The Peanut Gallery Strikes Back
In case you haven’t noticed, the “c” word is pretty big around here. No, not “cheesesteak,” though that may run a close second. I’m talking about “community.” In fact, in some from or another, we at TINN are always talking about community. It’s why we’re here; it’s why this site exists. There are literally thousands of small online communities in existence consisting of groups of people bound together by commonalties others would find strange. In studying even one of these groups, you might be surprised to find how they define “community.” I was the first time I entered a fan fiction community.
To use the widely accepted definition, fan fiction is the reworking of the original text of a motion picture, television program, novel, or series of novels to better serve the needs or interests of a smaller community. That definition is not mine; it comes from researcher Henry Jenkins who literally tagged along with Star Trek fans for years analyzing their interactions at conventions, meetings, etc. Jenkins also came up with some general fan fiction categories, which do a great job of furthering explain what fic writers do with their source material. Here, briefly are the basics:
- recontextuatlization: a.k.a. “missing scenes” in which fans fill in gaps between episodes or before or after the source’s timeline in order to provide further explanation for a character’s behavior or a series of events. Like most methods, this type originated in the Star Trek universe as fans kept writing fourth and fifth seasons for the show when it was canceled.
- crossovers: stories in which characters from another television show or movie show up in the universe of the fans source product.
- genre-shifting: the source-product’s genre — science fiction, action/adventure, etc. — changes to suit the author’s focus on one aspect, relationship, or event. Thus, a Star Trek episode may read like a romance, or The X Files becomes a comedy, etc.
For Jenkins, researching fan fiction meant establishing a rapport with strangers in order to gain entry in what, at the time, was a closed community. It meant hours on the road, driving to conventions, writing letters, and meeting key Star Trek fandom gatekeepers in person. Another researcher, Camille Bacon Smith, took a similar route, both with Star Trek and other (largely) science fiction fandoms. Both did the bulk if their research well before the Internet explosion.
These days, delving deep into the world of fan fiction is a bit easier; all you need is a decent search engine and some good keywords. If you’re curious, type “fan fiction” into Yahoo! and see what you get. It’s a bit overwhelming. Even more overwhelming is a visit to one of the web super-archives of fan fiction such as Fanfiction.net. You’ll find literally thousands of stories based on hundreds and hundreds of different sources. We’re talking everything from television shows and movies to comic books and novels.
So where, you many ask, in all this chaos, are the communities? You need to look beyond the sheer volume to the people that are the producing these vast quantities of writings, at their interactions, and their reasons for spending so much time on subject matters, that quite frankly, most people would ridicule. Having wrangled my way into a graduate communications research class during my senior year of college, I decided to try and find out just how the online fan fiction communities compared with the original communities the earlier researchers had studied. I was trying to find out how something so derivative of the earlier fandoms, which were so secretive and personal, could flourish in the anonymity of the Internet. From the sixties through to the eighties (and to some small extent even today), most fiction writing communities used exclusive postal mailing lists, fanzines, and closed conventions to share their productions. People met in each others’ homes, car pooled, and hand photocopied stories. Today, stories are posted on web sites or electronic mailing lists, often accompanied by no identifying information save an anonymous web-based email account name such as StoogesFan@yahoo.com. (By the way, I do not think Three Stooges fan fic actually exists which is why I’ve been using the example.)
With the aid of a specially designed online survey, a great many postings on fan fic mailings lists, and two marginally successful real-time chats at Talkcity.com, I set about finding out just who these writers were and what held them together. I received an overwhelmingly positive response, though many were a little confused as to why anyone would think they were important enough to study as a part of “serious” research project. Luckily for me, less than a year earlier, New York Times writer Amy Harmon had written a story about online fan fiction communities called “What Xena did during her summer vacation.” He story was one of the first acknowledgments by the mainstream press that fan fiction existed. It was a very positive piece, and most of the writers were anxious to continue painting that picture of themselves to outsiders.
The group members, while not always revealing their real names, were willing, even anxious to participate and reveal many personal details about themselves and their participation in fan fiction communities. The webmaster of one site immediately offered to convert my survey into .html format so that all the responses would be automatically forwarded back to my address (something an. .html neophyte like myself really appreciated.) They were encouraging, helpful, friendly, self-deprecating of themselves, and each other.
The key to understanding how identity works in these groups is to accept it as a kind of anonymous intimacy that is not uncommon on the Internet. When a new person enters a fan fic community, either by emailing the web master of an archive site or by posting on a mailing list, he or she) is immediately embraced and encouraged, To be sure, they are usually inundated with welcome emails or posts. Most groups having standing lists of mentors and editors whose “job” is to help inexperienced writers learn the basics. Off-topic or OT, on a given mailing list, you’ll find writers trading their interests in music, movies, and current events in between story ideas. Many discuss how their families, work and school obligations affect and influence their writing. Yes, very few writers share their real names; few will even list what cities they live in. They use the web’s anonymity to its advantage, because despite their trust of one another, they don’t trust that fact that their forums are public, open to those who might make fun of them.
It’s a very real fear, when I presented this project in class in 1998, my classmates immediately asked if these people were “freaks.” On more than one occasion, a writer referred to the old Saturday Night Live skit where William Shatner urges his fans “to get a life.” They say it’s pretty ironic because most of them say they do lead very busy lives and use fan fic to unwind. Among the respondents to my online survey were several graduate students and college professors, many working mothers and one medical doctor. (I should point out that my research confirmed what both Jenkins and Bacon-Smith found about fan fic writers. They are, as a group, largely female, highly educated, with ages usually ranging from their late teens to early forties.)
The key difference between the structure of online communities and the traditional writing communities they emerged from is the absence of doors and walls. Between the “diehard” writers, the same levels of communication, friendship, and interaction can exist. Thanks to the technology, writers separated by geography can communicate multiple times a day rather than a few times a month. However, in mail-based fiction communities, there was little room to be a non-active participant. Because everyone knew who you were, it was difficult to sit on the sidelines and watch the other writers do their work. In online communities, “lurkers” and third party observers like myself can drop into a web site or subscribe to a public list at any time without anyone being the wiser.
As with all online groups, in addition to the “lurker” component, there is also a large transient element. People enter and leave groups after short periods of time or move onto different groups as their tastes change (or as their favorite shows get canceled and new ones begin). There are still many loyalists who stay with one group indefinitely. With that in mind, it’s difficult to try to categorize fan fic groups as any more of any less cohesive than the original fan fic groups, the community TINN tries to build, or any other online group. Judged, maligned, encouraged, or laughed at, these groups form a very large and perhaps permanent part of the webs content – no matter what anyone else has to say about it.
