#racism in america

MLK Day 2022 - editorials from today’s New York Daily News.

fozmeadows:

For the past decade, English language fanwriting culture post the days of LiveJournal and Strikethrough has been hugely shaped by a handful of megafandoms that exploded across AO3 and tumblr – I’m talking Supernatural,Teen Wolf,Dr Who, the MCU, Harry Potter, Star Wars, BBC Sherlock – which have all been overwhelmingly white. I don’t mean in terms of the fans themselves, although whiteness also figures prominently in said fandoms: I mean that the source materials themselves feature very few POC, and the ones who are there tended to be done dirty by the creators.

Periodically, this has led POC in fandom to point out, extremely reasonably, that even where non-white characters do get central roles in various media properties, they’re often overlooked by fandom at large, such that the popular focus stays primarily on the white characters. Sometimes this happened (it was argued) because the POC characters were secondary to begin with and as such attracted less fan devotion (although this has never stopped fandoms from picking a random white gremlin from the background cast and elevating them to the status of Fave); at other times, however, there has been a clear trend of sidelining POC leads in favour of white alternatives (as per Finn, Poe and Rose Tico being edged out in Star Wars shipping by Hux, Kylo and Rey). I mention this, not to demonize individuals whose preferred ships happen to involve white characters, but to point out the collective impact these trends can have on POC in fandom spaces: it’s not bad to ship what you ship, but that doesn’t mean there’s no utility in analysing what’s popular and why through a racial lens.

All this being so, it feels increasingly salient that fanwriting culture as exists right now developed under the influence and in the shadow of these white-dominated fandoms – specifically, the taboo against criticizing or critiquing fics for any reason. Certainly, there’s a hell of a lot of value to Don’t Like, Don’t Read as a general policy, especially when it comes to the darker, kinkier side of ficwriting, and whether the context is professional or recreational, offering someone direct, unsolicited feedback on their writing style is a dick move. But on the flipside, the anti-criticism culture in fanwriting has consistently worked against fans of colour who speak out about racist tropes, fan ignorance and hurtful portrayals of living cultures. Voicing anything negative about works created for free is seen as violating a core rule of ficwriting culture – but as that culture has been foundationally shaped by white fandoms, white characters and, overwhelmingly, white ideas about what’s allowed and what isn’t, we ought to consider that all critical contexts are not created equal.

Right now, the rise of C-drama (and K-drama, and J-drama) fandoms is seeing a surge of white creators – myself included – writing fics for fandoms in which no white people exist, and where the cultural context which informs the canon is different to western norms. Which isn’t to say that no popular fandoms focused on POC have existed before now – K-pop RPF and anime fandoms, for example, have been big for a while. But with the success of The Untamed, more western fans are investing in stories whose plots, references, characterization and settings are so fundamentally rooted in real Chinese history and living Chinese culture that it’s not really possible to write around it. And yet, inevitably, too many in fandom are trying to do just that, treating respect for Chinese culture or an attempt to understand it as optional extras – because surely, fandom shouldn’t feel like work. If you’re writing something for free, on your own time, for your own pleasure, why should anyone else get to demand that you research the subject matter first?

Because it matters, is the short answer. Because race and culture are not made-up things like lightsabers and werewolves that you can alter, mock or misunderstand without the risk of hurting or marginalizing actual real people – and because, quite frankly, we already know that fandom is capable of drawing lines in the sand where it chooses. When Brony culture first reared its head (hah), the online fandom for My Little Pony – which, like the other fandoms we’re discussing here, is overwhelmingly female – was initially welcoming. It felt like progress, that so many straight men could identify with such a feminine show; a potential sign that maybe, we were finally leaving the era of mainstream hypermasculine fandom bullshit behind, at least in this one arena. And then, in pretty much the blink of an eye, things got overwhelmingly bad. Artists drawing hardcorn porn didn’t tag their works as adult, leading to those images flooding the public search results for a children’s show. Women were edged out of their own spaces. Bronies got aggressive, posting harsh, ugly criticism of artists whose gijinka interpretations of the Mane Six as humans were deemed insufficiently fuckable.

The resulting fandom conflict was deeply unpleasant, but in the end, the verdict was laid down loud and clear: if you cannot comport yourself like a decent fucking person – if your base mode of engagement within a fandom is to coopt it from the original audience and declare it newly cool only because you’re into it now; if you do not, at the very least, attempt to understand and respect the original context so as to engage appropriately (in this case, by acknowledging that the media you’re consuming was foundational to many women who were there before you and is still consumed by minors, and tagging your goddamn porn) – then the rest of fandom will treat you like a social biohazard, and rightly so.

Here’s the thing, fellow white people: when it comes to C-drama fandoms and other non-white, non-western properties? We are the Bronies.

Not, I hasten to add, in terms of toxic fuckery – though if we don’t get our collective shit together, I’m not taking that darkest timeline off the table. What I mean is that, by virtue of the whiteminding which, both consciously and unconsciously, has shaped current fan culture, particularly in terms of ficwriting conventions, we’re collectively acting as though we’re the primary audience for narratives that weren’t actually made with us in mind, being hostile dicks to Chinese and Chinese diaspora fans when they take the time to point out what we’re getting wrong. We’re bristling because we’ve conceived of ficwriting as a place wherein No Criticism Occurs without questioning how this culture, while valuable in some respects, also serves to uphold, excuse and perpetuate microaggresions and other forms of racism, lashing out or falling back on passive aggression when POC, quite understandably, talk about how they’re sick and tired of our bullshit.

An analogy: one of the most helpful and important tags on AO3 is the one for homophobia, not just because it allows readers to brace for or opt out of reading content they might find distressing, but because it lets the reader know that the writer knows what homophobia is, and is employing it deliberately. When this concept is tagged, I – like many others – often feel more able to read about it than I do when it crops up in untagged works of commercial fiction, film or TV, because I don’t have to worry that the author thinks what they’re depicting is okay. I can say definitively, “yes, the author knows this is messed up, but has elected to tell a messed up story, a fact that will be obvious to anyone who reads this,” instead of worrying that someone will see a fucked up story blind and think “oh, I guess that’s fine.” The contextual framing matters, is the point – which is why it’s so jarring and unpleasant on those rare occasions when I do stumble on a fic whose author has legitimately mistaken homophobic microaggressions for cute banter. This is why, in a ficwriting culture that otherwise aggressively dislikes criticism, the request to tag for a certain thing – while still sometimes fraught – is generally permitted: it helps everyone to have a good time and to curate their fan experience appropriately.

But when white and/or western fans fail to educate ourselves about race, culture and the history of other countries and proceed to deploy that ignorance in our writing, we’re not tagging for racism as a thing we’ve explored deliberately; we’re just being ignorant at best and hateful at worst, which means fans of colour don’t know to avoid or brace for the content of those works until they get hit in the face with microaggresions and/or outright racism. Instead, the burden is placed on them to navigate a minefield not of their creation: which fans can be trusted to write respectfully? Who, if they make an error, will listen and apologise if the error is explained? Who, if lived experience, personal translations or cultural insights are shared, can be counted on to acknowledge those contributions rather than taking sole credit? Too often, fans of colour are being made to feel like guests in their own house, while white fans act like a tone-policing HOA.

Point being: fandom and ficwriting cultures as they currently exist badly need to confront the implicit acceptance of racism and cultural bias that underlies a lot of community rules about engagement and criticism, and that needs to start with white and western fans. We don’t want to be the new Bronies, guys. We need to do better.  

YES. With regard to racism, imperialism, and cultural bias / appropriation, this lays out the nuanced lines of where critique matters the value of respect and awareness in fandom so nicely.

idealistic-realism00:

mikkeneko:

freedom-of-fanfic:

there’s so much to tell about this subject that I might add more to some points on subsequent posts.

everything in the below post is from observation and reading about the experiences of others on web 2.0. please feel free to add anything you feel is necessary.

(socmed = social media in shorthand.)

What even is web 2.0?

Web 1.0: web model where dotcoms generated their own content and presented it to users for free, depending on advertisers for their income. ‘social media’ mostly made up of mailing lists and forums on these content-oriented sites. collapsed because ad revenue wasn’t sufficient to support site maintainance costs.

Web 2.0: web model where dotcoms create a free space for users to generate their own content, depending on advertisers for their income. these sites define social media today. likely to collapse because ad revenue still isn’t sufficient to support site maintainance costs (even after shucking the cost of paying content creators).

(if you want to read more about how ad revenue is the social media Achilles Heel, check this link out: Why Monetizing Social Media Through Advertising Is Doomed To Failure.)

What makes Web 2.0 social media so much worse than web 1.0?

mostly: web 2.0 socmed exacerbates the pre-existing conflict of interest between users and site owners: site owners need ads. Users want to avoid ads.

With web 1.0, users were attracted by site-created content that had to appeal to them: users were the clients and advertisers were the sponsors. (Forum interaction was a side offering. sites dedicated to user interaction were small, scattered, and supported by banner ads.)

Web 2.0 socmed strips users of client status entirely; the content we generate (for free!) and our eyes/eyes we attract to the site are products the site owner sells to the actual site client: advertisers.

early web 2.0 social media sites (livejournal, myspace) used hybridization to pay site costs - users could buy paid accounts or extra blog perks. they also had privacy/limited-spread sharing functions and closed communities, which still ‘exist’ but with limited capabilities on current socmed sites.  privacy, it seems, isn’t very profitable.

now web 2.0 is geared towards spreading content as far as possible - and further if you’ll choke up a little cash to grease the algorithms. ;)

–

Web 1.0 had its fair share of problems. Web 2.0 generated new ones:

• following people instead of joining communities based on interests has negative emotional and social implications
  
• social media sites benefit from knocking down privacy walls. Maximizing content spread and minimizing blocking/blacklisting capabilities benefits advertisers - the true clients of websites.
  
• social media sites benefit from eroding online anonymity. they track user site interaction, searches, and more to precisely target their ads at your interests (unless you deliberately turn it off). tracking data can endanger anonymity and make doxxing easier.
  
• social media sites benefit from conflict. Conflict generates user response much more effectively than harmony/peace. More user interaction means more eyes on ads, increasing ad space value.
• social media sites are therefore deincentivized to address abuse reports, increase moderation, improve blacklisting tools, or offer privacy options. and there’s nothing you can do about it because
  
• there’s nowhere different to go. it’s difficult to compete with existing social media sites as a startup. to draw social media users, a newcomer must offer something bigger, better, and equally free*, and offering any of this on startup capital is … unlikely, at best.
  

*‘I’d move if they just had privacy features!’ the joke is: any successful socmed site that starts with privacy features will have a hard time keeping them down the road under the present profit model. they will be forced to cater to their advertisers if they want to keep afloat.

–

how does the structure of web 2.0 socmed harm fandom?

in aggregate: it forces fandom[$], a diverse space where people go to indulge niche interests and specific tastes, into overexposure to outsiders and to one another, and exacerbates the situation by removing all semi-private interaction spaces, all moderation tools, all content-limiting tools, and all abuse protection.

The result is that fandom on web 2.0 - tumblr in particular - is overrun with widespread misinformation, black & white reasoning obliterating nuanced debates, mob rule and shame culture as substitutes for moderation features, fear of dissent and oversensitivity to disagreement, hatedoms and anti- communities, and large/expanding pockets of extremist echo chambers that have no reality check to protect those trapped inside.

to be more specific:

• moderated communities were replaced by following unmoderated tags, directly leading to and encouraging the creation of hate spaces - ‘don’t tag your hate’ leads to negativity-specific tags that could themselves be followed, forming a foundation for anti- communities to develop from
  
• no privacy, minimal blacklisting options, poor blocking tools, lack of oversight, lack of meaningful consequences for TOS violations = ‘fandom police’/vigilanteism (attempts to assert authority over others without actually having that authority) - some people react to the inability to get away from content that they hate by trying to force that content to stop existing entirely. without actual moderating authority, they accomplish this by social pressure, intimidation, and shame tactics.
• the people-following structure of web 2.0 is fundamentally incompatible with web 2.0 reshare functions and search engines. content posted on a personal blog is rarely intended to stand alone because people who follow the blog presumably see all the blog’s content in an ongoing stream. but reshare functions and search results separate the content from the context in which is was presented, causing misunderstandings and strife. (for site owners, the strife is a feature, not a bug.)
• following people instead of joining communities based on a shared interest creates social stress - following/unfollowing an individual has more social & emotional implications than joining/leaving interest communities
  
• Unmoderated conflict is polarizing. Web 2.0 specializes in causing unmoderated conflict. - exacerbated by the depersonalizing effect of not being able to see or hear other users, conflict in the unmoderated spaces on web 2.0 social media quickly devolves into extremism and nastiness. web 2.0 socmed structure even eggs the conflict on: people are more likely to interact with content that makes them angry (’someone is wrong on the internet!’ effect), which shares the content with more users, which makes them angry, so they interact (and on, and on).
  
• The extreme antagonism generated by web 2.0 socmed creates echo chambers - the aggregate effect of unmoderated conflict is that the most extreme and polarizing content gets spread around the most. polarizing content doesn’t tend to convince people to change their minds, but rather entrenches them further in their ideas and undermines the credit of opposing points of view. it also increases sensitivity to dissent and drives people closer to those who share their opinions, creating echo chambers of agreement.
  
• reacting to content that enrages you increases the chances of encountering it again because algorithms - social media site algorithms are generally designed to bring users more of the content they interact with the most because they want more site interaction to happen. if you interact with posts that make you mad, you’ll get more recs related to content that makes you mad.
  
• everyone has an opinion to share and everyone’s opinion has to be reshared: reactionary blogging as a group solidarity exercise. when something notable happens and everybody has to share their reaction on social media, the reaction itself becomes an emotional and social experience, sometimes overwhelming and damaging.
  
• when the reaction is righteous anger that everyone can reaffirm in one another, it creates an addictive emotional high. one way to reproduce it? find more enraging content to be mad about (and web 2.0 is happy to bring it to you).
• It’s easy to spread misinformation (and hard to correct it) - no modern social media site offers ways to edit content and have that edit affect all reshares. Corrections can only reach fractions of the original audience of a misleading viral post.
  
• web 2.0 social media discourages leaving the site with new content notifications and by lacking tools that keep your ‘place’ on your dash, deincentivizing verification checks before resharing content.
• web 2.0’s viral qualities + misinformation machine + rage as a social bonding experience = shame culture and fear of being ‘next’ (tumblr bonus: no time stamps and everything you post is eternal) - when offending content is spread virally, each individual reaction may have proportion to the original offense, but the combined response is overwhelming and punishing. many people feel the right to have their anger heard and felt by the offender, resulting in a dogpile effect. fear of inciting this kind of widespread negative reaction depresses creativity and the willingness to take risks with shared content or fanworks.
  
• absolute democracy of information & misinformation plus too much available information leads to uncertainty of who/what is trustworthy and encourages equating feelings to facts - social media doesn’t give content increased spread and weight based on its truthfulness or the credibility of the OP. misinformation is as likely to spread as truth, and the sheer amount of available information - conflicting or not - on the web is overwhelming. when fact-checking, it’s hard to know who to trust, who is twisting the facts, or who is simply looking at the same fact from a different viewpoint. information moves so fast it’s hard to know what ‘fact’ will be debunked by new information tomorrow. People give up; they decide the truth is unknowable, or they go with what ‘feels’ right, out of sheer exhaustion.
  
• information fatigue caused by web 2.0 makes black & white thinking look attractive - conflict and polarization and partisanship erodes communication to the point that opposing points of view no longer even use language the same way, much less can reach a compromise. the wildly different reference points for looking at the same issue makes it difficult to even know what the middle ground is. from an outside point of view this makes everyone on both sides seem untrustworthy and distances the objective truth from everyone even more.
  
• it’s easy to radicalize people who are looking for someone or something to trust/are tired of being uncertain - information fatigue leads to people just wanting to be told what to think. who’s good and who’s bad? whose fault is this? and don’t worry - lots of people are ready to jump in and tell you what to think and who to blame.
  
• everyone is only 2 seconds away from being doxxed: our anonymity on the net is paper-thin thanks to web 2.0 - before facebook encouraged using our real names and the gradual aggregation of most people to a few major socmed sites, anonymity was easier to maintain. now we have long internet histories with consistent usernames and sites that track everything we do to improve ad targeting. anyone with minimal hacking knowledge could doxx the large majority of socmed users. 
• and all it takes is one poorly-worded, virally spread tweet to send the whole of twitter after you with pitchforks.

[$]using the vld discourse survey as a reference, fandom is (probably) largely neurodivergent, largely queer/lesbian/gay/bi/pan/not straight, has many non-cis and/or afab members, and around 20% are abuse survivors/victims. fandom is a space we made for ourselves to cater to the interests we have in common with each other but mainstream society doesn’t often acknowledge. 

I agree with this and I’d like to add another angle to consideration, and that is the conflation of private and public space.

I doubt Tumblr is the only one to do this but it’s the one I’m most familiar with. Here’s the thing: Tumblr is set up in such a way as to make it feel like your space. You can customize your blog style, make things feel nice and homey, fill your dash with the things you love. It feels like your room, your space, your place. 

But it’s also a broadcast platform. Broadcast  platform. Every post you make on Tumblr is being screamed out to the whole world, potentially, with no control or lockdown options available. Aside from a “post privately” option that is so broken as to be functionally nonexistent (things you post ‘privately’ aren’t even visible to you  unless you know which hoops to jump through) everything is public, all the time.

Your blog feels like your space, your room, but at the same time it is also a public space with the “if you don’t want it out there you shouldn’t post it public on the internet” caveat applied. It’s hard to remember that when you feel like you’re minding your own business. “I have a right to post what I want on my own blog,” I’ve often grumbled, and I stand by that. But then your post is on everybody else’s dash, and that’s a problem because – 

The dash/feed is even worse for the contradiction of a public and a private space. In one sense, it’s everybody else’s  private spaces, their own personal rant grounds, but it’s being streamed into your  space. When something disagreeable turns up in your dash it feels like an intrusion, a violation of your privacy. It’s not just a “see, disagree, move on,” it makes you mad. “Why is there untagged character hate on my feed?” I’ve fumed, in violation of all common sense.

Retags and reblogs exist in the same dual public/private space. If someone makes a post, that post is theirs, on their dash. But if someone else reblogs it, they can add tags and comments that, too, are on their own personal blogs. And yet at the same time the original poster can see the comments and retags. Once again the “I can post what I want on my own blog” comes into crossfire with “How dare you say that on my  post?” 

The moment you made it public it was no longer only your post. But it feels,  again, like a violation.

Reasonable debate is almost impossible on a broadcast-only platform. Even if the two initial parties are able to set aside their emotions to talk reasonably, with every reblog the argument is exposed to a whole new set of people who all then have their own reactions. Discussion on tumblr is like two people trying to have a philosophical debate on opposite sides of a crowded room by megaphone; the people in the middle will swiftly start to get angry just at the noise.

Back in the __Journal days there wasn’t this conflation. Personal blogs were private and communities were public. There was a clear distinction which was which when you were posting it, with some nuance available – setting to public on a personal journal set a tone of “This is my space and my opinion, but I invite discussion” while setting to protected on a community signals “I wish to share this with others, but only those of my choosing.”

Remembering habits from the Journal days I’m usually, generally, pretty good at keeping a clear sense of what’s appropriate to post in a public space and what’s not. What I don’t want broadcast, I largely just don’t post, and say only to my friends in private. But.  

But as shown by the examples above, even I’m not immune to the sense of outrage and intrusion when a public post is made in my private feed or a private reblog is make on my public post. And what of people who never had that past experience and have no mental schemas to keep the two apart at all? And as the march of web 2.0 socmed squeezes onwards, other forms of social communion get increasingly crowded out – that which I don’t say on my broadcast blog, I can be left feeling lonely and discontent as I find I have nowhere and no-one to express it to at all.

I would just like to share some perspective as a Black fen in fandom.  I’ve been around since web 1.0 and made the transition like so many fen from less active platforms like Livejournal to sites like Tumblr.  There is a clear breakdown in communication, even a sort of environment of fear where saying the “wrong thing” could result in what we used to more widely recognise was cyber-bullying.  In the fandoms I have participated in, there is a clear enforcement of group-think where a certain number of the most widely followed bloggers in the fandom set the tone and determine the acceptable discourse to be agreed upon “or else.”  Often this is wrapped up in shame tactics that depend on a very shallow bit of lip-service to social justice and it’s that latter point that make it all the more insidious.

See, OP theorised that much of fandom is made up of “largely neurodivergent, largely queer/lesbian/gay/bi/pan/not straight, has many non-cis and/or afab members, and around 20% are abuse survivors/victims” but one of the issues is that fandom remains a microcosm often reflecting wider social attitudes and mores.  Too often, the fen who are deciding what the popular discourse/group-think for a fandom is are largely also white fen.  Many of these, as I said, show themselves as all too willing to pay lip-service to social discourse as far as it serves the purpose of propping up their ships, favorite characters, or fandom discourse and keeping any detractors in line.  When you’re a fan of colour in a fandom, unless the fandom happens to be very specific to your culture, the majority voice in your fandom are white fen (often women) who are quite eager to discuss the issue of privilege so long as the focus is on where they have less privilege (whether they are lgbt, neurodivergent, etc.).  

My experience as a Black and queer woman in fandom has always been the same in each fandom.  White fen in the web 2.0 appropriate tools that activists of colour have developed for a specific purposes in this age of social media and they have taken them and turned them into a means to strengthen their positions of hierarchical privilege in a fandom.  So, a fandom becomes toxic, and what is blamed is “cancel culture” and “sjws” and the finger is pointed in such a way that it becomes easier for fandom to dismiss the concerns of fen of colour.  As an example, try to bring up the issue of people suddenly insisting that an interracial ship shouldn’t happen because one of the few characters of colour on the show relates to the lead white character more like a “sibling” and it would feel like incest.  Suddenly, then the issue of social justice discourse in fandom is divisive and the fens of colour trying to draw attention to the racial microaggression of always claiming that any interracial pairings seem more like siblings than romantic makes the fandom more toxic and, of course, it’s all the fault of the angry fens of colour who are to blame and why couldn’t we just keep silent and let them enjoy the show and why do we have to hate their ships, and so on.

The idea of fens organizing and using their influence is nothing new.  Fens of colour are particularly creative when it comes to not only looking for existing representation in our fandoms but actively pushing for more and better representation.  We were doing it long before the web 2.0 but now I’m seeing a trend of many of our tactics being taken and used for unrelated fandom wank and twisted into politics of shaming for the sake of enforcing group-think and then turning back around and invalidating legitimate issues raised by fen of colour by lumping any outspoken fen of colour in with the same group of antis and cyber-bullies who send death threats to people anonymously because: “Omg! You ship x and I ship a rival ship to x and I’ve come up with all the ways your ship is toxic and mine is the most woke because that makes my ship feel like the better one!”  To be clear, cancelling began in the Black community as a way for us to organize in solidarity and enforce some kind of consequences for racial intolerance by drawing more attention to the issue as a community.  It was a tool to force accountability and a means for us to use our collective voices to raise awareness, to fight for more and better representation, to use our power as consumers to boycott content that whitewashes us or portrays us offensively, to close ranks against the sort of racism online that people of colour have so long had to deal with on our own so that we can provide each other with a support network, etc.  It wasn’t ever meant to be a tool for white fen to single a person out for cyber-bullying because “their fav is problematic.”

It’s very frustrating to see our discourse and our activism taken and turned against us because once more we’re being shut out of fandom spaces and it is so very insidious.  I cannot properly be critical of certain content in fandom without coming up against accusations of being “one of those sjw antis who make fandoms toxic” or avoid the nervous knee jerk responses of fen who are afraid my criticism of certain issues means that I want to throw the baby out with the bathwater and I expect people to cancel the entire fandom and stop enjoying it so they defend everything about it dogmatically.  It often feels as if there is no longer room for thoughtful critique or discussion in fandom.  The fandom is either unproblematic or problematic and God forbid you’re the one to point out any issue because then you come under fire for trying to cancel a fandom and take it away from everyone, so people are quick to shut you down at any cost.

Sometimes a critique is just an invitation for thoughtful conversation. Sometimes it is an open ended question about how it could have been handled better. Sometimes it is a call to action because it needs to be handled better.  As things are, between the blatant lip-service and abuses of social justice to reinforce certain group-think in fandom, the anxiety resulting from the new culture of shaming and cyber-bullying, the knee-jerk responses that often lead to fen defending things in fandom they should not be (including attitudes of racism because they fear acknowledging even that much will mean giving up their fandom for good) being a fen of colour in the web 2.0 age is too often an exercise in frustration and an experience of open hostility where you find yourself being subject to scapegoating, tone policing, and invalidation.  If you’re not prepared to be quiet and nod along with the majority then you can expect a dissenting opinion or unpopular observation will single you out for harassment (either blatantly racist or thinly veiled) and accusations because an ability for discernment, for nuanced thinking has been all but abandoned but for some niche corners of social media and the rare individual who can swim against the current tides of fandom. 

In another reblog somebody else pointed out that my initial post said nothing about race in fandom, and I had reblogged to agree and apologize. As I’ve said before and as @idealistic-realism00 says here: [English-speaking] fandom is a microcosm of [Western, mainly American] culture. It’s *impossible* to have a discussion about fandom culture evolution across platforms without discussing its overwhelming whiteness, or the impact of - and impact *on* - fans of color (here, specifically on Black fen).

I really appreciate @idealistic-realism00 taking the time to add such detailed, nuanced description of their experience to this post.

freedom-of-fanfic:

queerofcups:

trashywestallen:

freedom-of-fanfic:

there’s so much to tell about this subject that I might add more to some points on subsequent posts.

everything in the below post is from observation and reading about the experiences of others on web 2.0. please feel free to add anything you feel is necessary.

(socmed = social media in shorthand.)

What even is web 2.0?

Web 1.0: web model where dotcoms generated their own content and presented it to users for free, depending on advertisers for their income. ‘social media’ mostly made up of mailing lists and forums on these content-oriented sites. collapsed because ad revenue wasn’t sufficient to support site maintainance costs.

Web 2.0: web model where dotcoms create a free space for users to generate their own content, depending on advertisers for their income. these sites define social media today. likely to collapse because ad revenue still isn’t sufficient to support site maintainance costs (even after shucking the cost of paying content creators).

(if you want to read more about how ad revenue is the social media Achilles Heel, check this link out: Why Monetizing Social Media Through Advertising Is Doomed To Failure.)

What makes Web 2.0 social media so much worse than web 1.0?

mostly: web 2.0 socmed exacerbates the pre-existing conflict of interest between users and site owners: site owners need ads. Users want to avoid ads.

With web 1.0, users were attracted by site-created content that had to appeal to them: users were the clients and advertisers were the sponsors. (Forum interaction was a side offering. sites dedicated to user interaction were small, scattered, and supported by banner ads.)

Web 2.0 socmed strips users of client status entirely; the content we generate (for free!) and our eyes/eyes we attract to the site are products the site owner sells to the actual site client: advertisers.

early web 2.0 social media sites (livejournal, myspace) used hybridization to pay site costs - users could buy paid accounts or extra blog perks. they also had privacy/limited-spread sharing functions and closed communities, which still ‘exist’ but with limited capabilities on current socmed sites.  privacy, it seems, isn’t very profitable.

now web 2.0 is geared towards spreading content as far as possible - and further if you’ll choke up a little cash to grease the algorithms. ;)

–

Web 1.0 had its fair share of problems. Web 2.0 generated new ones:

• following people instead of joining communities based on interests has negative emotional and social implications
  
• social media sites benefit from knocking down privacy walls. Maximizing content spread and minimizing blocking/blacklisting capabilities benefits advertisers - the true clients of websites.
  
• social media sites benefit from eroding online anonymity. they track user site interaction, searches, and more to precisely target their ads at your interests (unless you deliberately turn it off). tracking data can endanger anonymity and make doxxing easier.
  
• social media sites benefit from conflict. Conflict generates user response much more effectively than harmony/peace. More user interaction means more eyes on ads, increasing ad space value.
• social media sites are therefore deincentivized to address abuse reports, increase moderation, improve blacklisting tools, or offer privacy options. and there’s nothing you can do about it because
  
• there’s nowhere different to go. it’s difficult to compete with existing social media sites as a startup. to draw social media users, a newcomer must offer something bigger, better, and equally free*, and offering any of this on startup capital is … unlikely, at best.
  

*‘I’d move if they just had privacy features!’ the joke is: any successful socmed site that starts with privacy features will have a hard time keeping them down the road under the present profit model. they will be forced to cater to their advertisers if they want to keep afloat.

–

how does the structure of web 2.0 socmed harm fandom?

in aggregate: it forces fandom[$], a diverse space where people go to indulge niche interests and specific tastes, into overexposure to outsiders and to one another, and exacerbates the situation by removing all semi-private interaction spaces, all moderation tools, all content-limiting tools, and all abuse protection.

The result is that fandom on web 2.0 - tumblr in particular - is overrun with widespread misinformation, black & white reasoning obliterating nuanced debates, mob rule and shame culture as substitutes for moderation features, fear of dissent and oversensitivity to disagreement, hatedoms and anti- communities, and large/expanding pockets of extremist echo chambers that have no reality check to protect those trapped inside.

to be more specific:

• moderated communities were replaced by following unmoderated tags, directly leading to and encouraging the creation of hate spaces - ‘don’t tag your hate’ leads to negativity-specific tags that could themselves be followed, forming a foundation for anti- communities to develop from
  
• no privacy, minimal blacklisting options, poor blocking tools, lack of oversight, lack of meaningful consequences for TOS violations = ‘fandom police’/vigilanteism (attempts to assert authority over others without actually having that authority) - some people react to the inability to get away from content that they hate by trying to force that content to stop existing entirely. without actual moderating authority, they accomplish this by social pressure, intimidation, and shame tactics.
• the people-following structure of web 2.0 is fundamentally incompatible with web 2.0 reshare functions and search engines. content posted on a personal blog is rarely intended to stand alone because people who follow the blog presumably see all the blog’s content in an ongoing stream. but reshare functions and search results separate the content from the context in which is was presented, causing misunderstandings and strife. (for site owners, the strife is a feature, not a bug.)
• following people instead of joining communities based on a shared interest creates social stress - following/unfollowing an individual has more social & emotional implications than joining/leaving interest communities
  
• Unmoderated conflict is polarizing. Web 2.0 specializes in causing unmoderated conflict. - exacerbated by the depersonalizing effect of not being able to see or hear other users, conflict in the unmoderated spaces on web 2.0 social media quickly devolves into extremism and nastiness. web 2.0 socmed structure even eggs the conflict on: people are more likely to interact with content that makes them angry (’someone is wrong on the internet!’ effect), which shares the content with more users, which makes them angry, so they interact (and on, and on).
  
• The extreme antagonism generated by web 2.0 socmed creates echo chambers - the aggregate effect of unmoderated conflict is that the most extreme and polarizing content gets spread around the most. polarizing content doesn’t tend to convince people to change their minds, but rather entrenches them further in their ideas and undermines the credit of opposing points of view. it also increases sensitivity to dissent and drives people closer to those who share their opinions, creating echo chambers of agreement.
  
• reacting to content that enrages you increases the chances of encountering it again because algorithms - social media site algorithms are generally designed to bring users more of the content they interact with the most because they want more site interaction to happen. if you interact with posts that make you mad, you’ll get more recs related to content that makes you mad.
  
• everyone has an opinion to share and everyone’s opinion has to be reshared: reactionary blogging as a group solidarity exercise. when something notable happens and everybody has to share their reaction on social media, the reaction itself becomes an emotional and social experience, sometimes overwhelming and damaging.
  
• when the reaction is righteous anger that everyone can reaffirm in one another, it creates an addictive emotional high. one way to reproduce it? find more enraging content to be mad about (and web 2.0 is happy to bring it to you).
• It’s easy to spread misinformation (and hard to correct it) - no modern social media site offers ways to edit content and have that edit affect all reshares. Corrections can only reach fractions of the original audience of a misleading viral post.
  
• web 2.0 social media discourages leaving the site with new content notifications and by lacking tools that keep your ‘place’ on your dash, deincentivizing verification checks before resharing content.
• web 2.0’s viral qualities + misinformation machine + rage as a social bonding experience = shame culture and fear of being ‘next’ (tumblr bonus: no time stamps and everything you post is eternal) - when offending content is spread virally, each individual reaction may have proportion to the original offense, but the combined response is overwhelming and punishing. many people feel the right to have their anger heard and felt by the offender, resulting in a dogpile effect. fear of inciting this kind of widespread negative reaction depresses creativity and the willingness to take risks with shared content or fanworks.
  
• absolute democracy of information & misinformation plus too much available information leads to uncertainty of who/what is trustworthy and encourages equating feelings to facts - social media doesn’t give content increased spread and weight based on its truthfulness or the credibility of the OP. misinformation is as likely to spread as truth, and the sheer amount of available information - conflicting or not - on the web is overwhelming. when fact-checking, it’s hard to know who to trust, who is twisting the facts, or who is simply looking at the same fact from a different viewpoint. information moves so fast it’s hard to know what ‘fact’ will be debunked by new information tomorrow. People give up; they decide the truth is unknowable, or they go with what ‘feels’ right, out of sheer exhaustion.
  
• information fatigue caused by web 2.0 makes black & white thinking look attractive - conflict and polarization and partisanship erodes communication to the point that opposing points of view no longer even use language the same way, much less can reach a compromise. the wildly different reference points for looking at the same issue makes it difficult to even know what the middle ground is. from an outside point of view this makes everyone on both sides seem untrustworthy and distances the objective truth from everyone even more.
  
• it’s easy to radicalize people who are looking for someone or something to trust/are tired of being uncertain - information fatigue leads to people just wanting to be told what to think. who’s good and who’s bad? whose fault is this? and don’t worry - lots of people are ready to jump in and tell you what to think and who to blame.
  
• everyone is only 2 seconds away from being doxxed: our anonymity on the net is paper-thin thanks to web 2.0 - before facebook encouraged using our real names and the gradual aggregation of most people to a few major socmed sites, anonymity was easier to maintain. now we have long internet histories with consistent usernames and sites that track everything we do to improve ad targeting. anyone with minimal hacking knowledge could doxx the large majority of socmed users. 
• and all it takes is one poorly-worded, virally spread tweet to send the whole of twitter after you with pitchforks.

[$]using the vld discourse survey as a reference, fandom is (probably) largely neurodivergent, largely queer/lesbian/gay/bi/pan/not straight, has many non-cis and/or afab members, and around 20% are abuse survivors/victims. fandom is a space we made for ourselves to cater to the interests we have in common with each other but mainstream society doesn’t often acknowledge. 

Pretty much.This is what we’re talking about when we say it didn’t used to be this way.

This is interesting analysis but the assertion that fandom is mostly queer and the elision of fandoms overwhelming whiteness and historical racism, erasure of the voices of PoC (yes I do think this needs to be a part of EVERY conversation around fandom) that was featured in web 1.0 just as much as 2.0 makes me think someone’s got a point to prove that isn’t just offering data.

queerofcups makes a good point. While I mention racism pretty frequently in discussing fandom-wide problems these days (tags are ‘#racism in fandom’ and ‘#racism in America’ if you’re interested), it wasn’t mentioned at all in this post, and the omission is a glaring one.*

in this case, the focus was on social media tools more than fandom demographics. And it’s fandom’s differences from mainstream (American) society that gets fandom in social trouble that’s specific to Web 2.0 … and our racial demographics (and our racism) is not one of those things.**

Still: I think I was remiss in not mentioning racism, but not because of fandom racism in particular (which I’ll explain below). Rather, I should have taken the time to note that as bad as Web 2.0 social media is for transformative fandom in general, it’s unsurprisingly that much worse for fandom members who are people of color and creations revolving around characters of color.

Fandom’s racism blends in with societal racism. We’re not in unusual levels of danger of being called ‘freaks’ because we’re more racist or less racist than mainstream American social circles. Web 2.0 puts us at risk for writing content that caters to queer tastes because that’s very common & accepted thing in fandom, and that’s a standout trait. But we’re just as hostile to content that caters to people of color or non-white cultures as the rest of society. We’re just as suppressive - maybe more suppressive, because we persecute these creators both for creating it in the first place and for not doing it ‘perfectly’. (Which is more and more common with other marginalized content these days, too, on a side note.)

On Web 1.0, fandom’s white privilege racism was a microcosm echo of the racism in American mainstream culture. We were in isolated bubbles where said systemic racism was, on the whole, replicated and denied in the same ways as it was in society at large. This was already highly suppressive/silencing of non-white creators and fans and creations.

On Web 2.0, We’re no longer replicating the systemic racism in a bubble, but only because the bubble is gone. we’re all in the same echo chambers together with mainstream western culture, reinforcing (& denying the existence of) the same racism. This puts creators of color under not only the pressures that the rest of fandom struggles with on Web 2.0, but the additional suppressive and silencing pressures of all the English speaking social media scene.

Tl;dr:Web 2.0 doesn’t put transformative fandom as a whole in an especially bad position when it comes to our internal culture around racism, because transformative fandom is racist in the same ways as the culture it largely springs from. But it does add all the racist pressure from non-fandom spaces to that which already existed in isolated fandom spaces, which puts non-white fans and non-white-centric fanworks through even more societal stress than white fans/white-centric fanworks.

**Note that this does not excuse fandom’s racism. It’s just not a trait that’s peculiar or specific to fandom.

*the omission was not intentional/meant to ‘prove a point’, but my failure to bring it up even in passing was probably a function of my race privilege (I don’t have to think about my race on a daily basis).

of course, that’s no excuse, and I apologize for not mentioning the intersection of race and fandom specifically in my original post. :t

PS - it’s not like fandom was an amazing, wonderful utopia before moving to viral sharing social media platforms, especially when it comes to race. in fact, one of the best things about viral sharing social media is how it boosts the voices of marginalized ppl whose content was previously subject to a moderator/site owner’s whims (among other things).

but as that power has come to be exploited by the already-powerful, I’m of the opinion the trade-off has been, on the whole, quite costly. :(