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What are your rules for fandom?
Jul. 24th, 2008 02:19 pmI've been thinking lately about politeness and civility in fandom and what it means to me. As I said before in a previous post, I believe that fandom is a collection of communities made up of individuals who come to fandom for very different reasons with very different emotional temperaments and backgrounds and who as a result participate in fandom in different ways. As such, I don't think there are overarching rules for how to behave in fandom.
However, I do believe that each fan has a set of *personal* rules for how to behave in fandom that may or may not be shared by the average fan. Since these rules aren't written and it's often hard to tell what's important to a fan just by reading journal posts, I thought that maybe if we talked with each other about what we thought was important in terms of acceptable fannish behavior we could . . . Hmmmm . . . not reach consensus, because I don't think there's a consensus to be reached. But I do think that maybe if we understand a little better what our flists (and the fans we are acquainted with to a lesser degree) feel is important in terms of fannish behavior then maybe the controversy over those few things we can't agree about wouldn't be as heated.
So, to that end, if you had to distill your ideas on what constitutes acceptable fannish behavior into three rules, what would they be? (Remember, these are your ideas about how fans should communicate and interact with each other rather than any other aspect of fandom.)
( Mine would be: )
I don't have a lot of personal rules re: fannish behavior because for the most part my fannish experience has been extraordinarily positive. I've never gotten a flame before; no one has ever seriously hurt my feelings in a fannish interaction; fandom has been three and a half years of almost uninterrupted fun for me. I tend to not make rules about things until I have experienced them which accounts for what may seem the weirdness of this list.
ETA![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
synecdochic is smarter than me, not surprisingly, and this post pretty much articulates much of what I feel on the subject of concrit, reviews, recs, etc.
However, I do believe that each fan has a set of *personal* rules for how to behave in fandom that may or may not be shared by the average fan. Since these rules aren't written and it's often hard to tell what's important to a fan just by reading journal posts, I thought that maybe if we talked with each other about what we thought was important in terms of acceptable fannish behavior we could . . . Hmmmm . . . not reach consensus, because I don't think there's a consensus to be reached. But I do think that maybe if we understand a little better what our flists (and the fans we are acquainted with to a lesser degree) feel is important in terms of fannish behavior then maybe the controversy over those few things we can't agree about wouldn't be as heated.
So, to that end, if you had to distill your ideas on what constitutes acceptable fannish behavior into three rules, what would they be? (Remember, these are your ideas about how fans should communicate and interact with each other rather than any other aspect of fandom.)
( Mine would be: )
I don't have a lot of personal rules re: fannish behavior because for the most part my fannish experience has been extraordinarily positive. I've never gotten a flame before; no one has ever seriously hurt my feelings in a fannish interaction; fandom has been three and a half years of almost uninterrupted fun for me. I tend to not make rules about things until I have experienced them which accounts for what may seem the weirdness of this list.
ETA
synecdochic is smarter than me, not surprisingly, and this post pretty much articulates much of what I feel on the subject of concrit, reviews, recs, etc.
