Advocacy for Fan Created Content
Friday, December 14th, 2007I am delighted to discover the foundation of the Organization for Transformative Works via this if:book blog entry. While i’ve not been moved to storytelling via characters established elsewhere in the culture, i recognize it as a strong statement about our culture. I wonder about the time prior to TV and the certainty of historical research when you can imagine, “Tell us another story about King Arthur,” led to tales where the story teller could invent a new narrative, mixing in familiar landscapes and other characters. Cut-up, mix-up, mash-up may be post modern, but may also be pre-modern — modern, in the sense used by historians (not art and music scholars), to mark the distinctive arc of Western European culture for the past 500 years. In the excellent Dawn to Decadence by Jacques Barzun, he cites Petrarch as one of the first creators to express the desire that his name would be known because of his creations. This sense of ownership of one’s creation is, indeed, modern, and has a great deal of value. In contrast, the sense of creative work as part of a shared culture is ancient and, in a sense, definitive of human culture. I see in fan culture a connection to the ephemeral sharing of storytelling and culture building throughout time.
And then copyright, an infant concept when we look at cultural history, steps in with the modern age, Petrarch, and the printing press. First, the king controlled the copying. (Freedom of the press wasn’t just for newspapers but all mechanical duplication.) Works derived from one another — operas, ballets, plays, poems, novels — creating a stew of characters and plots that fed language and metaphor, created a shared experience. In the twentieth century with broadcast media, the shared smorgasbord of personalities and fictional characters became even more pervasive. Superman outstrips Zeus in Google hits. (Thor beats Mickey Mouse, but often as a brand or product name.)
Fanfiction seems to me a continuation of the human response of “Tell us another story.” I believe we need to make sure that storytellers are protected in their creative explorations of how characters are becoming more than an element of a creation but part of the cultural fabric. I can certainly understand creators wanting reward for their work, but in releasing their work to an audience, they have no choice but to give up control. Each viewer, reader interprets and understands a work in their own way. Characters show up in our dreams, in our jokes, in our fantasies, in our references. It’s not a large leap to storytelling. In telling new stories in a shared mythology or “history” — consider Mark Twain’s account of King Arthur and then E B White’s and then Marion Zimmer Bradley’s — storytellers weave the narrative into the culture, culture into the narrative. Surely, this has been happening throughout time: children playing out their new narratives, parents telling stories, amateur theater, 18th century tableaus. Now, with the internet creating a way to share and celebrate this sort of retelling, the issues of fair use suddenly become visible to the rights owners.
It’s an important part of sharing and understanding our lives, our world, and it’s great to see a group forming to support the activity.
