Portfolio Assignment #8
Part 1
In this lecture about critical perspectives on fandom and participatory culture, I know quite a lot of things that I did not know about fandom before. Regarding the toxicity, I have never expected fans outside the States like Latin America and Asia would encounter racism from white fans. Some of them said that they lost some of their language and culture by taking part in fandom because the fanfiction is mainly in English. They even cannot write their native language well because they have to adapt to English in order to gain readership for their fanfiction. Inequities in fannish spaces do exist in terms of race, nationality, colonization, and gender.
Personally, I am not a fan of any fiction but I have similar experience of witness racism. When it comes to some politically sensitive memes that involve fiction characters on tweeter especially the recent controversy between Thai and Chinese netiziens due to the sarcastic speech given by Thai representative on WHO conference, people are keep using race of each other to say radical comments against each other. For example, Thai people use the food delivery app “Food Panda” to humiliate Chinese people by saying they use their national animal “panda” to deliver Taiwanese bubble tea.
Regarding the lecture’s impact on what I thought about idea of the relationship between digital media and society, I am reassured that racism is more obvious and rampant on digital media as people can abuse the anonymity and comfortability to say something they think they are not held responsible for.
Part 2
This lecture mentioned a lot of issues and I believe social media as a space of community is the most relatable issue that I found with issues discussed in my final project case study which is about dating apps used for sex or one-night stand. In this lecture, queer-authored slash fanfiction online is taken as an example to illustrate the topic. As said in the lecture, participants who are users on fandom said they have found “chosen family members” through fandom. Chosen family originates from queer theory. In essence, queer people are often rejected by their biological family or just because they do not necessarily fit into the cis-normative/heteronormative lifestyle that their biological family tend to lead. They will construct their own chosen family that is consisted of queer people with really strong social ties. From my point of view, chosen family is exactly the definition of community and somehow dating apps are platforms for users to form different communities, for example, gay communities, lesbian communities, heterosexual communities based on geographical locations… There are various taxonomic models of online communities. Some are based on attributes, support software, relationship to the offline sphere, and boundlessness. Some are based on community types such as interest, relationship, fantasy, and transaction. I believe chosen family is united around a shared interest or identity rather than a particular virtual location. In other words, the above-mentioned online chosen family on fandom is a community formed around a shared interest to certain fictions and an identity of queer. This also illustrates our geographically specific notions of community are disrupted by the possibilities of the digital, where physically distant, disembodied beings create what they also call community.
