Disconnected musings on fandom

[superborb]

Twitter sent me a Twitter anniversary notif recently, it seemed like a good time to reflect on ~returning to fandom~ last year. Also I refuse to read five books in five days, I think my brain may be turning into mush.

Some disconnected thoughts:
1. I always was a little sad that the fandoms I was in were not well documented. I don't know if it was just that the fandoms were smaller (probably for the animanga ones) or more private (...definitely for jpop/kpop which had more locked stuff), but I'd go look at the some long write up in SGA or HP fandom and be-- envious. Part of this is that I have a truly awful memory, reading other people's recollections helps me remember in turn. (I'm great at googling and searching through notes though, so I can pretend!) But also, I think it's the nostalgia for a tiny slice of the internet that few people remember and that is impossible to reconstruct, so much having disappeared over the various LJ deletions and locks.

2. High school me was an idiot, which makes me look on young idiots in fandom with more tolerance. But the resurrection of high school esque clique behavior by adults is so irritating. Sometimes it feels like fandom devotes its time primarily to voyeuristically hating one person, or group, or idea, in order to solidify its in-group dynamics. Then I block on twitter or hide on DW until those things stop appearing and life is better.

3. Speaking of twitter and discord and tumblr, beyond its speed, one thing all the new generation of socmed has in common is the lack of information preservation. Articles on the youth's use of socmed made me realize this is a feature. Perhaps in some ways it's better-- more like natural communication in person. But I love backreading people's journals through tags. I miss that part of it. Tumblr could get the closest to that experience, but it's just not as easy because most people don't curate with that intent.

4. But I don't know if I have a real fandom anymore. Qihun is closest I suppose, tiny fandoms 5ever. But the bulk of my writings are-- food pictures and musings on twitter. Bookblogs and media reviews on DW. Is that still being in fandom? My reading list on DW is mostly book-and-personal, with a handful of fandoms that I'm not fully in. Don't get me wrong, I love book reviews and personal blogs. But I miss meta. Fic still being posted elsewhere and all, meta is what I feel like I lack.

5. I'm so lucky though. It turns out, it wasn't just college causing me to drift away-- it really was that I didn't understand the tumblr experience. (I've gone back to following tumblrs of interest on my RSS reader.) I can enjoy myself on twitter and discord, while keeping a reasonably active DW reading list, and be happy with that balance. It would be hard for me, coming back, if I couldn't use all of those. DW alone wouldn't have been able to feed my fannish feelings in smaller fandoms. It would be hard to make friends on twitter alone, but then it's hard to meet people through discord without an 'in'. (Though I suppose I have met good friends through discord alone.) So for me personally, I'm lucky that I could use all three.

6. I'm so lucky too, for making good friends through fandom once again, after I felt so lonely in the post-grad life. Friends who I disagree with, who challenge me, who clarify my views, who I learn so much from. Friends who are cozy marshmallows of joy. Friends who share this interest of taking something we love and making it more.

Comments

[hiddenramen]

It really seems sometimes that meta is a dying art. I don't see any of the long-winded meta threads or posts that I remember from fandoms past, and whenever I do, they're sort of treated as cringy by a large subset of fandom. Which sucks a lot, because I absolutely adore meta, and it's something I miss seeing.

Also, ugh, big same on the cliqueishness thing.

Like my god, guys, the internet is literally limitless in terms of space. We don't have to keep dumping slushies on each other in the hallway, we can just avoid each other. We don't have to re-enact the prom night from Carrie once a month just to solidify our bonds in the trenches. It's exhausting.

[dolorosa_12]

one thing all the new generation of socmed has in common is the lack of information preservation. Articles on the youth's use of socmed made me realize this is a feature.

I noticed this too, and it disturbs me. It bothers me as a librarian, but it bothers me even more as a member of the community, because a lack of reliable, retrievable written records makes it really hard to identify destructive, abusive or otherwise damaging patterns of behaviour. And this makes it easier for abusive individuals to flourish. I understand that the ephemeral nature of current social media is attractive because it makes things seem low pressure, but I'm a pessimistic person and my mind always goes to how easy systems are to exploit by people with bad intentions.

(And it's such a stark cultural shift that's happened in the fifteen-ish years that I've been online. When I first joined fandom, we hung out on message boards and supplemented this with real-time chat in an IRC channel, but the prevailing attitude was such that it was felt even the IRC chat needed preservation, and one of my friends set up a chatlog to save and document everything.)

[unrelaxing]

Truly feel no. 3; a twitter thread can disappear just by someone's decision to change their username, etc... seeing fandoms with twitter fic, despite how fun a read it can be, just makes me nervous.

[adevyish]

(1) is definitely something I think about; a few Yahoo MLs I was on never got properly archived and their archival sites are now lost to time. And, as I deleted my LJ, I also lost access to the locked comms I did still have access to.

With fandoms that are new enough that their entire existence falls under (3), it’s incredible how much collective memory gets lost within a few years in the big fandoms. What I knew as a fan of [redacted] was very different from what friends who became fans a few years after me know. A lot of fans from earlier than me, who have that communal knowledge, have also left the fandom. The fan culture is completely different now.

In one of my other fandoms a couple people did run a fandom news of the day blog, but after a few years they burned out and are not doing that any more. Fortunately there are several other people in that fandom who curate their tags to be archival whose blogs were active for years.

It’s difficult in some fandoms I’m in to contribute to meta, because there’s a certain view that if you critique at all you’re not a fan, so you can’t be too honest without losing followers and getting a couple weeks of harsh anons or quote tweets. I find fandom Twitter stressful enough that I now just never say anything on Twitter about anything with a fandom without using some asterisks.

[superborb]

I think x_los still does some great meta, but usually she posts directly to AO3. I guess the answer is to Be The Change and write meta myself, but it's hard when it's not rewarded! It seems that the only widespread stuff is cultural meta, which is really only a small subset of the interesting conversations to have.

I've gotten a lot better at identifying the cliqueishness which helps me disengage with it, at least? =.=

[superborb]

It really is such a strong cultural shift. But part of it is that fandom is just bigger now, with more people, and so people don't feel such a strong obligation to a community.

[superborb]

Yup. I mean, a decade on, a lot of LJ and other websites have disappeared, but they weren't meant to disappear the way twitter is.

[superborb]

Yeah, and I guess it's really that preservation of that communal knowledge isn't something people care about as much. But it's part of what makes something feel like a community to me-- a shared background.

I do miss fandom newsletters, but they're SO MUCH work, especially with everything being so spread out over different platforms.

I do censor myself critique wise on twitter a lot more than I do on DW. It sucks because IMO critique is so integral to good meta?

[corvo]

a lack of reliable, retrievable written records makes it really hard to identify destructive, abusive or otherwise damaging patterns of behaviour. And this makes it easier for abusive individuals to flourish.

Sorry to stick my head in while wandering past to comment on this specifically, but this element of the shift in the way we do fandom over the years (and the platforms we do it on) has definitely been on my radar for some time, too. There is a practicality to pessimism as part of risk assessment, even if we concurrently believe that people are vastly fundamentally good and abuses will be rare.

A lack of reliable, retrievable records really makes it hard to identify patterns and serial bad actors, but documentation of this nature is also used by serial bad actors in order to perpetuate destructive and abusive behaviour. I think the importance of documentation far outweighs how it can be misused both in methodology and practice (as deliberate bad actors will always adapt, and if we focus on trying to be entirely proactive instead of predominantly reactive, we'll inevitably paralyse ourselves into inaction), but I do feel like we (general) are overall ill-equipped to document it effectively, to critically assess such documentation when it is presented to us, and to apply it to a broader picture, pedagogy, and process of making our spaces safer. There are so many moving parts to consider, and we're often rapidly outpacing any deeper contention with them.

[silveredeye]

Re:3... yeah, I also feel that the ephemerality of social media is in some ways a feature these days (people share so much about themselves? in such worrisome detail? do they not worry about infosec AND feeling hella cringe in a decade??), but I wish it could somehow easily coexist with preserving some stuff for posterity.

I've been doing writeups of my own tiny fandom (it has a very dedicated info-preservation society, but there used to be a BNF who wrote more narrative posts about each (week-long) season and she stopped doing it at some point... I kind of wanted the experience to continue, so I started writing my own). It's... more effort than I originally thought. And that's with Society's immaculate record-keeping that I can reference, without it I'd probably be "a character hit ball, it gave me a feeling", except more wordily. :D

I also miss meta. I feel like there still used to be more of it in early-ish Tumblr, but by now fandom is so much more decentralized and so much more paranoid about accidentally going viral and all that follows (which... one of the reasons I don't do fannish Twitter is that lurking has taught me to be paranoid) that writing it kind of isn't worth the bother for many people.

[superborb]

Yeah, those kinds of writeups and maintaining of records for posterity is also a LOT of work, which is why it so easily falls by the wayside...

[lirazel]

Yeah, it's so much easier to cut a 14-year-old some slack, isn't it?

. But the resurrection of high school esque clique behavior by adults is so irritating. Sometimes it feels like fandom devotes its time primarily to voyeuristically hating one person, or group, or idea, in order to solidify its in-group dynamics.

Yeah. I see that too.

Is that still being in fandom?

My feeling about it is that if you found your people through fandom originally, it's still kind of fandom once you all move on to only talking about your job and your garden and your kids. Like, I have friends I never talk about fannish stuff with anymore, but they're still my fandom friends.

I love reading your tribute to your friends in #6. So lovely.

[superborb]

I guess it's a bit like saying 'high school friends' or something-- the descriptor describes how you originally met haha

[lirazel]

Yes, absolutely!

[china_shop]

Re 5: That's great that you've been able the various platforms to meet your needs! \o/

Sometimes I crave the whirligig heyday Golden Age of LJ, but given how much trouble I have keeping up with even DW these days (as demonstrated by this very belated comment, hi!), the status quo suits me okay. Current DW-based Guardian is a bit quieter than I'd like, but not to the point where I've had to branch out to other platforms.

*waves*

[superborb]

I do get a little annoyed now when people say DW is completely inactive, like, what! Look around a little, please.