Did We Stop Caring? A Conversation on Crowdfunding and Empathy

Hello and welcome back!

Below is an embedded player for this assignments podcast, and I’d advise that you listen to it before proceeding with the rest of the text.

Within the podcast for the final ALM101 assignment, I got a little (maybe even a lot) bleaker than expected. I had chosen to tackle the question regarding crowdfundings role in the democratisation of the internet, starting with touching on the aspects of this concept outlined in the units study material regarding the involvement of ‘backers’ in design choices for the finished product on websites such as Kickstarter. I then moved on to discussing an interview with Camilla Zhang regarding the increase in comic creators taking less traditional routes to get their work published, and finishing with a quick discussion of the other uses of crowdfunding sites that seem to often be forgotten – people funding medical costs, rent, and the like.

The podcast ended up being relatively freeform, I had a few points jotted down on what I wanted to talk about, and then just sat myself down in front of my phone and let myself stream of consciousness. It was a lot more difficult to do than previous audio work I’ve done, and I understand now why podcasts are usually hosted by two or more people. When you’re doing it solo there’s no one to bounce off of.

Working solo on this project was deliberate. While I love to collaborate directly on my own creative endeavors, coming to something that is inherently personal makes it hard to feel comfortable contacting anyone for input. While I haven’t been in a position where I’ve needed to crowdfund for my survival, I know people who have, and I wouldn’t want to ask them to use their trauma for my benefit. Similarly with creators and artists I know, particularly those from minority groups, I don’t feel comfortable putting them in a position they might feel like they can’t say no. So turning to published interviews and research work was the next best step. Zhang’s (Salkowitz, 2020) interview led brilliantly in to talking about empathy, and empathy is exactly what we need to view the research regarding the rates at which most gender affirmation crowdfunding ventures, and general medical cost crowdfunding attempts don’t reach their goals. It’s incredibly easy to forget that there are people behind those figures, many of whom are struggling.

Podcast work isn’t something new to me, I’m familiar enough with using Audacity and other recording software from my hobbyist audio book work. While I’m familiar with adding music to my work, I felt that with the combination of podcast length and the rather grim not it ends on, I’d been leaning too far into melodrama. In lieu of that I’d like to shoutout Scott Buckley, who makes an amazing amount of Creative Commons music, who has a Patreon – a branch of crowdfunding I was unable to cover during my podcast. If you watch a lot of vlogs, you’re likely to have heard some of his music. 

All in all, this assignment was an interesting venture. I hope if nothing else it can act as a reminder that behind every crowdfunding venture, there are people, not just corporations.

To quote Zhang once more, “Look eye level and you’ll see that we’re all gods.”

NSFW, but make it complicated

The fun thing about going to an academic conferences in what you hope is going to end up your field, paired with having a brand new Twitter, is that you get the names of plenty of people to follow, and you promptly realise that oh, the people in fandom studies are just here to have a good time. Your heroes aren’t dead, they’re just on twitter talking about the implications of omegaverse.

There was a conversation I had repeatedly at this conference that I’ll transcribe for you, that usually took place after the person I was talking to introduced me to some fantastic new concept. It went something like this:

Me: Wow that’s really cool! Do you have a twitter I could follow so we can talk after the conference?

Them: Sure! Do you want my fandom, I tweet a lot about [Supernatural/Marvel/baby Yoda], or my professional?

Me, laughing: ‘I’ll grab the professional one, I tweet too much about transformers on my main.

And that was it. Sometimes I’d be asked for my main in return, so the number of Baby Yoda fans I’m following on there has increased. But it’s left me contemplating is there is a real reason to keep segregated accounts given that unlike a lot of my peers, I’m aiming to stay within the university sphere.

Any persona I might have tried to establish in this environment fell to the side amongst discussions that just sounded like my significantly more unfiltered self – maybe not 100% genuine since I was a little starstruck by being in the same room as some big names of the field, but that mainly manifested in a couple of sirs/ma’ams, rather than keeping my mouth shut about the implications of hockey ‘RPF’.

This openness leads to a conundrum. 

There’s something that hasn’t quite made it over to what I lovingly refer to as my academic account. I’m very vocal about being queer on my main, and about having fibromyalgia (and a couple of other tag along health issues). I retweet informative posts about both these things, partake in hashtags when they start circulating, even (gasp) talk about my experiences as a chronically ill queer person.

“Chronic Illness Awareness Week” by Maia Sevilla is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 

As it stands, I wouldn’t do this on my academic account.

On the third day of the conference, I was having a conversation with an academic about how we hadn’t attended the previous nights activities, when she mentioned a reason, in a hushed voice so unlike how we’d been talking – she named a condition that I have no memory of, but I immediately responded with my own diagnosis. Solidarity, y’know?

This conversation made me question quite a few things, namely why we both seemed to be ashamed of this facet of ourselves in academic scenarios.

Ashamed might not be the right term. Fearful, perhaps?

It’s strange that not 10 minutes before we had been having a conversation about some topic that would have absolutely been inappropriate in a work environment if not for our fields of study, and yet when something that is a crucial, if inconvenient, part of our day to day life comes up, we freeze.

I put a simple ‘chronically ill’ listing in my bio on twitter after that. 

It’d be ironic, if the realisation didn’t sting. Miller (2017) discusses how a social media students who are both LGBT+ and disabled (and that’s close enough to chronically ill for me, given the overlap) is often a space for community building, and the validation that comes with finding people kin to yourself. He discusses how these experiences become ‘central to [the students] higher education experiences’ (p. 523), and I believe this is something that applies to my main account.

So why do I cut myself off even the potential of this community on my academic account? What am I scared of?

Having a chronic illness is almost always going to turn off a potential employer. Being queer might be less so, but you never really escape the stigma you grow up with – that this facet of who you are isn’t something you should let other people know. So I don’t. So I get nervous (and a little bit giddy with excitement) when I see people who list these things about themselves on their public accounts.

I’ve taken a step. It’s a scary one, and I may backtrack from it, despite it feeling like the most authentic step I could have taken. 

Better people than I have spoken about the online being a negotiated space, so I guess I’ll just have to keep negotiating it.

Thanks for reading this, lets go on to think about what we put out into the world, and continue to make it kind. 

(Ps: a quick update on my last in class sock knitting session featured here:

I finished that sock and started a new one as my #conferenceknitting

Conference Knitting, 2019, self taken.

Reference List

Miller, RA 2017, ‘”My Voice Is Definitely Strongest in Online Communities”: Students Using Social Media for Queer and Disability Identity-Making’, Journal of College Student Development, vol. 58, no. 4, pp. 509-525, doi:10.1353/csd.2017.0040.

Lets give this a try!

Hello to anyone who has made it here to this very first post, that will hopefully not remain the only post for very long.

I’m Lal, and I’m a student at Deakin University in the very last year of my undergraduate (woo!), a Bachelor of Arts.

I don’t know about you, dear reader, but I always find introduction posts and first posts incredibly dull to both read and write, since the author (in this case moi) tends to be a bit stiff because of all the nerves that come with wrestling the mortifying ordeal of being known on a new platform.

I leave this post here then, in hopes that by getting it out in to the world it’ll make my next post less uncomfortable for all of us involved!

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