While you don't want to speak to individuals, I can only speak as myself, so: Yes. there is uneven power distribution and there is privilege and on many axes I tend to have the latter. I want OTW to affect discourses about fandom, because I believe that the ones out there at the moment are insufficient and problematic and often just plain wrong. And I am aware that my/our narratives will have problems of their own and I continue to be aware of that. And I wouldn't be a good postmodernist if I didn't know that any action may produce effects above and beyond those intended. However, not doing anything is an action as well, and one whose effects are almost entirely out of our control.
So, yes, I want to use whatever privilege and power I have to change mostly academic discourses and am proud and happy when I see them change (from media fandom getting acknowledged in media studies settings to media scholars respecting our community conventions to young scholars getting the opportunity to work on fan studies because it's becoming more respectable). Every change has drawbacks and some may occur against our will, but to me, personally, that is worth it.
I'm not doing this naively, and I wouldn't spend all those hours I could be doing more fun things if I didn't feel strongly about our goals. I think the reason I misunderstood you was that it seems a given to me that there's cultural capital and that there's power and that it's unevenly distributed, so I read your comments as accusations of power abuse above and beyond that, which you apparently didn't. I'm sorry to have misread you.
Because in the end, I can either do something or extensively talk about it, and while I love doing the latter, I think at this point in time I'd rather do the former, especially since there's nothing I can change about the latter (i.e., I can possibly help change the way vidding is or isn't a topic in contemporary fan scholarship, but I can't change the fact that a journalist may prefer to interview Naomi...I think it's a choosing one's battles mentality?)
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So, yes, I want to use whatever privilege and power I have to change mostly academic discourses and am proud and happy when I see them change (from media fandom getting acknowledged in media studies settings to media scholars respecting our community conventions to young scholars getting the opportunity to work on fan studies because it's becoming more respectable). Every change has drawbacks and some may occur against our will, but to me, personally, that is worth it.
I'm not doing this naively, and I wouldn't spend all those hours I could be doing more fun things if I didn't feel strongly about our goals. I think the reason I misunderstood you was that it seems a given to me that there's cultural capital and that there's power and that it's unevenly distributed, so I read your comments as accusations of power abuse above and beyond that, which you apparently didn't. I'm sorry to have misread you.
Because in the end, I can either do something or extensively talk about it, and while I love doing the latter, I think at this point in time I'd rather do the former, especially since there's nothing I can change about the latter (i.e., I can possibly help change the way vidding is or isn't a topic in contemporary fan scholarship, but I can't change the fact that a journalist may prefer to interview Naomi...I think it's a choosing one's battles mentality?)