Episode 154: Fans are Discussing…
In Episode 154, “Fans are Discussing…” Elizabeth and Flourish...discuss (heh) the way Twitter’s trending topics reflect—and fail to reflect—what fans are actually talking about. The conversation touches on the platform’s editorial decisions, how Twitter trends are interpreted by both Hollywood and the press, and the way fan speculation fuels the geek media ecosystem. They also respond to a teen listener’s letter on a recent discussion about age and fandom.
Show Notes
[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:01:34] Our most recent AMA episode was #152.
[00:07:37] We talked about this in Episode 158, “Do Not Interact.”
[00:17:08] We went deep on the Snyder Cut in Episode 146, “If You Give a Fan a Cookie.”
[00:19:05] Our interstitial music here and later is “Musical Mathematics” by Lee Rosevere, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:22:05] “Fans and the Man” was Episode 117. Also, Special Episode 24 was all about WandaVision!
[00:27:41]
[00:28:35]
[00:30:00] “Meet the Twitter Employee in Charge of Making Sense of its Trending Topics” by Luke Winkie.
[00:34:52] Lola Bunny, before and after:
[00:42:15] If you don’t encounter them in your Facebook feed, there is an entire Tiny Kitchen YouTube channel…
[00:51:04] 1. The parallels are real and they both look fantastic. 2. Elizabeth still does not want mutants in the MCU.
Transcript
[Intro music]
Flourish Klink: Hi, Elizabeth!
Elizabeth Minkel: [laughing] Hi, Flourish.
FK: And welcome to Fansplaining, the podcast by, for, and about fandom!
ELM: All right. This is Episode #154, “Fans Are Discussing…”
FK: [laughs] Our title comes from a phenomenon that you have probably noticed, which is on Twitter and also in other places the appearance of headlines that are like, “Fans are discussing X thing,” and you’re like, “OK. Great. That is a headline I guess?”
ELM: OK, there’s more…
FK: “There’s discussion…”
ELM: There’s more to it than this! We got an ask about this and about the cycles it creates.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: This was building on some themes that we talk about a lot, but it is something that we haven’t specifically talked about and it’s something I complain about a lot on Twitter, so I’m pretty excited to get the chance to complain on this podcast!
FK: Yeah, and I feel like I’ve been seeing it—I feel like it’s been growing over a long period of time and it has really become a monster recently.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: So I’m really looking forward to discussing that. We will be fans discussing fans discussing.
ELM: Fans are discussing this about fans discussing. That’s great. But! First we have a letter about, in response to our most recent AMA episode, when we talked about teens. Our letter is from a teen!
FK: Yeah!
ELM: We asked for some teen perspectives and we are so thrilled that a teen listener wrote in to talk about their observations, so do you wanna read it?
FK: I’ll do it! OK, this is from S.P.
“I listened to your ask anything episode where you put out a little call for teens listening to give some feedback vis-a-vis whether your podcast had done any inadvertent teen-bashing. I’m a teen that enjoys your podcast, and I think that you have provided a really fair look at the behaviors of teen fans, especially on Tumblr—so thank you! I’ll say that I’m reluctant to do anything more than lurk in spaces that I assume are adult dominated, like your pod, in case minors aren’t welcome, but I thought you might appreciate a teen perspective. On that note, I wanted to share some observations from a fandom I’m active in that seems to be very teenaged at the moment.
“This is a fandom that, right now, has a huge split between younger fans and older fans—and a lot of discourse between them (keep in mind that I’m sure there are adults and teens on both sides, but teens and adults are each most visible on a certain side). On the ‘teen side’ I see a lot of purity culture, a lot of content that (in my opinion) is totally divorced from the canon, a lot of callouts, a lot of ‘correcting’ the source material because the writers ‘got it wrong,’ a lot of ages in bios, and a lot of Carrds with looooong DNI lists. When I stepped back into this fandom during quarantine, I was excited to see fans my age that I could possibly interact with. But when I saw all this ‘DNI’ stuff, I was pretty confused. As I learned about this particular way of being on Tumblr, I found that I did not want to interact this way, and I was unfortunately not enjoying participating in this fandom. But I am interested in understanding why these fandom spaces are behaving like this.
“One really interesting thing I found was how all the purity culture and ‘protecting minors’ coincided with this idea that the canon was wrong, and that really there was a more ‘pure’ canon that the writers just weren’t writing. Have other people noticed these trends going hand in hand? Do we have any information on whether these DNI heavy, minor heavy fandom spaces are the same ones that believe there’s a ‘real’ version of a certain plot or character that they would like better, if only the writers/actors/directors/powers-that-be would just give it to them?
“I was thinking that the reason for this connection might be that teens often have little financial freedom—and the objects of fandom can be pretty expensive, if you have to buy a streaming subscription, or order comics every month, or whatever it is. It’s often talked about that people are just discontent with the canon, but is it possible that they actually haven’t encountered very much of the source material? It could be that their primary way of consuming canon is by participating in Tumblr fandom—the fanon is the canon, sort of? I wonder about this very often when I see meta cross my dash that doesn't seem to be actually reflecting on any of the canon, just the fanon that this ‘teen side’ of the fandom has created and perpetuates. These fannish behaviors aren’t really my cup of tea, and I’m excited for the day when the split in this fandom disappears and all the fans can interact alongside each other in a non-discoursey way. Will we ever get there?
“Anyways, hopefully you have some thoughts. And hopefully I’m not the one teen-bashing, because there are certainly a lot of behaviors in predominately teenage fan spaces that I do not agree with.” And that’s from S.P.
ELM: SP, thank you so much. Such a good letter.
FK: Yes. And for the record, we welcome in this space, I think, adults and people who aspire to become adults.
ELM: [laughing] What a strange way to describe teens, Flourish!
FK: [laughing] You know…
ELM: Uh, just very strange! Very strange.
FK: I don’t know.
ELM: Yeah, absolutely. I think that, I hope—I think it’s worth stating explicitly, since it was in this letter, but I do, I assume that it’s fairly clear from our overall schtick that we obviously respect minors’ rights to gatekeep themselves by those terms, right, to say “I’m under 18 and I’m going to click ‘no, I do not consent to seeing this content,’” but we also constantly talk about how when we were minors we clicked “yes.” [FK laughs] “Yeah, sure, I wanna see it,” right?
So either way you wanna be, like: we respect that, but like, this is definitely not…cause I think we talked about this in the thing that S.P.’s responding to, about the like, “No-18” emoji in bio, you know? The…
FK: Right.
ELM: That, that kind of huge trend over the last year or two.
FK: Yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: Coming from adults. Which you know, I think a lot of this is so strange to me too, because it just sets these arbitrary lines of like, very black-and-white lines to say like, when actually these ages are not consistent across—even across states, let alone…
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: Internationally. So.
FK: Yeah. So I did want to say, I mean, to just respond directly to some of S.P.’s questions: I don’t think that we have data about, you know, how these things like, the different purity culture and DNIs and like, the idea of there being one true canon or whatever—I don’t think we have data about how those things actually march together, or if indeed teens are more likely to be engaging with that stuff than adults are. I do think anecdotally I feel like those things often go together, just in the same way as I think that there’s other stuff that anecdotally goes together on the people with “no-under-18s” in bio.
But I also think all of those phenomena are things we’ve seen elsewhere in fandom over the years, just in slightly different versions, you know what I mean?
ELM: Mm-hmm.
FK: Time is a closed loop and like, we’ve seen all this stuff happening and coming back in, like, different ways over time, so I mean, it wasn’t called “purity culture” at one point, it was something else, but like—I don’t know. It’s, it’s really hard for me to put a finger on this and say like, “Yes, everybody is like this or not like that, and it’s happened recently and here’s why.”
ELM: Yeah. So yeah. Here’s what—yeah, I agree with you. I feel like, so when I’ve tried to explain what Carrds are to a bunch of my friends in their 30s, and they’ve never heard of them, and I’m like “A Carrd!” And so I’ll go into Twitter and I’ll type in “Cardd” [sic], and as we described in the DNI episode—DNI, for anyone who missed that, Do Not Interact messages or warnings rather—a Carrd is like, this is a website were you can put your whole profile and your likes and dislikes and the DNI stuff and, you know, fan art or whatever, original art, et cetera.
So I’ll show them a Carrd and it’s always really interesting because they’ll be like, “Oh! I get it.” Cause that’s what we discussed in that episode: it definitely has strong like, you know, Geocities or MySpace or like, AIM profile energy, right? It’s like…
FK: Yeah!
ELM: You know? Yeah! You’re jammin’ right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
FK: Yeah, and also a slightly more polished and less specific version of it—my personal website, like, FlourishKlink.com looks an awful lot like a Carrd to some extent, you know what I mean? It has basic information about how to contact me.
ELM: Well, hold on. It doesn’t say like, you’re afraid of spiders and you love K-pop, though, right? Those feel like…
FK: No no no, those feel like they’re down that road. But it says “Use this email address if you want to talk to me about this thing and this one if you want to talk to me about that one,” it’s stuff that would also be in a Carrd.
ELM: Yes, but I’m talking about the stuff that feels a bit more adolescent.
FK: Sure sure.
ELM: Stuff we definitely did as teens.
FK: Sure.
ELM: It was important to me to list the things that I liked as a teen, and now I would feel…
FK: Silly.
ELM: Weird doing that. Yeah, right? But like, I don’t disrespect my teen self for doing that in any way, right?
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: And so like, that’s really interesting. But whenever I pull up a Carrd for them, I always notice that a lot of stuff—I’m just doing random searches, they’re not fandom people at all, and there’s no mention of fandom things on these Carrds, right? And so that has me thinking about like, some of these trends, so much of the Carrd and DNI stuff, a ton of the people doing this are not fandom people, but they’re like, intersecting—there’s a Venn diagram of fandom folks, and I think it’s some of these like, intersections where things get really muddy, right?
Because like, that’s where you can see people being upset about shipping in general, right? And so then you have fans who are engaging in these, you know, practices or whatever, but they’re coming from a fandom space where shipping is normal. But then they’re, you know, sharing the same visual and media language with people who are like, kind of anti-fandom generally, right? You know what I mean?
And so that to me says that like, those actual methods are more about a demographic and age group, right? That does feel like that swath is for younger groups of people, not necessarily different corners of fandom. Does that make sense? That distinction?
FK: Right. Yeah yeah yeah, that does make sense. I think that’s a very fair point.
ELM: I mean, connecting it back to S.P., like, all right, that’s a point I made but how does it actually connect back to this? I think that also gets back to some of what you’re saying about, like, patterns repeating and things that we’ve seen, right? Like, you know, the means are a little bit different, and I don’t know—I feel like a lot of these kind of parallel 2001 versions of these conversations we saw, obviously they’re influenced by the broader cultural conversations. But I don’t think the pathways between the fandom conversations and the parallel ones outside of fandom were that smooth. You know?
FK: They were not! Yeah. I mean I’m thinking about in, like, 2001, I had a—at the time there was the thing where there were teenage, you would like, make your own little personal website, right? Like your domain name.
ELM: Sure.
FK: And I had an obscure surname of Athena, Zosteria.net, like, that was my domain name.
ELM: Flourish! Teen Flourish is so…
FK: Such a teen, right? And like…
ELM: Such a Flourish.
FK: And I had, and I had this blog and like, I did not talk about fandom stuff on that blog. And I had friends who were in that space of like, teenagers on the internet making their homepages and blogging and early video blogging, and stuff. And that was not a space that fandom was in. I had like a different identity that was doing fandom. [laughs]
ELM: Right, right, right.
FK: You know what I mean?
ELM: Yeah! And where were you, thinking about the places where you might have discussions too.
FK: Right.
ELM: It might have been mailing lists or whatever, which is something really specific, and it’s not like you would accidentally click on someone’s site thinking they were not doing a fandom thing and they actually were doing a fandom thing. That was much less likely. But right now, if you click on someone’s Tumblr, functionally, you know, it’s just like “Oh, a Carrd!” And then you might not be able to tell, you know what I mean? I think it’s a lot blurrier and more connected now than it used to be.
FK: I agree.
ELM: Which means that there are a lot of people who think they’re talking about the same things with the same sets of values, but actually don’t at all. And I think that’s really tricky.
FK: But one of the things that I will say about this is I think that there are, you know, I also think there are some adults who are engaged in all of these behaviors. I don’t think it’s purely a teen thing.
ELM: Sure.
FK: But I think that for a lot of people, whatever time you come to it, it is often kind of a phase. Right? Like, there’s a period in which—I remember being a teen and having people be like, “Why are you,” people in fandom being like “Why is all this stuff in your AIM, that’s so teenage,” like, you know? “Why do you—why do you have, why does your LiveJournal look like this?” Obviously there were people who were like that.
ELM: Wow. Why was everyone so mean to you?
FK: It wasn’t mean, it was just like, you know, having a discussion about different people’s aesthetics on their blogs and people being like “yeah, I don’t do that because like, I don’t feel the need to, it feels kinda juvenile. It’s cool, you’re a kid, go for it, but also I don’t,” you know? “I would’ve done it if I were still 16!” You know? [laughs]
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And I feel like there were people who were of all ages who like, went through that period and then were like “OK, but I don’t need to do it anymore,” like, “I don’t need to announce all this stuff.” So to some extent, you know, I kinda wonder like—I don’t know that these things, that these trends, are going to be like, forever things. You know what I mean? Not for everybody. Maybe there will always be people who are doing things like Carrds, but I don’t know that it’s always going to be the same people doing it.
ELM: Yeah, but, it was kind of a free-for-all about who even had access to the internet or their relationship to the internet around the year 2000. Right now, we’re talking about groups of, you know, younger groups of people who have come up online 100%, have really different expectations around privacy…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: You know what I mean?
FK: Yeah, I do.
ELM: So I think it is a little hard to extrapolate from the past, but.
FK: Yeah, all right.
ELM: I wanna make sure that we get to, from S.P.’s letter, the—I don’t know, I think the purity culture elements of it, cause I think we just talked about Carrds mostly, which I mean, we just find them very interesting, right? But like, the purity culture element…I also feel like there is, I feel like there’s a lot on Tumblr of like, I don’t necessarily think this is new. But it’s not, it feels like it’s just growing and growing to me, the kind of like, memeification and the like, disconnect from canon.
Do you know the posts that are like, “incorrect whatever quotes,” and they’ll be like a scene from Parks & Rec and they’ll insert the character’s names or whatever, you know what I mean, right?
FK: Yeah, yeah yeah.
ELM: And like, that’s obviously been going on for years, but I feel like it’s just gotten stronger and stronger, and I say this across—these are the people that I follow, I see this on my like, pseud fandom dash, I see this on my regular dash with people from all sorts of different fandoms at this point. No one on my regular dash is in the same fandom as me, everyone has moved on to a variety of different things, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: And you know, I think for some people it sort of seems like the fandom world is like, so wholly disconnected from the canon and like, people talking. We talked about the fic stuff too of like, lots of people don’t care about the source material at all, right? And maybe never even engage with it, right? So it just become this like, inter-fandom language and way of tossing characters into scenarios.
So then you start having arguments that seem pretty disconnected from the canon, and you have these desires of what you think story should be, and you don’t understand why that outline can’t overlay directly onto this thing, right? And it’s like, “well, I just like the looks of these people and the version that I have in my head” or whatever.
And I don’t think any of this is new, but I kind of feel like it’s just been growing and growing as like, fandom has gained this like—it’s like a big snowball, right? Because now at this point there are so many, fandom is so much larger and people have spent more time in it, so they’ve like, gathered…
FK: Right.
ELM: You know, archetypes and feelings and snowballing over and over again, right?
FK: And you also aren’t necessarily coming in from a perspective of like, there was a lot of this behavior in the Harry Potter world in the early 2000s, but people were coming in to it from a Harry Potter canon to like, “I’m going to find a Harry Potter canon-related website to look at,” and then from there like, maybe going off and getting weird. Right? Like…
ELM: Yeah. Sure.
FK: Yeah. Like, for you know, a period of time like, I was engaged in a portion of fandom that really cared only about Snape.
ELM: Weird!
FK: Great! Right? Like, you know, all the rest of it—very unimportant. You know. And like, obviously that has very little to do with the canon in a lot of ways. But you had to come into that through, through the canon, whereas now I feel like you don’t necessarily have to come in through the canon. You can just be like “Oh yeah! That’s my archetype, that’s my guy!” you know?
ELM: Right, right. Yeah. My comfort character. Use the lingo, Flourish. Yeah! Absolutely. I mean, I don’t wanna like, toss on a pair of rose-colored glasses, you know. I don’t feel like, it’s obviously like—lots of people have spun off their own fanon worlds to the point where it’s like “what are you even talking about anymore?” all throughout my time in fandom.
But I do think just because of the volume of it, and because you know, there are so many people who engage with stuff mostly via gifset or whatever, you know, like—I don’t know. I feel like that, like, sets up a ground for like, people allowing their like, headcanons and their personal desires to like, vastly outweigh what is actually going on in this stuff canonically.
FK: Yeah, and there’s also like, outside of the purity culture context, the idea of the great thing that they’re keeping from us is also just like a much broader cultural force right now. RIght?
ELM: Sure.
FK: Like all of the people who want the Snyder cut, all of the people who want, you know, a different version of what was going on in Star Wars, because what was going on in Star Wars was like, too woke for them or whatever. Right? Like, these are not purity culture people, but they also have a similar idea of “the real thing,” the form of the thing out there.
ELM: Right.
FK: So I agree with everything that you just said and I would just also say that I think it’s like, it’s both/and, right? It’s also this broader cultural trend that we’re seeing.
ELM: Totally, yeah. And I don’t think that’s age-specific at all.
FK: No, no, definitely not.
ELM: But I do think it’s hard if you’re younger and you’re coming into, you’re coming online, you’re coming into your like, intellectual growth, and this is the world in which you’re growing and like, makes it even harder to resist if you’re already kind of inclined…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I know people of all ages like, you know, latch onto conspiracy theories or say “this isn’t right, it should be a different way because this is not what I wanted.” Like, that’s normal and human. But you know, it’s hard if you have everyone around you kind of giving into those instincts instead of trying to figure out ways to like, work with reality, basically. So.
FK: All right.
ELM: Well, S.P., wonderful letter. I really really appreciate you writing in and I appreciate the thoughtfulness with which you even framed it, as a teen writing into an adult-led— “led.” [laughs] An adult-only? I was gonna say “adult-only” but that feels weird. But we are two adults.
FK: It’s not weird, we are two adults.
ELM: It’s only us. A two-adult podcast. [FK laughing] I just made it awkward.
FK: Thanks. Thanks for that awkwardness that you just injected in here. Should we take a little break and then come back and talk about the main topic of this episode?
ELM: I think that’s a good idea!
FK: All right.
[Interstitial music]
FK: OK, we’re back and before we get on to discussing fans discussing…
ELM: Oh my God.
FK: We need to talk about Patreon, and one of the big reasons we need to talk about Patreon is we are coming out with our next Tiny Zine and it is extremely exciting!
ELM: [laughs] Yes! So, if you didn’t listen last time or you don’t follow us on social media, you may not have seen—this is a collaboration. Once again, a collaboration. Our last three were with Maia Kobabe. Incredible artist, I love all three of those Tiny Zines. This one is with, I don’t think that they’d appreciate this, me saying they’re an incredible statistician. They’re probably gonna write us like a panicked message being like “I’m not a statistician!!” Fandom stats whiz—
FK: There we go, that’s better.
ELM: —DestinationToast. Once and future guest, and someone that a lot of people in fandom know for their stats work, their data analysis.
FK: Yeah. So if you would like to receive that Tiny Zine, pretty soon now you should go over to our Patreon and pledge $10 a month or more.
ELM: Or more! Or more.
FK: [laughs] And then we’ll make sure to get that out to you. It should be going out within the next couple weeks. You can also, if you, you know, don’t have that much money to spend, don’t think that Tiny Zines are cute—I don’t know, whatever.
ELM: No, no.
FK: Everyone thinks Tiny Zines are cute, right?
ELM: Scratch that second one. That’s, I don’t, stop. Stop listening if you don’t think Tiny Zines are cute.
FK: Right. Anyway, you’re not, you know, it’s not necessary to support us at that high level. You can still support us! You can, for $5 a month we’ll send you a cute enamel pin—
ELM: [laughing] So awkward. Yeah. Uh-huh. Cute.
FK: For less than that, I think $3 a month? You get access to all of our special episodes, and we’ve done a lot of them.
ELM: This is very weird that you’re going backwards.
FK: I know, right? I’m very off.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And for I think $2 a month you get early access, so you get like 24 hours ahead of time access to all of our episodes. So that’s patreon.com/fansplaining, which we also didn’t say up top. We are going completely backwards.
ELM: Yes.
FK: However, that’s not the only way that you can support us.
ELM: [laughs] All right. You’re free, you’re done, you said it backwards.
FK: I did it!
ELM: It’s complete.
FK: [laughing] I made it!
ELM: So, yeah. Of course we appreciate all financial support, but we also appreciate all non-financial support: that means sharing the podcast, we have transcripts of every episode at fansplaining.com if you have friends in fandom who are not listeners but readers, we encourage you to share those with them. Subscribing really helps us show up in various places on people’s feeds.
And then contacting us just like our two contacters today—I was going to say “letter-writers,” but. [FK laughs] You could write us at fansplaining at gmail.com. You could also use the submissions form on fansplaining.com. You could contact us like the ask we’re about the read for our main topic, on fansplaining.tumblr.com. Anon is on, please don’t be mean. But [laughs] you are free to be anonymous there, just as you are in any other of our asking spaces. We’re also on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. And, if you’d like to get your voice on the podcast, you can call us at 1-401-526-FANS.
FK: Yeah!
ELM: We will play your message. Just keep it to a couple of minutes, and yeah! You can also be anonymous there, obviously just don’t say your name out loud. So please contact us with more questions. We obviously love answering them.
FK: All right. With that, shall we get on to our second letter?
ELM: Yes! Speaking of—no, these were messages Flourish. That’s what I’m trying to say.
FK: OK. Well anyway. Our second message.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Our second communique.
ELM: Communique, thank you. I will read it. So this is from an anonymous person on Tumblr. They wrote:
“So recently on Twitter, I've noticed something that made me think of your ‘Fans and the Man’ episode, and other episodes on corporations interacting with fandom. I’ve been watching WandaVision (as it seems like a lot of people have) and in the trending topics, especially when new episodes of the shows come out, there are often captions like ‘Fans discuss the new episode’ along with the hashtag, or ‘Fans debate whether (some character) will appear on the show.’
I don’t personally mind the explanation in the trending topics for people who may not understand why certain words are suddenly trending, but at the same time I could see why it would feel and/or be exploitative for some people. And given some of the more controversial elements of the show, I could also see the perspective being that Twitter has only chosen to spotlight popular fan theories rather than meaningful discussion and critique, as much as that can be made there. Thoughts?”
FK: Thank you, first of all, for writing in and asking about this. We very much want to talk about it.
ELM: Yes. Definitely have thoughts.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Really appreciate the opportunity to share those thoughts.
FK: So my first thought, I don’t—how can I put this? I have some bad news for anybody who feels like they are being exploited on Twitter for like, having their Tweets tracked or followed or whatever: that is like, the purpose of Twitter, right?
ELM: Cool. I thought it was to share ideas, Flourish.
FK: The purpose idea of Twitter is to generate—
ELM: To make connections…
FK: To generate data that drives ad sales, and also people doing, like, research and so forth and—like, corporate research, I mean. That’s the fundamental purpose of Twitter, not making connections and being fuzzy.
ELM: I love that you are only talking from the perspective of your specific industry. There are so many other reasons why Twitter exists.
FK: Uh, I mean…
ELM: And uses of Twitter.
FK: Sure, but like, from a like, money-making standpoint, right? From a standpoint of how Twitter makes money.
ELM: I mean, I don’t know. Twitter also has a lot of partnerships.
FK: That’s true, you’re right, good point.
ELM: I don’t know. And also of course—that’s not what we’re talking about, how Twitter makes money.
FK: Well, all I’m saying is when I saw “exploitative” I was like, “exploitative?!” [ELM laughs] I was like, “Exploitative that they’re highlighting that there is this hashtag that’s trending, which is a way that people like, find—” you know, one of the uses of Twitter for various people is to find out what conversations are happening, right?
ELM: Right.
FK: I don’t know, it just…I was like “Whoa! Is it exploitative to have like, a thing happen that is built into the platform that you signed up for that’s like,” I don’t know, I was just sort of blown away by that question.
ELM: OK. All right. I think you’re zeroing in on a word. Let’s take a little step back here. Twitter.com. [FK laughs] The microblogging service launched in 2006…
FK: Thank you.
ELM: By SMS.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Yeah. What a cool platform.
FK: At South By Southwest.
ELM: Yep! So…
FK: Remember the days…
ELM: I know some of our listeners are probably not on Twitter, so I don’t think we should shorthand anything or take anything for granted. But, Twitter has for a very long time had trending topics on the side, and they have been a source of I would say—you, just, just a beautiful example of like, bad UX and bad decisions by a tech platform. [FK laughs] For literally the entire time. Right?
So like, in the very beginning was a pure—I mean, I don’t actually know some of the ways that their algorithms have shifted over the years. I’ve noticed things in passing, right? And I’d probably pay more attention than other people, because I studied platforms, like, at the graduate level, right? You know? So like… But, you know, there was a period where the K-pop fandom, and other subcultures but particularly K-pop fandom, figured out how to gamify them, basically, to the point where—
FK: Only ever.
ELM: All of the trending topics on the side were K-pop things. And so they had to change their algorithms to punish them, right? So they wouldn’t show up there. That kind of thing. So it’s often felt very reactionary and they kind of weren’t really in control of this, even though they literally are in control of this, right.
FK: And at the same time people take these trends—I mean, if you don’t take the trending topics very seriously then you may not think very much about them, because I certainly didn’t for many years. I was just like “OK, yeah, whatever, trending topics.” But people take them extremely seriously in a lot of different areas.
ELM: Sure.
FK: I cannot tell you how many different phone calls I’ve gotten about things going “Such-and-such is trending! Do we know why?” And if you don’t have an answer to why, which sometimes you don’t because their algorithm is not always very sensible, like–then it’s a big drama. And I also see people like, generating stories, journalists, you know what I mean? Because there’s something that shows up in trending, and you’re like “OK, that’s where that came from.”
ELM: I’m sorry, I just got a strong vision of like, one of the characters from—what was that Coen Brothers movie in Hollywood? The one where Channing Tatum sings the gay sailor song.
FK: Oh yeah, that one!
ELM: What was the name of that movie? [singing] “Ain’t gonna be no dames. No dames!”
FK: [sings] “No dames!”
ELM: “No dames!” [both laughing]
FK: It was a fun movie but I don’t remember. It was so fun! And it had, um, and it had…
ELM: Hold on!
FK: And it had what’s-his-name, um, Christophe Lambert played the director? Yes, that’s “Christopher Lambert” but said Frenchified because he is in fact French.
ELM: Hail Caesar!
FK: Hail Caesar! Hail Caesar! That was a great movie. It did not get enough credit.
ELM: It truly was great. I was surprised when I watched it years later and I was like, “Why isn’t this like a true classic?” Like, I don’t get it, I don’t get it.
FK: I think that about every Coen Brothers movie. Anyway.
ELM: I had a strong vision of like, one of the characters from that film calling you on like a 1950 phone and being like, “Flourish. Explain to me why is this trending.”
FK: Yes. Yeah. Or—
ELM: Oh, that sounded like J. Jonah Jameson.
FK: J. Jonah Jameson!! [both laugh]
ELM: “More trending topics!”
FK: Yeah yeah. But I do think—but I do think that this is something, I mean, genuinely this is also, observationally it seems to me like journalists also use the trending topics to come up with ideas for things to write, and you know…
ELM: You say “journalists” but I think we are using that term very loosely right now.
FK: Yes, I am.
ELM: “Content producers.”
FK: Content producers! [laughs] At sites that claim to be news sites.
ELM: Yes. So, OK. So they have—Twitter has changed how they display trending topics. You can get more granular with your location and so you can show trending topics for your region or your country or global, which is usually incomprehensible, cause it’s a big world with a lot of things going on. [laughs] And they also have definitely futzed with the algorithm to the point where things will trend when they only have a few thousand tweets—
FK: Yeah!!
ELM: —and they won’t trend when they have hundreds of thousands of tweets. So I don’t know the decisions that have gone into it, and I just notice it as an observer. But. Maybe a year ago, maybe a little longer, some sentences started appearing alongside some trending topics. Giving context.
FK: Explaining them.
ELM: And these sentences are not very good. And I was like, “All right.” I’m not blaming the sentence writers—and I’ve tweeted about this so many times, but it’s just like: I want to know what is their directive? What are they being told by Twitter? This is clearly being generated by humans.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Right?
FK: Yep.
ELM: So when we got this ask I pulled up this article that I was thrilled to see a few months ago in Slate where a journalist went through the same process where—he apparently had thought they were auto-generated, which I don’t know why he thought that, and then he realized one day reading one particularly awkward one, which I’ll read to you right now, that—this is when he realized they’re human-generated.
So [laughs] this is the summary, this is what appears on the sidebar on Twitter, alongside whatever the hashtag was that was trending. Quote: “People are discussing gatekeeping in pop culture after a user suggested if someone’s anime knowledge is solely based on popular titles like Demon Slayer, Naruto, Inuyasha, Bleach, One Piece…then you’re NOT an anime fan!”
FK: [laughs] Yeah, I mean, I do have to say: that could not be generated by an algorithm. That is a human-generated sentence. It is! Well, it could be generated by an algorithm, but it definitely wasn’t.
ELM: Right. So breaking this down, you know, they had to—they pulled in “gatekeeping in pop culture.”
FK: Yep.
ELM: Then obviously the, the tweet was probably something lke “if your anime knowledge is based solely on these titles you’re ‘not an anime fan.’” Right?
FK: Yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: So just kind of lightly rephrasing what I assume the original tweet was, but making it sound as awkward as possible.
FK: And, and the all-important thing, that people are discussing it. Right?
ELM: People are discussing.
FK: People are discussing it. It’s not just that someone said this, it’s that people are discussing it.
ELM: Right. So this kind of bland passive—somewhat passive language, right? Like, well, I mean, it’s not really passive, because then you’d say “it is being discussed.” Right?
FK: No, but it is pretty passive—it’s distancing.
ELM: Right. So these, I’ve noticed, have been quite awkward, and you know, I look at these a lot and there was one instance where I actually noticed that it changed, and that gave me a little insight about maybe the directive they were getting. Because it’s like, it had something to do with TERFs, something to do with I don’t know, probably the British media or whatever. And I noticed that some of the language they had used around trans stuff in the tweet, or in the trending topic, was like—I felt a little loaded, and also maybe not great, you know? In that way that sometimes you’re like “Whoa, wait. Did you mean to,” you know what I mean?
FK: “Is this ignorance or malice?”
ELM: Right, exactly. And I was like “Oh!” And I actually was going to screenshot it, and I think I had seen it on the Fansplaining—I had our account open in a different browser, and then I refreshed or I looked at it in the other browser or whatever, or I looked at it again, and it had changed slightly and it had become more ‘neutral.’ It had become more bland, basically, and I was like: is this happening all the time? I had no idea. Or was this an exception that someone then noticed? Are these being reviewed and then being like, “Oh, you need to sound less involved and not give an opinion,” right?
So I had already been wondering about that and then this article came out. So that was the thing I read, the demonslayer Naruto thing, that was the thing that led this journalist down the path of finding out why they’re doing this, right. So he managed to get hold of a woman named Victoria who’s one of the writers. And there are writers all over the world, right?
So apparently their directive is to just get a lot of context and to present some of that context briefly. So the quote from the article:
“Victoria tells me that, because of this work, she’s become exponentially more familiar with Twitter’s gradient of fandoms. The way she puts it, her responsibility is to assimilate among those who keep pushing those strange, mangled trends to our timelines. In practice, that means Victoria had to recently embark on an all-encompassing Minecraft deep dive. The massively popular block-building game, first released in 2011, is in the midst of a minor renaissance, and the names and catchphrases of individual Minecraft streamers frequently orbit to the top of the trending apparatus. Victoria resolved to embed herself in the game’s lexicon, to truly know it and speak it so she could parse its frequently appearing trending terms. There’s no educational cheat sheet in a job like this.”
And so it went on to explain how she, like, reads a lot of wikis, right? And really tries to understand like: who is Dream? Or whatever.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I know the names of two Minecraft streamers, for obvious reasons, right. That kind of thing. And you’ll see this too, and it will be like: “YouTubers Borgle, JoBro—” things you’ve literally never heard of— “are all saying that it was just a prank!” Or whatever. I don’t know, I’ve never heard of these people, I don’t know what they did, you know what I mean?
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: And like, and so, then she had this quote that I think was really—Victoria, the woman who works at Twitter—I think really summed it up. She said: “It’s not our job to share our opinion. We’ve got to stay as impartial as humanly possible. How I’m feeling about Lola Bunny’s new design needs to stay out of it,” adds Victoria. “The way to keep it down the middle is to say, ‘People are reacting to Lola Bunny’s new look.’” And for the record, it’s cause the new Space Jam has a new Lola Bunny and she’s not a busty bunny. [FK laughs] If you’ve forgotten about that little controversy from earlier, I think that, you know, I have no opinion. It’s important to keep my opinion out of it.
FK: [laughs] But it does, it does make sense though, right? Because—when I just think about, I mean, obviously I’m coming at it from a very particular perspective of my industry and all of that, just like you were calling me out on earlier. But when I think about the way that people, the degree to which people parse this stuff, it’s so finely parsed, right? Like, it’s so like—people obsess. I was not joking about getting the J. Jonah Jameson call about like “Why are we trending on the Twitter?!” You know?
ELM: “Flourish, why are people reacting to this?!”
FK: Right! And if that sentence says something that feels like it’s even slightly leaning one way or the other, people have full-on meltdowns about this. Right?
ELM: Well, yeah. I absolutely understand. I mean, I think that it’s a little specious—I don’t, obviously there’s no such thing as impartiality and I understand they have to say…I understand that as a directive, and I understand that as a goal, and it doesn’t, you know, whatever. Like, these are, unless they get a, a full extremely diverse array of all of the human experience into that room, where they’re writing these things, which they’re not going to be able to, right? They’re not gonna be able to capture that. Presumably there’s not a ton of people writing these.
FK: It’s gonna be Victoria reading Minecraft wikis at two in the morning being like “I have to poot out this sentence!” [both laugh]
ELM: Poor Victoria! I hope she likes her work. But you know, like, I think that—I understand that as a goal, but editorial choices are being made every single time they do one of these! Right? You know? Because they are picking out specific things to highlight. Things that they think are important? I don’t know. I wish the article had actually gone into that. Why are you picking this? Because some of the stuff that they choose, like I said, just like the trending topics on the side, are like—some of them don’t actually have that many tweets, right?
FK: Yeah!
ELM: Something like Beyoncé will be trending at the time, and there’ll be like a million tweets about Beyoncé, right? I wish I had some sense fo the overall editorial directives, but I don’t. And so this just leads me to speculate about what they, what Twitter values and what they think we should see, and I think that kind of brings in the fans, and that’s the “Fans and the Man” element to me, because it creates this, this cycle where they say “fans are talking about this,” and people see it, and they keep talking about it, right?
FK: Yeah. I mean, I—just having observed this happen and having like, looked very closely at the way that things on Twitter, the ebb and flow of certain conversational topics on Twitter go, my suspicion is that they’re highlighting things that seem to have a particular cause. Because a lot of times, you’ll have like, Beyoncé trending with a million tweets on Twitter, and there’s actually not really a clear reason. Obviously I’m not actually following Beyoncé for this, but I’m following other stuff. It’ll be like, there’s not really one singular clear reason why that’s happening.
ELM: Right, right, yeah.
FK: It’s like, someone tweeted about it, and there was something else, and there was this viral post,a nd that brought it to mind for a bunch of people, and in the end you can get swells of hundreds of thousands of tweets—none of which has, like, a single cause or a controversy or anything like that in it. Right?
ELM: So, I think this happens all the time and I’ve noticed this with my fave, Magneto, who’s trended a lot, including around WandaVision, which we usually—around WandaVision time there was a reason why Magneto was trending. But he’s also trended a bunch recently, including the person saying in that meeting that the vaccine gives you, like, Magneto power? She didn’t say it that way. I was like “If only.”
But so I click on “Magneto,” because of course I do, and like, yeah, it’ll just be like people’s random comments about Magneto. And it’s like, well, this isn’t really trending so much as like, in the sheer volume, a bunch of people are talking about Magneto. And I find that often when I’ll click on stuff. I’ll be like, you know, when Victoria doesn’t tell me why it’s trending, I’ll be like, “Why is…”
You know, my hometown Saratoga Springs trended for me the other day, and it only had a few thousand tweets. And I clicked on it, and I think it was ostensibly people were tweeting about it because the opening day of the racetrack had just started. But like, which is similar to random tweets about Saratoga that came up when I clicked on it, right? And I was like “Yeah! That seems normal.” People just tweet about places every day, right?
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: So I was like “Why did this even make it into trending status,” right? So the question of like: is this one big conversation, or a sort of pointed conversation, to the point where Victoria could say “People are tweeting about Saratoga Springs, New York because…” Or is it just an aggregate of several thousand people mentioning the same term at once, right? And that is not always clear to me when I dig into this stuff.
FK: Yeah. It’s not for me either, and I often, you know, I use various tools, I get the whole Twitter firehose and I’m able to cut into and see what are the, what are the tweets that are driving this? Usually there’s a few viral tweets that are really driving a peak like that. And a lot of times it’s just like: someone drew a really pretty piece of fanart.
ELM: Right.
FK: And it went super viral. And 60,000 people saw it and then they had little conversations about that fandom because it was so pretty. And it’s like, well that’s not really…
ELM: Sure.
FK: And meanwhile there was something else going on too at the same time for some reason, right. And that’s like, Victoria’s not going to write a caption saying, you know…
ELM: “Fans are reacting to a beautiful piece of fanart!”
FK: Right.
ELM: She wouldn’t say “beautiful.” Poor Victoria. We should make up a colleague for her so we don’t have to keep pinning this on her, but you know.
FK: [laughing] Victor.
ELM: [laughing] All right, sure! Victoria and Victor over in the office. Yeah, you’ll see people being like “Since,’ whatever, you know, “since Magneto’s trending, here’s my Magneto opinion!” They saw it. But that’s the self-perpetuating part, too, right? People see it and it inspires them to spew out their opinions into the world.
So I wanna take this and then like, kind of shift slightly and talk about the other part of this ecosystem, which is the media. Specifically the bottom-feeding quote-unquote “geek media,” which is not the same as like, I don’t know…
FK: The people that I was erroneously calling “journalists.”
ELM: [laughs] Yeah. Like, there’s a huge ecosystem that’s developed, particularly in the last five years, of just kind of garbagey websites, like, literally garbagey, they’re full of like, Taboola generated ads about, like, that will trigger you, cause they’re terrible images of conditions that you could have on your body or whatever. Right?
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: [laughs] Or like, the things, the foods that you’re not supposed to eat? I always get so tempted to click. I’m like, “What?” It’ll be a picture of a rotting avocado or whatever and I’m like “Are you telling me not to eat avocados?! Like, this seems like a doctor writing this—I should click, right?”
FK: The place that gets me with that is Facebook, with like, the—it’s not like ads, it’s like, featured content and I’m like: I know this has been populated into my feed because someone’s paying you to see it, but I’m still gonna click.
ELM: I click on that all the time. It’s always like “Hey, do you live in New York City and go to Broadway shows?” and I’m like “I do! I’d like to read this Time Out article on a place I live!” It’s fine.
FK: Exactly! Yeah, or watch this soothing video of someone making a resin tabletop or whatever.
ELM: Oh, anything that’s being created I will watch on Facebook. Side note. Can I just say, first of all…
FK: Facebook, good job, you’ve got us.
ELM: Good job, Mark, congrats. [laughs] Sheryl? I don’t know who’s still there anymore. You know, did you ever get the ones for the tiny—the tiny kitchen?
FK: No!
ELM: Oh, Flourish, I would watch any of those in a heartbeat, and I’m a vegetarian, too. I don’t wanna see people making meat products! But I would watch that.
FK: Oh, but it’s like a little tiny, tiny tiny tiny miniatures?
ELM: It’s a super tiny kitchen and they have, like, a real heat source on the little stove and a hob, so it’s like, they literally cook the thing. Right? So I just watched one where they made a tiny cookie…and they always play it so cutely, they have a little breakfast nook. Oh, Flourish, get ready to watch them!
FK: I’m ready! This sounds like it’s right up my alley.
ELM: I think once you click one, also, you’re gonna get hundreds of them in your feed [laughing] like I do.
FK: I’m into it, I’m into it! I’m excited for that, instead of like, weird sewing tips from Malaysia. Which is, I got myself into that ecosystem and now suddenly I’m like “All right. Here they are.”
ELM: Any of those. I’ll watch any cake decoration, I’ll watch any nail art…
FK: Right, yeah.
ELM: Literally anything.
FK: OK, cool.
ELM: Fine.
FK: Here we are.
ELM: Good job to those content producers. But anyway, the geek media sphere—these are the outlets that like, so the way, the way it works is the way they make money is by pure traffic, right? They have shitty ads on the side and they are paid a fraction of a fraction of whatever for, you know, to have those ads. And that’s the way they make money. Right? And they might be a part of like, a media group that has a bunch of these sites, and they’re just kinda throwing shit to the wall to see what sticks, basically, with these. And so they really live or die by like, how good their SEO is and how good their social engagement is. Right? Because they do not offer substantive nuanced journalism or commentary. [FK laughs]
FK: No.
ELM: I would say.
FK: No.
ELM: And so these are the sites that will present speculation and rumors about Marvel’s casting decisions, for example, as fact, or they’ll like—I don’t know, you, you have to look at these all the time.
FK: I do.
ELM: I don’t know if you have any of your favorite strands of this kind of content production.
FK: Oh, um, yeah. Uh, whenever there’s something—and it’s always very very very aimed at, because they live or die by their SEO, because they live or die by social conversation, it’s always super aimed at that. Right? Like, it’s always “we’re gonna give you the most controversial version of this thing so that we can hopefully—we noticed this on a trending topic, so we’re gonna repackage that and then hopefully you’re gonna spread this and then you’re gonna make the conversation trend more and it’s gonna come over to us, because then you’re gonna read the next five articles we write about this.”
ELM: Exactly.
FK: I’ve really noticed it anytime, any time there is something that is sort of controversial. This is actually one of the things I believe is driving polarization within geek spaces, right? Because I notice that they’re not above pulling in anybody in the alt-right sphere.
ELM: Cool.
FK: And there are some alt-right people who also do this! There’s at least, there’s several channels that I know that are alt-right channels that just give you alt-right takes on pop culture that have huge, huge, huge followings.
ELM: Yeah, yeah.
FK: And then they feed into the sort of more, like, neutral geek media spaces and they just feed off each other.
ELM: I feel like with that stuff, though, I do feel like the mainstream media plays a role. It made me immediately think of the Star Wars harassment stuff around, with the actors of color. A lot of that was elevated and perpetuated, I think, in a well-meaning but unfortunate way by mainstream media, right? Where they kind of overindexed on the relatively small group of people being racist monsters, and but once you put it in The Guardian…
FK: Right.
ELM: Or once a thoughtful writer writes an analysis of it in New York Magazine or something, that then elevates it to, like, an actual news story that’s an actual dynamic going on and then that turns into this, you know, big cycle.
I think that’s a bit different than just these garbage sites covering some of this stuff, because it’s unfortunate, but it was a serious story. The Guardian and outlets like that make this stuff serious by covering it, you know what I mean?
FK: Sure, but I’m thinking of specific stuff like—there will be a rumor, like, say, whatever. A TV show releases casting and they don’t say who’s playing what part. Right?
ELM: Sure.
FK: And so then the garbage sites will be like, “here are the rumors for which of these cast members are playing this, and by the way, did you know, this cast member is Black and that means that it’s cross-race casting and so get ready to be angry, people who love the original!” You know?
ELM: Great, great, cool, OK.
FK: Or “They’ve hired a—” you know, I don’t know. Just anything. When I’m talking about this, I’m talking about like, rumors, before anything comes out. Because the mainstream press will not pick up on stuff generally speaking—
ELM: Exactly, yeah, it’s true.
FK: —when it’s like a rumor. You know, it’s a spy person who like, took pictures of the set, like, reports. But these garbagey sites will.
ELM: Right.
FK: And they’ll report on it as fact. And then they will get into that, that feeding frenzy back and forth, you know?
ELM: Yeah, OK, all right, that makes sense. And I bet you they—I absolutely understand why you would see things, you in particular would see things like this.
FK: Right, because for me, I mean, just on the, on the side of the Powers That Be, they get reports on all of this. They get reports on all of the headlines that are coming in on everything. And those headlines don’t differentiate—I mean, they know, obviously, what’s an important site and what’s not. But if you see like, there’s two hundred headlines and they’re all super negative…
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Then you get worried, even if they’re all these cruddy little fly-by-night sites, right? It doesn’t, that doesn’t matter. People are still worried about that for obvious reasons.
ELM: I think people have terrible media literacy, also, and I’m not just saying the people that you’re like, reporting to or your clients or whatever. I mean, I see some of these rumors tweeted onto my feed by journalists!
FK: Oh, yeah! Oh yeah.
ELM: They’re like in the quote-unquote “geek space,” right? And so they’re excited to see “oh, is Marvel gonna do this?”
FK: Yeah.
ELM: It’s like, trust me: if Marvel’s gonna do something, we’re gonna hear about it in like a, you know, the Apple keynote-style version of…we’re not gonna learn about it in ShittyComicFacts.com or whatever this website is you’ve just shared, right?
FK: Well, you might learn about it from ShittyComicFacts.com. But you will also learn about it from the glossy keynote thing and then it will actually be for sure true. You know.
ELM: Right. But so many of these are just like, wild speculation, and then you actually click on some of it and it’s like, “Well, fans are discussing the possibility that…” but it’s like “What? This is just some people on Twitter being like ‘wouldn’t it be cool if Magneto showed up in the seventh episode of WandaVision’ or whatever,” right? And I don’t, that’s not…it’s such an also…
I mean, actually now that I bring this up I do want to talk about it a little, because I feel like WandaVision was such an egregious example of this cycle, also, where it was just like—it made the conversation, some portion of the conversation so boring. [FK laughs] Because it was just this like, constant cycle of like, “is this character gonna show up? Is this actor gonna be in it?” Right? You know?
And then people would start tweeting about it, and so often people would be like, “Fans are talking about…” and I was just like: fans on my feed are also talking about, like, whether or not this is actually a nuanced portrayal of grief, and like, writing like, you know, dissertation-length tweet threads about yes or no, their opinion or whatever. Right? And it’s just like, there are so many actual interesting conversations, critical or you know, praising, about this show, and you’ve kind of reduced this into I think some of the worst parts of geek media and superhero and comics media, where it’s just about like, you know, a roster of people and characters right? You know?
FK: Yeah, well, the other thing about this, I think—you’re totally right. The other thing is, I think that this also leads…weirdly, let’s go back to the first half of this episode, right? Talking about the idea of the “real thing” that you were denied.
ELM: Mm-hmm.
FK: I think that some of this conversation leads people to feel that there is a real thing that is the thing in their mind, right?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: I mean, I’m thinking about the WandaVision stuff, I’m thinking about if Magneto showed up, right—oh, wouldn’t that be cool. But there’s also, like, all of—on every speculation level, people get to a point where they believe that they know what’s going to be in it, right?
ELM: Right. And then they would write “fans are disappointed Magneto didn’t show up in this episode,” right?
FK: Exactly.
ELM: And it’s like “All right, yeah.”
FK: And that’s OK—obviously you can be disappointed, and it would have been cool for Magneto to show up, sure. I think that would be cool.
ELM: I don’t know. I don’t, I disagree. I don’t want, I don’t want mutants in the MCU, Flourish.
FK: You—you had a lot of feelings about this at the time though, don’t, you know, they were not all like one thing or the other. [laughs]
ELM: No, the only feeling I have about—positive feeling—is I really enjoyed the like, seeing specific visual parallel shots.
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: Wanda and, you know.
FK: Yeah, OK.
ELM: I loved that and I still love it.
FK: All right.
ELM: But other than that? No.
FK: Right, OK. Anyway, my point is just that like—I think that some of this, because the speculation gets reported on as like, fact or like, rumor gets reported on as like, something that was substantiated, even though it’s just people going “oh, what would be nice…” Then it leads us more and more into this space of like, the imagined thing that’s going to come out, and brings us back to the like, “Well, this wasn’t it.” Right?
I’m thinking particularly of like, less the purity culture side of that and more the like, Snyder cut side, or the, you know.
ELM: Yeah. But I think it’s beyond that, too. I think that that’s right, but I think that it’s like, that also leads people—particularly on Twitter and like, not, you see this less on Tumblr I feel like, but other places where people speculate and that’s a big part of their fannish practice, it’s not like “I want Magneto to show up,” it’s the utter confidence. It’s “Magneto is going to show up. Tonight, Magneto’s gonna show up.” Right? Or like, “This character is actually this character. I, I predicted it. I called it.” Right? You know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: It’s like—and so, then, it’s like, it’s not even about desires anymore. This is getting at exactly what you’re talking about in terms of, like, the realness, the truth of it, right? You’re like, “I’ve cracked the case.”
FK: Yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: “This is what’s happening next.” Right? So it’s not just like, “fans are disappointed afterwards.” It’s like, “fans are mad that they, their prediction didn’t come true,” or whatever. Right?
FK: Right.
ELM: It’s just like—what a tiring cycle this is!
FK: Well, and I feel like you’re putting together two things that do like—they march together but they’re not the same thing, one of which is the “fans are discussing” where it’s just like: this thing trended because people thought this would be a good idea and then it gets reported on and then it creates a cycle. And then the other thing is the stating my fan theory as though it were a fact, you know. “I’ve cracked it.”
I have a book from years and years ago, it’s like, The Key to Harry Potter. And it was this professor who like, had this intense like, alchemical reading of Harry Potter, right? He was like, “Yes, the albedo, the nigredo and the rubedo of the Philosopher’s Stone process,” which are real parts of it, right, “it’s Albus and Sirius Black and Rubeus Hagrid.” And it was this whole thing and it was like, OK, I’m glad that you have enjoyed—
ELM: This was a book?!
FK: Oh yeah. I’m glad that you have enjoyed—he was at a conference that I ran. So it’s like, I’m glad that you’ve enjoyed all of this, but also like…and I know that you’re a literature professor somewhere, and that you have let yourself go down this path, but like, also, this is a fan theory! [laughs]
ELM: Right. Oh, man.
FK: A very complicated one, right?
ELM: For a not-so-complicated series of books.
FK: Exactly. And I think about this every time I see, you know, fan theories since then, like, where they’re like “I have solved it,” right? “I have the key.”
ELM: Yeah.
FK: So those two things do go together, because the “I have solved it, I have the key” people drive the rumor mill, which then results in the thing being announced as a fact or like, you know, “IT’S DEFINITELY GOING TO HAPPEN! We think maybe.” And the “We think maybe” is in the tiny little letters.
ELM: Right. I think this also, like, gets to the like—I mean, we’ve talked about this plenty, but it turns, it just makes me feel like people reduce so much of their watching of like, narrative media into like, more…I mean, this is even a little insulting to sports, but into a sports game, right? You’re just like, looking for an outcome. Right?
FK: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
ELM: You’re looking for a final score and you’re looking for your side to win or whatever. Right? Like—and also, I don’t, I don’t think that sports are that simplistic either. It’s not like you could just be told the final score and that you would understand how the game went, right? You know? Like—there’s a pleasure in watching the entire thing. Right.
FK: You would not get the same pleasure, yeah.
ELM: Yeah, you know, even if you know how the game’s gonna end you could still have the pleasure of watching the game, because there’s so much to it, right? It’s not just…
FK: Yeah. Why do baseball fans listen to radio reporting on baseball games that happened 50 years ago, and like, envision the game in their head, right?
ELM: It’s for nostalgia, Flourish.
FK: And because they’re enjoying the experience of thinking about what happened in that game! [ELM laughs] You know?
ELM: Yeah, it’s true. It’s true! So you know, but I always, I feel like—I think about all the different ways, I think of this with Marvel, with the MCU in particular, you know. I think I’ve talked about this on the podcast in the past, like, when—being at Comic-Con when they were announcing, they were showing the preview bit and feeling like I was watching, like, the lineup at the All-Star game or whatever. You know? [FK laughs] They were just like…
FK: Whoo!
ELM: “T’Challa!” and they were like “Oh shit!” And they were like “Spider-Man’s here!” and they were like, “SPIDER-MAN!!!” It’s just like, cool! All your faves showed up, right? But it’s just like—and obviously it brings people an incredible amount of joy, but also to some degree—I don’t, there are elements that I just don’t get on a personal level. Like the whole thing with the Avengers, the final Avengers film, where it was like “Oh, it can’t be spoiled!” and it’s like—you know what I mean? It’s like only the outcome matters, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: And not the actual experience of like, watching a narrative piece of fiction.
FK: Yeah, totally. I mean, I think also like, just touching on something that you said earlier, right—part of the problem is when this is the flattened thing, this is the only thing. Right? Like, how does fandom appear in Twitter trending topics? Only about “fandoms are debating this thing.” Or “fans are debating this thing.” You know. “Fans are excited about this thing.” Never “fans are having a nuanced discussion about this thing.” Right?
ELM: Victoria doesn’t have the space to…
FK: She doesn’t! I’m not blaming Victoria. I’m just saying, then it’s like, that gets flattened. And again, I see this in my work, right? People want to see what is going on in fandom, and to some extent they want to see the deeper stuff—I’m very lucky that many of my clients want that. But a lot of people really just want to see, why was this trending? And what was the very simple explanation for why? And how does that impact like, the thing that we cast.
ELM: Right.
FK: Like, casting next season. End of conversation. And the impact is like, very very simplistic, right?
ELM: More pictures of Spider-Man. [laughs]
FK: Right! I mean, like, do we—yeah—so it’s like, OK. I don’t want to deny the fun of this, and I think that also like, there is—I mean, Lord knows there’s pleasure in spy reports from on-set and speculation and all this. But when it’s the only thing that is being shown back to you as something fans do, then it feels icky to me.
ELM: Yeah. Well, we’re running short on time. I’m trying to like, connect all these pieces together, because like, you know, I also think we’ve talked plenty in the last few years about fandoms for whom the like…I’m thinking about Twitter making editorial decisions of what to highlight.
Going back to the original ask, I think we both agree that “exploitative” isn’t the word we would use, because it’s like, Twitter is not going to include you in this if you lock your tweets, and other than that it’s a public platform and you know, this is one of the least exploitative things that Twitter does because it’s not about individual users. They also historically, I don’t know if they still do this, but there was a long-running feature called “Twitter Moments” where they would put—if you had like a semi-viral tweet, they would make a moment out of it, and it would be a special section you could click on. And everyone I know who has been a moment has said it has been a nightmare, because it just puts this decontextualized shitty spot—I mean, it seems like the crowd of people who look at moments also are not great, right? And so it’s just like, “Please never put me in one of these, because I don’t want this extra level,” right.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: It’s ironic, because it’s like “Well, why did you tweet it at all if you didn’t want people to see it?” And it’s like…
FK: Not like that!
ELM: Yeah, exactly. That does actually feel—maybe “exploitative” is not the right word, but it’s not great because it’s just not thoughtful, right?
FK: There’s a difference between things being exploitative and things like, taking you out of the—you know, of the context that you thought you were in. Right?
ELM: Right. Right.
FK: There’s been a lot of work done on sort of, what our expected audiences are, right? And one of the challenges we have is like, if you tweet something with a presumed audience of like, just your followers, and then it gets thrown out to a lot more people than that, you’re like “Wow, well, I wouldn’t have said it that way if I had known that that many people were going to see it,” right? Because why would they have the context? Right?
ELM: Yeah. I mean, like the thing we were discussing before, but every time anything I’ve ever tweeted has gone even mildly viral, I’ve regretted it immensely and been like “I should never tweet again.” Right? And usually it’s like nothing—like, nothing bad. It’s not like people are in my mentions yelling at me. They’re like, “Correct! You’re right,” and I’m like “Cool, I don’t like this in any way. I don’t like 1,000 people saying yes.” Like— [FK laughs] It just feels bad, right? It feels kind of scary, you know?
And so like—it’s a weird platform, because it’s like, you delude yourself into thinking that you are just talking to your followers or whatever, but that’s not actually the way it works in practice at all, cause you’re posting something on the open web.
FK: Yeah. Most of the time, you’re going along lulled into, you know, calm and lulled into a sense of security, because you’re just tweeting to people who follow you.
ELM: Right.
FK: And nothing bad is happening. And like, you know, I mean—you can say that people are naïve to think that it’s not going to go to a larger group; I do say that myself sometimes. But you know.
ELM: You see these posts on Tumblr all the time that are like, “This is a trash fire of a platform but also it’s great,” because there’s like, no algorithms and there’s no trending topics and there’s no plucking you out of the context in which you are. And obviously we’ve discussed the problems within Tumblr, about people winding up in an out-of-context, right, when they—you know, get reblogged out into the various spider-and-web of a reblog chain.
But it is true that Tumblr feels very insular, right? Your problems will all be within Tumblr. It won’t be like you’re gonna wind up in an article, “Fans are saying.” Because none of these sites even look at Tumblr, right?
FK: Yeah, and that’s completely true! And this is, I mean, this is—I know that you’re right that people use Twitter for a lot of things other than, you know, like, data mining and so forth, but I know I always say this a zillion times, like: Tumblr’s terrible API is what saved it from the fate of being like Twitter. And its like, bad way of tagging so that you can’t like, search things sensibly. Like: people can’t get that information out of Tumblr the way they can out of Twitter. Twitter is optimized for it, you know?
ELM: I think the way that people write on Tumblr also is like, incomprehensible to like, you know, like—I can decipher a Supernatural post, but it may not say the word “Supernatural” anywhere in it.
FK: Oh yeah. Yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: I have to know about the homophobic angel confession. I know these words, but what value is that gonna serve unless you—
FK: But actually the way that the API works, you actually can’t find that at the moment. Right? Like, it’s looking at tags.
ELM: Mm.
FK: So you know.
ELM: Right, and Tumblr famously has a conversational tagging style that probably isn’t great for data analysis.
FK: It’s challenging, right? Anyway, so—yeah. Point being that like, this does get back to like, how these sites make their money or don’t make any money, congrats Tumblr. Right? Like… [laughing]
ELM: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think, this is an interesting thing, because I think a lot of people did move to Twitter in the last two years, not just because they were leaving Tumblr actively with the porn ban—though obviously there was a big move there. But people were already moving off of Tumblr and onto Twitter, and obviously Tumblr is still a robust place with a lot of use, at least I see that on my dash.
But this is like a little bit, like, caveat emptor, with Twitter, like—there are so many places where you can have your fannish conversations that are hard for people to access. Like, even Reddit: Victoria would have to spend so much time reading through Reddit posts to do, you know what I mean? Reddit is one where things surface because of the community, and that’s really different than the platform surfacing stuff, right, you know?
FK: Yeah, absolutely. Even though Reddit has a better API, such that you can search through Reddit stuff more easily and figure out what people are saying, the actual way that that’s—the way that people’s eyeballs get on it have to do with the community choosing to like…
ELM: Exactly, right.
FK: …push it up. So that changes the vibe completely.
ELM: Right, right. And so Twitter is pretty unique at this point. Facebook I don’t think is, I mean, they’re making these opaque decisions and they just show you stuff, too. But like, Twitter’s interest in showing you these things as suggestions—that is what it is, right? And it sucks that, I mean, it sucks that the media overindexes on Twitter, that they give it more space than it deserves, because it kind of creates the self-perpetuating cycles that we were talking about. I don’t know. What a stupid website that I go on many times every day.
FK: Yeah! I’m restraining myself from getting deep in like, the different websites and their levels of transparency and all of these things, so I think that we had better end this conversation, because otherwise I’m just going to go down a long, long rant about—like, you mentioned Facebook and I like, I’ve got a mine of stuff to say. So we’re not doing it.
ELM: No, no, I don’t need to hear it. You can tell me later! I love talking APIs. My favorite topic.
FK: Fan communities on Facebook are weird, also, so like, it’s fascinating, but…
ELM: Nope! Nope! Don’t cut yourself off and then open, you know, re-attach yourself. [laughing]
FK: All right! All right! I’m cutting myself off. I’m cutting myself off now. Thank you so much, anonymous person, for this ask. It was obviously extremely fruitful as far as thinking and discussing goes.
ELM: Yeah! We did discuss. Fansplaining is discussing, has discussed.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: It’s a reference to the title, did you get it?
FK: Yeah! I got it. Let’s—you know, the best way to support us would be to make this trend on Twitter. [laughs]
ELM: No, it wouldn’t! I don’t want that. I think we just explained why that would be bad. So anyway, never tweet, that’s the moral of the story.
FK: Never tweet.
ELM: OK, cool.
FK: I guess I’ll talk to you later then, Elizabeth Minkel. Go don’t tweet.
ELM: [laughing] I’m not going to tweet right now. OK bye Flourish!
FK: Bye!
[Outro music, thank yous and credits]