[MUSIC] So hello and welcome. I'm here today with Dr. Casey Fiesler, who is an assistant professor in Information Science in the College of Media Communication and Information at the University of Colorado Boulder. But Casey, you also wear a lot of other hats. You have a courtesy appointment in computer science, you're the founding director of the Internet Rules Lab. You're also a fellow at the Silicon Flat Irons Institute for Law Technology and entrepreneurship and at the Atlas Institute, which is the Alliance for Technology Learning and Society. That's [LAUGH] a lot of hats to wear, right, a lot of credentials to wear. You also have an interesting background for some academics and that, not only do you have a PhD in Human Centered Computing, you also have a law degree and your research draws on both of those aspects of your background. So I was hoping we could just kick things off by asking you to talk a little bit about how you arrived at all of those academic experiences and how those different parts of your background, inform your research and your teaching today. >> Sure, so, I actually started out as a psychology major in undergrad where I went to Georgia Tech. And interestingly, my degree is actually in applied psychology, [LAUGH] which basically means that I know nothing about the kinds of things that you expect someone with the psychology degree to know about [LAUGH] like abnormal psychology for example. And mostly my work was on, human factors and experimental design and statistics and all of these kinds of things. And I got really interested in Computer Science when I was an undergrad, actually thought of double majoring but then realized that it would have taken me longer to double major than to just get a master's degree. And and so I ended up going from my undergrad into a master's degree in human computer interaction, which is kind of like the intersection of computer science and psychology. And I was really fortunate to, as a master student work in a research lab, but the professor who studied learning and online communities [LAUGH] and so I got very interested in on my communities as a research area. And I remember telling this professor about fandom which she was not necessarily super familiar with, and I ended up doing my master's thesis on fandom based role playing games, like people pretending to be Harry Potter and Live Journal. [LAUGH] And, actually my interest in online communities and even specifically in fandom was one of the things that inspired me to go to law school. Because I was really interested in Internet law and intellectual property and all of those kinds of things that were intersecting with the things I was interested in. So I went to law school and it was fine. [LAUGH] I discovered kind of part way through that I was more interested in the law is like a scholarly discipline than I was in practicing law. I loved any class where I was writing a paper and I did sort of research as much as I could. I worked as a research assistant for a copyright professor, which means I mostly wrote footnotes and his law review articles. And I worked as an editor on a technology law journal. I also wrote a student note. And this was in the mid 2000s, I guess this was around 2008 when I was writing this paper and You tube was becoming a thing. You tube was really starting to take off and everyone was talking about user generated content and the copyright implications. And everyone's like this is the topic du jour and in copyright circles and it's like this new thing and I was like, this isn't new [LAUGH] exactly like You tube is new. But even remix videos, fandom people have been making remix videos on VCRs since the 80s, this is not a new art form. And I started thinking about why all of this copyright crisis that was happening with this new generation of user generated content wasn't a problem with fan fiction. People sometimes talked about copyright but everyone in the fan fiction community was just like, well I know the rules and I know what I should do and these really strong social norms. So I ended up writing a law review article about the copyright social norms and fandom and how I thought we could learn from them. And it actually ended up winning this fancy award and I [LAUGH] got to go to this fancy awards ceremony at the Library of Congress and met Justice Scalia. And also this was way more exciting, David E Kelly, he's a writer of Ally Mcbeal in Boston legal. [LAUGH] I used to write about spots and legal fan fiction when I was in law school. [LAUGH] So anyway, all of this interest in sort of the law is a scholarly discipline, I really missed the research side of it, and so that's why I pursued a PhD. And then I ended up keeping with that line of inquiry, copyright norms and fandom is what my dissertation was about as well, which was a little bit unexpected, but it worked out really well. >> The sense of, sort of communities of people creating transformative works and responding to legal policies and other kinds of things to create their own social and cultural norms is really fascinating to me. So, I wonder if you could elaborate a little bit in your experience, both participating in and studying fan fiction communities and folks who are doing transformative work. What is it about fans that brings them into a position where they're doing things like participating in fictional worlds, but also expanding those worlds and sustaining those worlds in some cases a lot longer than the sort of canonical formation would last in and of itself? What's the role of the fan in that kind of lineage of story? >> I mean that's a really interesting questions, sort of what is motivating this community, and I think there are a lot of different answers to that, especially why people decided to start creating fan works in the first place. But I think most generally it comes from a love of the source material and also wanting to share more of that with the community. I mean at the time that I was writing a lot of fan fiction, I was also writing a lot of short fiction, science fiction and fantasy and submitting it to publications where the acceptance rate is like 2%. [LAUGH] And because I was doing these things at the same time, I was really struck by the contrast which was like, I write a short story and I send it off to some magazine and then I don't hear back from them for a really long time and it's usually a rejection. And even if I publish something, not that many people read it. And meanwhile, publish a piece of fan fiction within 20 minutes, there are 100 people telling me that I'm the most brilliant writer and thank you so much and these are my favorite characters and I mean it's really remarkable. And so fandom actually kind of functions on this gift economy, an economy of attribution and feedback, where what people are getting out of it is this sharing and getting the love back. And, I think that that is really powerful. And, one of my PhD advises, Brianna Dim, has been looking at ways that people in the transformative fandom community are also kind of creating resources and giving back to their community. Not even just with fan fiction, but advocacy for LGBTQ people, or building platforms like archive of our own to give back to the community. And a lot of this is just like you love something so much that you want to share it with people and help people in this community etc. And also, something that I found in my work specifically for copyright norms, but also some follow up work we've done around norms around things like privacy and safety. I think that social norms form in this community a lot more strongly than a lot of community is in part because the community identity is important to people. They want to be part of this community and so when it's close knit like that and people actually want to kind of have that shared identity, it's a lot easier for shared norms to form. >> It's really interesting to me, one of the things that I think about a lot is the different kind of buckets of how we form our own identities online and how we engage with other people online. And I think the kind of fan works communities that you're describing probably ride kind of below the radar for a lot of people who engage with other people online. One of the sort of dominant forms of engagement online now is the big social media platforms like, your Facebooks and twitters and your Instagrams and TikTok and all that sort of stuff. And those platforms have certainly emerged over the last decade, 15 years as sites of content creation, spread and dissemination of information and of course the content that's created, but also things like organizing direct action and exercising social control. Some people would argue. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how you see these two, there's lots of different platforms to engage with people online. Some of them are built on this sense of shared communal exchange, like you're talking about and kind of positive feedback cycles and giving love back into communities. And some of them, some folks would argue are a little more predatory than that and that are really based in harvesting information about us. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that landscape and sort of what it means to be a fan on the Internet when you have both of those, or all of those different avenues toward engaging other people. >> Yeah, so, traditionally fans have appropriated a lot of different kinds of platforms to exist on and to share work with each other. When I first discovered fan fiction and was on Usenet in the late 90s. So, that was one place and then lots of when I was early in Harry Potter fandom, I was mostly on email lists, and then LiveJournal was a big space for this, and also there's sort of all these one off archives. And of course now I think a lot of people think of fandom as being centered on tumbler and archive of our own, though there's also a lot of other kinds of fan fiction archives, fanfiction.net, Wattpad etc. And I think that one of the big differences with respect to a platform like archive of our own compared to, say, even tumbler, but these big social media platforms you're talking about because fandoms on twitter and fandoms on TikTok etc.as well. But our camp of our own was built by fans for fans and it's not for profit and there's no motivation for them to sell your data or to really do anything, but just be what the fans needed to be. And that is super different than any other social media platform. Like fans have existed on tumbler and it sort of worked for what they need. But then when tumbler had the big adult content ban in 2018, there was a lot of concern that, my gosh, this is what happened to LiveJournal, they don't want us here, because a lot of content was getting flagged, like fan art and that and that kind of thing. And so I think there's often this idea that yeah, you can do your fanish stuff on these platforms. But there's always this little bit of anxiety that, maybe someday they're going to change their policies or they're going to change their design and something isn't going to work for us anymore. So, I do think that fan communities have managed to exist in these smaller places on these platforms, but also that it's really good when there can be something that's for them. So arc over own is an example of that. There's currently an in development beta version social platform called pillow fort, that fans are starting to use for the more social aspects because our arc over own is in a social media platform, it's just for archiving and sharing fan fiction. But I mean I think fans will be everywhere, name a social media platform, there are absolutely fandom people on it. [LAUGH] >> So what do you think drives that? I mean, is it a sense that fandom will just inhabit any space to the boundaries and the space that it comes to? Is there something specific about that urge or that drive to engage in an online relationships that' specific to fandom or that facilitates something within fandom that isn't possible somewhere else? I mean what really makes it so that fans just are everywhere that you might possibly find them? >> I mean I think that there are fans everywhere that you wouldn't even think of as being a fandom. So, I mostly think about transformative fandom which is like people making fan works and sharing them with each other, but also for thinking about just like fandom, also people talking about Star Wars on twitter or whatever. That kind of thing doesn't have to just be about things like Star Wars. I actually recently talked to a journalist who's writing a story about Peloton fandom and she's like, is this a fandom? [LAUGH] Sounds like a fandom to me. [LAUGH] I mean any place where people are gathering to talk about the things that they love, like, my dad's on all these Facebook groups for classic cars, that's a fandom. I mean it's very similar in structure to people talking about Star Wars and I'm not sure sort of linguistically why these [LAUGH] don't didn't be considered sort of the same thing. I mean I tend to distinguish between curative fandom and transformative fandom. People creating fan works versus curative fandom being like, collecting Star Wars figures and talking about collecting facts and collecting things, and then transformative being like making your own thing. And so that's a distinction that I've seen used before, that I think makes a lot of sense. I don't know if people are writing Peloton fan fiction about the instructors, but like maybe they are, [LAUGH] I don't know. >> Maybe that's going to come up on a pillow, >> [LAUGH] >> [LAUGH] pillow fort. Maybe [LAUGH]
