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darkemeraldsI think I now understand why professional fiction writers are up in arms about fanfic. And it's not what any of them are actually saying.
In July 2008, The Atlantic published an article by Nick Carr entitled "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" in which Carr argued that because of the internet, people are losing the ability to engage with long works of literature.
Clay Shirky, in a pair of response posts, says, basically, "so what?"
The real anxiety behind [Carr's] essay is that, having lost its actual centrality some time ago, the literary world is now losing its normative hold on culture as well. The threat isn’t that people will stop reading War and Peace. That day is long since past. The threat is that people will stop genuflecting to the idea of reading War and Peace.
Shirky goes on his second essay to say something that made me go, "Ohhh! So that's what's really going on!" [Bolding is mine.]
Whenever the abundance of written material spikes, the average quality of written material falls, as a side-effect of volume. New forms start out tentative and incomplete, and can only compete for attention with older literature among people who prize experimentation...The abundance itself creates a distraction...Institutions built around previous scarcities warn, often correctly, of the end of society as we know it.
Fanfic is one of the distractions drawing the attention of people who prize experimentation (i.e., us) away from the old norm of published literature and OMFG It's TEOTWAWKI!!!!
Sure, that pencils out to lost sales, but as others have pointed out, the most anti-fanfic pro authors are the most monetarily successful. It's not about money; they just don't like the idea of having finally climbed aboard the Published Express, only to find it running slowly down a side track to marginal relevance.
It must gall them to see some of the the most experimentally minded readers out there haring off to tentative, incomplete new forms. They focus on the tentativeness and incompleteness of fanfic as a literature and willfully ignore the whole point.
Fanfic apologists, for the most part, seem to have missed the point, too: they argue for quality, they argue for passion, they're defensive of their little corner of the old written world, when in fact the only really valid answer to anti-fic authors is, "It's new, it's changing, it represents something that nobody fully understands yet, and we can't quite explain it, but it's not going back in the bottle."
In July 2008, The Atlantic published an article by Nick Carr entitled "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" in which Carr argued that because of the internet, people are losing the ability to engage with long works of literature.
Clay Shirky, in a pair of response posts, says, basically, "so what?"
The real anxiety behind [Carr's] essay is that, having lost its actual centrality some time ago, the literary world is now losing its normative hold on culture as well. The threat isn’t that people will stop reading War and Peace. That day is long since past. The threat is that people will stop genuflecting to the idea of reading War and Peace.
Shirky goes on his second essay to say something that made me go, "Ohhh! So that's what's really going on!" [Bolding is mine.]
Whenever the abundance of written material spikes, the average quality of written material falls, as a side-effect of volume. New forms start out tentative and incomplete, and can only compete for attention with older literature among people who prize experimentation...The abundance itself creates a distraction...Institutions built around previous scarcities warn, often correctly, of the end of society as we know it.
Fanfic is one of the distractions drawing the attention of people who prize experimentation (i.e., us) away from the old norm of published literature and OMFG It's TEOTWAWKI!!!!
Sure, that pencils out to lost sales, but as others have pointed out, the most anti-fanfic pro authors are the most monetarily successful. It's not about money; they just don't like the idea of having finally climbed aboard the Published Express, only to find it running slowly down a side track to marginal relevance.
It must gall them to see some of the the most experimentally minded readers out there haring off to tentative, incomplete new forms. They focus on the tentativeness and incompleteness of fanfic as a literature and willfully ignore the whole point.
Fanfic apologists, for the most part, seem to have missed the point, too: they argue for quality, they argue for passion, they're defensive of their little corner of the old written world, when in fact the only really valid answer to anti-fic authors is, "It's new, it's changing, it represents something that nobody fully understands yet, and we can't quite explain it, but it's not going back in the bottle."