At what point do we begin to do harm?

Fox recently sent a letter to a “Dollhouse” fan site asking it to settle down on the rumors about the show since responding to the more outrageous ones was actually eating into their productivity, specifically the time they should have been spending marketing the show more effectively.

Similarly, Cinematical asks whether or not The Internet (apparently a cohesive, Six Sigma-based organization) should shut up about movie rumors and leaked scripts, especially since online commentary has been held responsible for a number of movies undergoing last-minute tweaks, tweaks that might have done more harm than good.

There’s a lot of good that comes out of everyone having a voice online. (Note: I didn’t say an “equal voice” because that’s not actually the case – some people’s voices are more important than others.) It can lead to communities coming together and talking about whatever it is that they’re interested in.

If they’re really fans, though, there’s a certain responsibility that they have to stop doing harm to the properties, brands and products that they love so much. If someone running a fan site hears that a specific action they’re engaging in is distracting the company the object of their affection, stop it. I’m not saying that companies have the right to shut down anything that’s not officially sanctioned. They should, in fact, be hands-off in their approach and at best embrace them and participate in the conversation. But when the efforts start to do damage, it’s alright for the company to engage in an open and productive dialogue to identify problems with the person running the community and see if changes can be made.

Similarly, the power of self-publishing and the race for ad dollars have led some people to take polarizing opinions and decide that it’s their “responsibility” to publish every rumor that comes through their inbox and comment on every supposed leaked script that someone passes to them. They claim to love movies, music, books or whatever the object of their affection is. But they do the industry a bit of damage every time they do something like that and, for instance, prompt the movie studio to shoot a new ending because online reaction to the original one was so negative or simply because they wanted to do something different to get people into the theater.

(This actually leads to quite a problem: Movie “news” sites report on rumors and label something as bad for whatever reason. Movie studio then orders reshoots or new scenes to be shot, which are then obviously tacked on. Movie “news” sites then decry the additions/tweaks as being unoriginal and only included as a way to please fans, apparently unaware of their role in the equation.)

Again, the web is a great tool that allows people from across the country – or across the world – to connect in communities around similar interests. That’s powerful stuff, since some of those communities are so small in numbers it’s likely one person would never meet another aficionado in the flesh. But that fandom doesn’t mean that they have free reign to, even though it might be unknowingly, do harm to the things they claim to hold dear.