Event Title
Platforms that Matter
Location
CB1-309
Start Date
4-11-2017 8:15 AM
End Date
4-11-2017 9:45 AM
Description
Since its emergence in the 1970s, media fandom has utilized a range of different technologies to collaborate and communicate. With each new platform, new features are introduced and previous norms are reworked. This session examines how platforms matter in contemporary fan cultures and practices. In particular, we interrogate the features and assumptions built into platforms, their affordances and limitations, and the ways they materialize in code and through social norms.
Francesca Coppa, one of the founders of the Organization of Transformative Works (OTW), discusses how fandom's founding of OTW and building projects like the Archive of Our Own (AO3), the CC Gold Open Access journal Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC) and the wiki Fanlore were based in a realization that fans needed to own the servers that housed their works and tracked their networks. This anticipated current digital humanities initiatives for scholars and teachers like UNW's Domain of One's Own and Open Media Scholarship, pointing to academia's similar need to develop alternatives to corporate, for profit scholarly tools and paywalled journals that make scholarship inaccessible and unusably expensive.
Also taking a long view, Kristina Busse examines the challenges scholars and teachers face when selecting fan works to discuss in their research or use in teaching. Researchers are forced to choose between the accessibility of texts on open platforms and the intertextual quality of fan texts intensely situated in more closed communities. Busse outlines the methodological and ethical tensions that arise when choosing between exemplary versus representative fan texts.
In contrast to the models offered by AO3 or in fan fiction communities, the next two presentations address the challenges fans face when using mainstream commercial platforms like Tumblr and Twitter. These are platforms where fans have far less control and input. However, Twitter and Tumblr remediate and transform classic fan practices/features. JSA Lowe and Mel Stanfill examine ways Twitter brings fans and celebrities into closer proximity, facilitating both contact and harassment. In particular, we discuss actor William Shatner's attacks on queer and women fans on Twitter. We use this case study to consider how Twitter's affordances simultaneously amplify and diminish user inequalities.
Finally, Katherine Morrissey interrogates Tumblr's emphasis on reblogging and tag surfing, outlining ways these features lead to charged encounters between different fans. Tumblr's reblog, ask, and tagging features extend and dramatically transform long-standing fan practices. As a result,Tumblr is viewed, simultaneously, as a problematic echo chamber, a social justice powerhouse, and all that is wrong and right about contemporary media fandom.
Through these historic and contemporary views, we investigate the specific intersections of technology with fan practice. This allows us to better understand how fan cultures have engaged with specific platforms over time and the ways fan engagement and practices shift along with their platforms.
Platforms that Matter
CB1-309
Since its emergence in the 1970s, media fandom has utilized a range of different technologies to collaborate and communicate. With each new platform, new features are introduced and previous norms are reworked. This session examines how platforms matter in contemporary fan cultures and practices.
