The Internet has opened up many opportunities in electronic publishing. While the commercial world is weighed down by formats and digital rights management the amateur world has embraced the new means of distribution. The are two types of amateur writing available online - original fiction and fan fiction. Fan fiction, in its simplest form, is amateur fiction written about characters or set in a world that has have been previously created by someone else. Both fan fiction and original fiction have been around since the oral tradition held sway and telling the difference between the two isn't always obvious. In its most current form fan fiction is generally agreed to have been around since the late 1960s with credit (or possibly blame) most often being given to Star Trek as the catalyst.
The proportion of original to fan fiction on the Internet is impossible to estimate but, while it still remains widely distributed, taken as a whole it probably represents one of the largest electronic libraries currently in existence. Unfortunately, one which doesn't come with a catalogue. While the larger archives are fairly fixed in their position, the smaller archives and personal pages are frequently changing address, going down temporarily for maintenance or due to bandwidth limitations or just vanishing. "Can anyone tell me where to find..?" is a frequent question on many lists as is the popular "Can anyone recommend..?" Part of this ever changing nature is attributable to the subject matter and the very amateur nature of the enterprise. Complaints, witch-hunts and legal threats can force relocation while lack of resources or loss of interest can remove sites entirely.
Finding something specific is often more a matter of luck than judgment even within the specific communities that you are familiar with. Investigating and entering a new community is even worse since conventions and nuances may well be different and you are lacking the vital clues and experience that you need to help you.
Originally fan fiction was passed around between small, closely knit groups of friends and the more controversial it was the more under wraps it was kept (Bacon-Smith, 1992, Ch. 4). The Internet changed all that. While some of the older fandoms remain stubbornly off-line the rest have embraced the new media wholeheartedly. IRC, mailing lists, electronic journals, e-zines, web sites and archives... fan fiction and other amateur writers have carved a place out for themselves in and with all of them.
Despite this embrace of technology, community members individually are unlikely to have a high level of technical knowledge. The archives vary between dynamic, database driven sites and those which have been painstakingly done by hand (or at least by Frontpage). Personal pages tend to be very basic (Frontpage or Dreamweaver creations) with the users unlikely to have laid eyes on the HTML behind the page. It can be argued that a lot of the popularity of electronic journals in the community is due to the fact that is basically provides the same service as a personal home page ie. a way of presenting you work to your friends, while requiring no technical knowledge to use and none to upkeep. Journals even provide a way of controlling access through the "friends" system, something that is beyond the technical ability of most members of the community otherwise. Community members use the technology because it makes their lives easier but for the average author or reader they have no interest in it beyond its use as a tool. Any time spent working with the technology is time lost from where their interest really lies.
Camille Bacon-Smith compares the community organisation to an extended family structure or 'circle' (Bacon-Smith, 1992, P.26-31). These circles can be both concentric and interlocking with people belonging to many group and being introduced to new areas by these contacts. A lot of changes in the fandom have occurred since the book was written but this conglomeration of small cliques making up the whole is still a valid model. Small may be a relative term but even within the larger circles smaller more personal sub-divisions coagulate.
One of the biggest changes in recent years has been due to increased public awareness and thus increased popularity. This increased public interest as well as an increase in the number of very well known fandoms such as Harry Potter, which are of popular with people of all ages, has sparked a number of debates both within and without the fan fiction community. Until fairly recently the community was comparatively small and, while it varied slightly between fandoms, had a code of practice that members by and large kept to. This is by no means a new concern. Camille Bacon-Smith comments on concern in the community after the publishing of an article on the community by Joanna Russ, later published in her book 'Magic Mammas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans and Perverts', bought publicity to certain sections of the fan fiction world and an increased influx of new people (Bacon-Smith, 1992, P.224).
One of the most fundamental of these understandings, a spin off of the concept of Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations (IDIC) (Bacon-Smith, 1992, P.6, 219), was the premise that if the reader didn't like something then they didn't have to read it. This was frequently summed up on web sites as "if you don't like it you know where the back button is". This attitude was coupled with an increasing trend to attach meta-data to a story. This would include anything that either was unlikely to occur in the source that the fan fiction was inspired by or that might cause offence or upset. The amount and detail of warnings expected to accompany a story tended to vary between fandoms and involvement in that fandom would give community members an idea of what was expected of both the reader and the author.
This trust between author and reader was reinforced by two factors. The first is the large overlap between producers and consumers. Fan fiction by its definition moves the fan away from the position of a passive consumer to one of active creator. There are those who solely read fan fiction without any attempt to create, or at least without any attempt to reveal their creations to the rest of the fandom, but a very large part of the community is the exchange of ideas. When these are not in story form they are in the form of appreciation, discussion and letters of comment (Jenkins, 1992, pp.161-162).
In 1996 Charles Hill wrote "readers will come to demand what now seems a luxury: the ability to engage in a public dialogue with a writer, not content to merely read the text and keep their opinions about it to themselves" (Hill, 1996). This state of affairs had already existed for a considerable period of time in the fan fiction world although the complaint most frequently heard is that not enough opinions from the readership are heard. Possibly the authority of the author has already been undermined to such an extent by the concepts of fan fiction and the confluence of the reader and writer roles that the further undermining of authorial authority that Hill comments on (Hill, 1996) is not perceptible. Instead its largest influence appears to be a greater understanding. Writers find it very easy to identify with what they would like to see as a reader because it is a role they often take on themselves. Likewise a good proportion of the readership is going to be other fan writers who know the conventions and have a voice if those conventions are flouted. It is in everyone's interests to "play nice".
The second factor in the trust equation is peer-pressure. Reputation is an important element within the community, probably more so because except for conventions and other organised events there is very little face to face communication. An author known to flout the conventions will become known as such throughout the social circle in which they exist and the correct information circulated. This does, however, assume that people belong to the relevant social circle and so can receive the information and that there is agreement on the meaning of the meta-data that is included by the author for their readers.
With the rapid expansion of the number and type of people involved in amateur fiction on the Internet these two factors are becoming undermined. This is partly a symptom of the change that is going on within Internet users in general. As O'Hara argues "these newbies will not feel the need to respect the underlying assumptions of the net, even if they know about them; peer pressure to conform will be that much less powerful" (O'Hara, 2004, P.118). This has a direct effect on the way the relationship between the writer and reader is being viewed both from those within the relationship and those viewing it from a distance. Writing has always dealt with the controversial and amateur writing is no different. The fear is that the new thinking is totally contrary to the community practices that have traditionally served as a checks and balances mechanism. The concept of a contract of trust between the author and the reader is broken when the reader is deemed to be untrustworthy, or worse that the concept of credibility should not be applied to them. Rather than trust being a two way process the shift in public thinking is towards the author taking full responsibility for who is able to read their work even when the reader ignores warnings or lies, either by agreeing to abide by conditions they can't or won't abide by or by explicitly giving false personal details. This attitude can be seen in two recent "Cease and desist" letters sent to Harry Potter adult fiction sites. The letters acknowledge that the sites clearly have warnings that state that the content of the site is unsuitable for children:
Plainly the warnings to the effect that children under 18 should not access your website do not in fact prevent minors from doing so. Indeed such warnings may well serve simply to entice teenagers to your site. (HP1; HP2)
The majority of the rules in place for protecting minors from adult material rely on the distinction between the creators and consumers of such material. The community recognises, and pretends not to notice, the fact that many authors started writing stories with adult themes and content before they reach the age of majority. This is especially true in a community where straight men are notable for their scarcity and for a lot of the teenage, especially mid to late teenage, authors fan fiction is an important outlet. For all these reasons a lot of authors subscribe to the idea of indicating what can be expected within the content of a page but baulk at the idea of a totally enforceable blanket restriction. This is an understandable sentiment but one that sprang into being when the number of minors that came into contact with amateur fiction, adult or not, was much smaller and was mostly comprised of those who were already in their mid to late teens.
Some sites subscribe to various self-classification systems since this is seen as a continuation of the warning system. They are providing information about the content of the site it is then up to reader, or whoever sets the browsing level for the reader, to decide whether they wish to access that page. This filtering approach is backed at high levels in the United States and other countries for these reasons.
[Filters] impose selective restrictions on speech at the receiving end, not universal restrictions at the source. Under a filtering regime, adults without children may gain access to speech they have a right to see without having to identify themselves or provide their credit card information. Even adults with children may obtain access to the same speech on the same terms simply by turning off the filter on their home computers. Above all, promoting the use of filters does not condemn as criminal any category of speech, and so the potential chilling effect is eliminated, or at least much diminished. (United States Supreme Court, 2004)
It is hard to say if the reason more people within the community don't take part in these schemes is ignorance of them, lack of faith in them or an objection to the system. It seems likely that for most people it is a combination of lack of technical knowledge and belief in the traditions they are familiar with. The problem is a conceptual one as well as a technical one. Most of the prior campaigns to encourage authors use these systems have been hampered by the lack of help and incentive they offer in combination with the judgemental and condemning tone that they use.
Can a workable ontology be created that covers both the categorization of the stories and the relationships that exist between the writer and the reader and between the members of the community. An ontology which is understandable and, more importantly, usable by members of the community in a quick and easy manner. Using this standardized meta-data can the tightly bound communities that exist within fandom be used to create an authentication system through social networking? One which, possibly working with other methods, creates a system that the overwhelming majority of users are happy with? There have been previous suggestions, demands and campaigns both from within and without the community for some action to be taken in response to the influx of young fans. A lot of these calls have not been met with a lot of enthusiasm because they have tried to force themselves against the understood social norms and traditions that exist in the community. The social networking aspects of the semantic web can be easily seen with the success and continued development of systems such as FOAF. Can such a system be used to work with the community to create a workable trust system?
There are no authorities existent within the community beyond the cores of the various social circles. Trying to impose a central hub would cause more problems than it would fix suggesting that any such system would need to work on a distributed, peer-to-peer system. One frequent complaint is about stories and sites vanishing so any system would need to be able to cope elegantly with changing nodes and ideally should be able to identify identical stories and thus provide alternate locations.
Anonymity, or at least the illusion of it, is a fundamental part of the fan fiction community. People may choose to give up that option with people they know but the ability to keep "real life" and "fan life" separate is extremely important to a lot of those involved. Most writers in the community write under a pseudonym, some even writing under different names in different areas of interest. This is not just coyness, stories of people loosing jobs, friends and family are common enough within the community that personal details are guarded closely. Even those who write under their own names do not tend to put their full name for this reason (Jenkins, 1992, P.200-202; Bacon-Smith, 1992, P.207/8). The same applies, but even more so, to readers. While some details are expected from writers so that feedback can be sent to them readers see no need why their identities should be required of them. Any system that required verifiable personal details to be entered by its users would be doomed to failure. Further there is a good argument that encouraging the belief that it is alright to give away personal information to unknown people and sites on the Internet will, in the long run, be more harmful to the "impressionable children" than any contact, intentional or otherwise, with a piece of work intended for an adult-only audience.
The concept of the Web of Trust is not new. Encryption systems such as PGP are based on this idea and recent work has been done to use such structures for web services and e-mail filtering (Golbeck et al., 2003; Golbeck and Hendler, 2004). The question is given the restrictions is it possible to come up with a compromise system that restricts access of adult content to minors, unless the content was written by that particular minor in question (or is the author not permitted to read their own work until they come of age)? Further is it possible to include in that system the ability for the parent or guardian of the minor to override those settings and give permission for the child to view either specific works or stories of specific classifications? A fan "public key" that can be issued in certain places under specific conditions but once used negotiates with the semantic services so that they only return appropriate results without requiring or giving away any personal details. In most situations this might not be a workable solution but when community is such an important part of an on-line domain it seems worth investigating whether that network can be used as an alternative to, or in conjunction with, other policies to provide an age authentication system with a reasonable level of reliability. One which is implementable by amateur, non-commercial web sites and by users who may have little time and a low level of technical knowledge while providing incentives to make the extra work required worthwhile.
The Fan Fiction Ontology Project - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/onto_fanfic/
