Fannish dollars
Apr. 2nd, 2004 05:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwynI was thinking about this fannish expenditure vs. benefit thing today after a strange experience online with a vid. I've finished a Firefly vid that I wanted to share with friends and see if they had any comments, and ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
morgandawn set me up with space on her free account at a web hosting place that offered 20MB free space. Since the vid was 17, I figured it would be a good place to at least have my friends outside the area look at it, only after a long period of uploading it, I went to check it and they'd deleted the account for violating their terms of service. Apparently, they don't allow .mov files. Which, you know, whatever, but it changes my options.
In the past, I've made vids and then accepted that they wouldn't be seen for a long time either because they were for a con, or I would only be able to give out DVDs/tapes at cons to people who were interested. Now that online has become an option, it means my mind sort of goes, hmm, well, this isn't for a con, so maybe I should find a way to put it up. But that means forking over money so I don't run into the problem I ran into today.
With stories, it's relatively easy and financially painless to stick stuff up -- if you have a basic service with an ISP, you most likely will have web space, and if you don't, you can often put things at archives or places like FF.net. Even photos and icons, if you're not doing something like screen caps of whole eps, etc., are fairly low disk space and low bandwidth. But vids are a whole different ball o' wax. They're high-bandwidth, high disk space, and fairly risky in that while there have been purges of fanfiction and photographs off and on over the history of the Web, it's really vids that call down the wrath of the copyright infringement gods. TV show folks often don't care that people are using their clips in vids, but the production studios can; mostly, though, the music companies are pretty scary and have no qualms about going after people. So you've got this product that takes up an enormous amount of space and calls attention to itself in some ways, and it costs most folks a lot of money to make and distribute.
Now, the argument for art is always that you do it because, you know, you're an artist. You write the stories, you make the vids, you do the icons, etc. And in fandom, you share them without financial gain. But for marginally expensive or cost-free art, that's one thing; with vids, you get into a territory where the artists are forking out money to share with other fans, to make their art, but get next to nothing in return. I'm not one of those folks who necessarily believe feedback is the be-all and end-all of fandom, and that only feedback from strangers counts, or that you have to cultivate BNF status in order to consider yourself rewarded. But it is a win-lose proposition in some respects -- some folks have a ton of money and they have their own bigass servers and can upload and download vids with aplomb, but most regular people will have to fork over some money for hosting. Then, they'll also have to fork over money for the products used to make the vids. In the olden days, you could make some of that investment back through selling your tape collections at cost, and then plow it again into the creation of more product.
But today, that's not true. Everyone expects things to be free on the web, and if they're not online, they don't count to most folks. I've made offers many times that people can have nice shiny DVDs for free of my two recent vid collections (one finished, one in progress) for the cost of a postage-paid envelope, yet few people ever take me up on the offer because first, money for the postage, and second, it's apparently beyond the ability of most fans to do something like postage paid (I say this as someone who is surrounded by beloved friends with post office phobia, so that's okay). In a few short years, though, we went from a culture where people leapt at the chance to get vid collections to an "I want it now, for free" mentality that leaves those of us who don't/can't fork over the bucks for web hosting kinda outside the vidding community once again.
To me, that's an interesting, and frustrating, conundrum. Because now that I've experienced the immediacy of being able to share a few vids with friends fairly quickly, rather than maybe once or twice a year, there's a sense of fun and community. But if you're spending a lot of money, time, and meticulous effort on these artisitc creations, and you get nothing in return for your considerable expense -- not even feedback, which should be the most basic level of currency used in fandom, I think -- then is the expense worth it? I'm not sure. It's hard to decide, and possibly because of my situation employment-wise, something I'm thinking about harder and harder. My friends who have tons of web space and don't use make me grind my teeth; I know they don't realize how spoiled they seem to me, but it's one of those things that kind of reminds me how have and have not fandom can sometimes be. Not that this is anything new; it's not, but it seems to come into sharper relief these days with the instant gratification of the web.
I wonder, too, if people get worn down by the constant cost over time. I'm thinking that one of the places morgan told me about, which has some pretty cheap space, might be a good deal to at least try it out for a bit and see how it feels. But after spending the money for a length of time, would it lose its appeal, especially if there's no real benefit? (And again, benefit is a difficult term to define, because for some it would be feedback, for some, recs, and for others, nothing less than goddess-hood and worship everywhere would be benefit enough -- everyone has a different standard). I'm not sure I know what my answer will be even in a few months. I'm not even that fond of watching vids online in many respects -- the colors are washed out, stuff pixelates, transitions can be awkward, music sounds bad when it's compressed... and the size often gives me a headache. But that immediacy and ability to share has great appeal. I'd still rather show vids at cons and make my DVDs available (since I really do make vids with TV screens in mind, and my esthetic choices are always targeted to that kind of situation), but these days that's not enough to really truly be part of the community.
Anyways, it's something I'm thinking about. I guess life depression always turns me into a fannish navel-gazer, for some reason.
morgandawn set me up with space on her free account at a web hosting place that offered 20MB free space. Since the vid was 17, I figured it would be a good place to at least have my friends outside the area look at it, only after a long period of uploading it, I went to check it and they'd deleted the account for violating their terms of service. Apparently, they don't allow .mov files. Which, you know, whatever, but it changes my options.In the past, I've made vids and then accepted that they wouldn't be seen for a long time either because they were for a con, or I would only be able to give out DVDs/tapes at cons to people who were interested. Now that online has become an option, it means my mind sort of goes, hmm, well, this isn't for a con, so maybe I should find a way to put it up. But that means forking over money so I don't run into the problem I ran into today.
With stories, it's relatively easy and financially painless to stick stuff up -- if you have a basic service with an ISP, you most likely will have web space, and if you don't, you can often put things at archives or places like FF.net. Even photos and icons, if you're not doing something like screen caps of whole eps, etc., are fairly low disk space and low bandwidth. But vids are a whole different ball o' wax. They're high-bandwidth, high disk space, and fairly risky in that while there have been purges of fanfiction and photographs off and on over the history of the Web, it's really vids that call down the wrath of the copyright infringement gods. TV show folks often don't care that people are using their clips in vids, but the production studios can; mostly, though, the music companies are pretty scary and have no qualms about going after people. So you've got this product that takes up an enormous amount of space and calls attention to itself in some ways, and it costs most folks a lot of money to make and distribute.
Now, the argument for art is always that you do it because, you know, you're an artist. You write the stories, you make the vids, you do the icons, etc. And in fandom, you share them without financial gain. But for marginally expensive or cost-free art, that's one thing; with vids, you get into a territory where the artists are forking out money to share with other fans, to make their art, but get next to nothing in return. I'm not one of those folks who necessarily believe feedback is the be-all and end-all of fandom, and that only feedback from strangers counts, or that you have to cultivate BNF status in order to consider yourself rewarded. But it is a win-lose proposition in some respects -- some folks have a ton of money and they have their own bigass servers and can upload and download vids with aplomb, but most regular people will have to fork over some money for hosting. Then, they'll also have to fork over money for the products used to make the vids. In the olden days, you could make some of that investment back through selling your tape collections at cost, and then plow it again into the creation of more product.
But today, that's not true. Everyone expects things to be free on the web, and if they're not online, they don't count to most folks. I've made offers many times that people can have nice shiny DVDs for free of my two recent vid collections (one finished, one in progress) for the cost of a postage-paid envelope, yet few people ever take me up on the offer because first, money for the postage, and second, it's apparently beyond the ability of most fans to do something like postage paid (I say this as someone who is surrounded by beloved friends with post office phobia, so that's okay). In a few short years, though, we went from a culture where people leapt at the chance to get vid collections to an "I want it now, for free" mentality that leaves those of us who don't/can't fork over the bucks for web hosting kinda outside the vidding community once again.
To me, that's an interesting, and frustrating, conundrum. Because now that I've experienced the immediacy of being able to share a few vids with friends fairly quickly, rather than maybe once or twice a year, there's a sense of fun and community. But if you're spending a lot of money, time, and meticulous effort on these artisitc creations, and you get nothing in return for your considerable expense -- not even feedback, which should be the most basic level of currency used in fandom, I think -- then is the expense worth it? I'm not sure. It's hard to decide, and possibly because of my situation employment-wise, something I'm thinking about harder and harder. My friends who have tons of web space and don't use make me grind my teeth; I know they don't realize how spoiled they seem to me, but it's one of those things that kind of reminds me how have and have not fandom can sometimes be. Not that this is anything new; it's not, but it seems to come into sharper relief these days with the instant gratification of the web.
I wonder, too, if people get worn down by the constant cost over time. I'm thinking that one of the places morgan told me about, which has some pretty cheap space, might be a good deal to at least try it out for a bit and see how it feels. But after spending the money for a length of time, would it lose its appeal, especially if there's no real benefit? (And again, benefit is a difficult term to define, because for some it would be feedback, for some, recs, and for others, nothing less than goddess-hood and worship everywhere would be benefit enough -- everyone has a different standard). I'm not sure I know what my answer will be even in a few months. I'm not even that fond of watching vids online in many respects -- the colors are washed out, stuff pixelates, transitions can be awkward, music sounds bad when it's compressed... and the size often gives me a headache. But that immediacy and ability to share has great appeal. I'd still rather show vids at cons and make my DVDs available (since I really do make vids with TV screens in mind, and my esthetic choices are always targeted to that kind of situation), but these days that's not enough to really truly be part of the community.
Anyways, it's something I'm thinking about. I guess life depression always turns me into a fannish navel-gazer, for some reason.
