Dreamwidth acct, or tumblr account, deviantart? IMO, it's kind of ridiculous and the sort of thing that makes fandom people shut down, not embrace it with open arms. Fanfic writers being forced to invest time to police and maintain a profile on a site designed to criticize them? And GR prides itself on not removing database entries ever, for any reason. That's pretty absolute. I may not like people pulling their fanfic down to publish it, or because they're afraid of people finding out about it, or even because they've moved on from fandom, but I would never dispute their right to do it. Yet if Felisblanco succeeds in publishing her book, there's already a fanfic entry on goodreads for it that she shouldn't ever be able to get removed? It should be up there forever to compare with the book's reviews? Is that fair? Doesn't seem right to me. So it's not even principally the reviews that I object to, it's the cataloging and permanent nature of the data. Authors should have control over that without being forced to have a presence on the platform. And it should be opt in, not opt out. (Can authors see where hits on their AO3 fanfic are coming from? Perhaps this shouldn't have come as such a shock? I don't know.) Even AO3 gives them the choice to orphan their works.
Finally, I'm not sure how fandom being googleable relates to this. You have to actively enter something to search for in google. It's active participation. I don't know anyone who browses Google. In goodreads you can just browse tags and lists and reviews, look at what your friends are reading, or wander around and stumble across fanfic with no determining action being taken on your part. Everything is interlinked. They promote reading lists on your GR home page unsolicited and suggest related books and you can't opt out of that, afaik. Goodreads is designed to promote things and reach the widest possible audience. Fandom is not. It's about sharing your work with your intimates and maybe their intimates. Word of mouth, if you will, controlled by the creator, not blast determined by the site coding and an algorithm of hit counters and ratings.
My stealing metaphor... I'm not arguing anything about tumblr. I don't like tumblr as a fandom platform either, so you won't hear me defending it. It's a bit of an echo chamber and you can get a really skewed perspective of what fandom is like just from choosing your dash. But I would argue that AO3 is a protected space. People can lock their fics and disable downloads and remove it from searches, make it private. I've seen at least two comments over on GR where people have said they'll read fanfic, but they don't consider themselves a part of fandom and they'd never browse AO3. They only read the fanfic because of their friends' reviews showing up in their feeds. So no, I don't consider those people a part of fandom. They don't want to be a part of fandom. But I acknowledge that there also are fans being born on GR. There was one girl who was really apologetic for her part in adding fanfic entries and she understood the creator's POV when it was explained to her. But right now there's no happy medium, and until there is, I fall on the side of more anonymity is better, control should be in the hands of the creators, and don't assume that everyone wants to be promoted and publicized all across the web.
I do think that your experience with published nonfiction is fundamentally different from fanfic however. I assume you had editors, marketing, a target demographic, the goal was perhaps to make money? You published knowing that it would be reviewed and criticized and judged. I don't think fandom creators have that same mindset, nor should they. They put their works out there for different reasons. Gift economy and all that.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-18 05:31 am (UTC)Lots to chew on here, but please let fan authors know they can get the entries for their fan stories removed. Not only the page removed, but it will reach into Goodread readers' accounts and delete their reviews, their comments, their discussions, ratings and remove the story from their 'to read" lists. That is an unusual amount of "removal" - think of Google removing something from its search engine and then going to your website, tumblr account, blog and email accounts to delete the info there as well. So far around 20% of the Sterek fanfic has been removed - other fandoms are ranging from 2-8% and I expect the numbers to climb. The process is not hard and it will take a day or two. The Goodread Librarians are working hard so please tell the authors to be polite and patient.
There are some good instructions for authors on tumblr - I cannot put my hand on them.
edited to add: here is the contact link to ask Goodreads for removal https://www.goodreads.com/about/contact_us
A GR Librarian explains more here (see comment 59) https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/2120086-fanfiction-deletion?page=2#comment_111042714
if there is one more "signal boost", please reblog this info so that fan authors know they have options.
(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-18 06:24 am (UTC)I found something interesting
In some of the fanfic reviews, readers are leaving...proto-fan-mixes? They link to music that they think fits the story https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/981921945?book_show_action=true
And there are picspams (there are better ones than these examples but it is late) https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/161583784?book_show_action=true https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/363613748?book_show_action=true https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21943305-smile-for-the-camera
(no subject)
From:(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-18 06:12 pm (UTC)http://fanlore.org/wiki/%22Crossing_the_Line:_%27Netfans%27_and_%27Printfans%27%22 (sorry I don't have a clickable link)
An excerpt (you really should read the entire essay)
"For me, the point, the heart of fandom is discussion, conversation, and analysis. ..... The heart of a convention like Escapade is not the dealers' room, important as it may be.... it is the panel discussions.
The heart of fandom -- that is, of what *I love* about fandom -- is discussion and analysis. And not just of shows and characters, which analysis is often done through the mechanism and metaphor of stories as well as through explicit discussion, but of fandom itself. Panels on the history of slash are perennially popular. ..... The advent of the net has spurred intense discussion of what makes a fan a fan, and how fans relate to one another and to fandom as an idea.
It's very difficult, perhaps impossible, to do this kind of meta-analysis through stories alone. .... I can't think of any net stories that I would categorize as doing this kind of thing, though. (Which doesn't mean they don't exist, of course; it means I haven't heard of them.) And if net fans are indeed concerned with stories just as product, then they aren't interested in joining analytical discussions, in brainstorming with others, in both *doing* and *reflecting on* fandom."
(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:to answer cathexys question about how I used to feel about fandom visibility
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-18 06:51 am (UTC)1) Tumblr's password-protect option seems very much like a matter of "meh, you and your five friends can use this for your cooking club if you want," not like LJ/DW community setups. Tumblr's screwball dashboard and endless stream of NEW STUFF SHINY ALL THE TIME means locked things don't work well as a normal part of the tumblr social venue.
2) Yahoo owns tumblr; they bought it a couple of years ago. Much drama and fretting at the time about whether they were going to lock down all the NSFW content. So far, they haven't, but they have been increasing the amount of advertising and doing other "tweaks" to the user experience without regard to user communities or preferences.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-17 03:30 pm (UTC)Quick note about gekizetsu
The info was pulled from her google searchable website where she lists her names http://gekizetsu.net/about.html
Google has been indexing more and more over the years. There is more out there that we know.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-17 10:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-17 04:52 pm (UTC)but this is not Goodreads "culture" - thus is today's online culture. It sits at the foundation of most corporations and businesses. And it is way beyond anyone's ability to control.
but this is where some good news creeps in - goodreads unlike the vast majority of aggregators *will* allow you - the author - the ability to control your profile in their corner of the world. It may not make much of a difference but it shows that there are more similarities than differences between "their" and "our" culture,
(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-18 02:07 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-18 02:42 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-17 07:44 am (UTC)And regarding the "crit wasn't offered unless you asked for it"... when was that, because there are letterzines going back to the 70's that were packed with unrequested flaming critiques, including declarations of the authors' education, personality and moral standards, based on either their fic or their participation in the social aspects of the zines.
To be fair, the crit was rarely in the same zine as the stories... but critique on GR is not the same as commenting on the story with it. GR reviews are for readers, not for the author--and I very much want review sites to be comfortable places for readers to say "I didn't like this, and here's why." Even if the "why" translates to "because I'm an immature, close-minded bigot, and this story contained ideas that made me uncomfortable" or "because the author supports [cause I hate] on her website."
FWIW, I think posting fanfic on Goodreads is more than a bit ridiculous. But I'm not a Goodreads user; I don't get my book recs or my social activity there. So I'm not comfortable saying "Fandom: they're doing it wrong;" obviously it's not how I do fandom, but if I got to declare who and how is "doing fandom wrong," GR is nowhere near where I'd start.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-17 09:20 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-17 03:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-17 03:25 pm (UTC)ABB?
Someone sent me link to the horrific author-reader interactions in the past years on GR and after reading just a little bit, i understand the GR reader vehemence.
I understand the fanfic writer vehemence as we've been living in the midst of it for decades.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-17 03:29 pm (UTC)I've only seen the authors behaving badly thing in passing but that was enough to make me have very angry thoughts... I stand by what I tell my 101 students: if your reader misunderstands you it's more than likely YOUR fault. Not theirs! You can't run after your paper/story/essay/book and tell folks, you're reading it wrong! That's how you should interpret it!!!
(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-17 03:39 pm (UTC)Seriously, turn off Google indexing. The shit anyone can find on you in 5 minutes is terrifying.
Oh and even if you turn it off someone else may be reblogging or quoting or linking to it and that is being indexed. And if you forget to lock it for 5 frigging minutes (yes this happened to me), it will be snatched up. Blogging on tumblr is about as public as you can get. Facebook has more privacy protections in comparison.
Railing at Goodreads readers is like yelling at the one ocean wave for getting you wet. Stick around for another 5 minutes. There will be another wave. And you will be wet.
(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-17 02:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-01-09 07:48 pm (UTC)