What we miss out when we just look at the numbers

Author’s note: I just wanted to apologize for letting you folks down last week and not being able to publish an issue. Sometimes even my own systems fail me, so I thought I’d make up for it this week with two drops. Today’s newsletter is a pretty special one because it is my birthday, and I thought I’d give a bit of a gift to make up for missing last week’s newsletter drop and because I guess I have more to say this week.

One of the things that has been in the back of my mind has been people bringing a ‘stats’ mindset to fandoms that don’t really need it.

Over the past year, I have just learned that people have apparently started to care about their ‘comments-to-hits’ ratio on Archive of Our Own. This was news to me. And this is certainly wild to me as someone who has been in fandom for close to two decades now. I know big name fans (BNFs) are a thing and there are people who also write professionally who use fanfiction and fandoms as their training ground. I also know fandom can be a ground for serious leisure. I know this because I have spent hours and hours writing and reading fanfiction and giving feedback to people who make fanart and edits.

That said, I feel like fandom moving in this direction, where we start measuring or taking in fanwork based on how popular it is or how big of a following it has is a symptom of the overoptimizaton and quantification culture we now live with (which in itself has roots in mass production and the field of management being tied to a more scientific approach in order to help industries scale).

Nothing is ‘worth it’ until it can be proven that it is.

Things can no longer exist until there are charts and statistics backing up their existence.

We hold onto numbers, to statistics as markers of quality to the point that it does cloud our judgment. There’s actually a term for it: quantification fixation.

This study talks about how people prize attributes based on what can be quantified and that this fixation is worse in people who see themselves as more fluent with numbers. (A self-fulfilling prophecy, if you ask me.) The authors go on to highlight that yes, people like to compare using numbers and one way to combat the fixation may be to be more fluent in non-numeric information. I’m interpreting this as: we need to get better at articulating why we make choices that go beyond the numbers.

I’m currently part of a music fandom, so charts, streams, and purchases are part of the conversations. When I saw a tweet from a fellow fan saying, “Maybe we should look into mass purchases for our fandom?” My first question was: Why? Is it because we’re seeing it in other fandoms? Is it because we want to overtake a certain artist? Are we here for the music, for the artist, or are we doing this to feed our ego, because we want to be part of a group, part of a team that’s on ‘top’?

If it’s the latter, maybe it’s time to start asking ourselves why we’re in fandom.

For some people, the charts, the streams, they’re actually fun. Even the debates people are getting into could be fun. (As a nerd, I’ve enjoyed my fair share of listening to basketball and European football savants talk about formations, passing, and defense. It’s a fun way to pass the time.) But if we’re using charts, streams, downloads, statistics, and accolades not only as a way to determine quality but to determine that other people shouldn’t even try to make things or other people’s work is worth less because it doesn’t hit certain ‘metrics’, then we lose the plot.

On film Twitter, it drives me nuts when people talk about movies in this way: This movie had x amount of production budget, so it needs to make $____ billion to make money. As a moviegoer, that’s not my problem. That’s a shareholder problem. My problem is just making sure that when I do go out, I watch something that I’m entertained by, struck by, or moved by. If I’m a film buff, maybe I’d want to go to movies for more than that but trying to make this the norm for even the most casual of moviegoers just breeds a mindset that art, media has to be ‘worth it’ to be seen.

And when this trickles down to even fanwork… What do we get? We get people who might not even try to make things because they’re too busy trying to get the right ‘ratio’ before they publish or share anything. We get smaller and smaller circles of people who are ‘allowed’ to make things. (And this of course shuts out anyone who has less access to resources, whether that’s money, time, energy, or even the Internet.)

We get people who forget fandom is about love. You have to love, or at least care about something to want to spend time on it.

If all it’s bringing you is stress or irritation, then it’s a good time to assess whether you still want to engage with it, like the spaces you’re in and people you’re with, or if you need to be a fan making and discussing instead of someone whose engagement is lighter or more casual.

Fandom is fun. Or it’s supposed to be.

And my God, I hope it stays fun for people, even when our definition of fun ranges from light reading, watching, and listening to being in flow spending hours making things.

Speaking of fanwork, there’s a new, open-access book on fan creators and productivity out. I found out about this last night and I know I have a few chapters earmarked.

See you on Friday!