Snowflake Day 2? Favorite fan moment

[labingi]

In your own space, share a favorite memory about fandom: the first time you got into fandom, the last time a fanwork touched your heart, crazy times with fellow fans (whether on-line or off-line), a lovely comment you’ve received or have left for someone. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

So back in 2004, I was exploring the internet for Blake's 7 fandom, like you do (well, did), and I came upon this charming RPG that was a Blake's 7/Farscape crossover on a site called LiveJournal. I started poking around and found the journal of one astrogirl, who I believe was playing Stark in the RPG, and very rapidly I came to find that I was surrounded by an amazing community of (mostly) women who were fannish geeks in exactly the same way I was, who knew what I was talking about when I discussed the dynamics between Blake and Avon (and cared!), and wrote and read excellent fic and meta about the sci fi of obsessions of the day. To date, it has been a unique experience in my life of feeling I had found "my people," in the form of a fairly large, active, unified community, a unique experience of feeling understood and appreciated for who I am. I really miss those days. I really miss that internet--and, more broadly, culture that still had major touchstones like that that almost all fannish geek girls shared.

Comments

[egret]

This is a great description of that wonderful and elusive feeling.

[sallymn]

I miss it too... hey, I miss the old mailing lists sometimes :)

[astrogirl]

Yep, I was Stark! My goodness, that feels so very long ago now... I'm delighted to have helped someone else have that "found my people!" feeling, because I remember how deeply important that was to me, back in the day.

And, yeah, I miss those times, too. Mostly I miss the way LJ provided a platform for so much lively fan activity and connection and, above all, discussion, in a way that Tumblr does not seem to be remotely set up to do.

[labingi]

I do miss the feeling. I've been learning to let go of the expectation of finding it, both in online fandom and in personal friendships with fellow geeks. Maybe it will come again, maybe once kids are grown and I actually have time to have friends again!

[labingi]

Me too! My first online fandom community was the Blake's 7 list that wasn't Lysator. I'm forgetting: the slashier one. (It's possible that's where I first encountered you?)

[labingi]

I was both comforted and a little disheartened to find I'm not alone in my discontents with Tumblr when I facilitated a panel on the "fandom's next home" at a Kirk/Spock slash convention this fall. Old and young, we all agreed fandom has become technologically fragmented. All agreed LJ is dead and DW probably won't be the next thing. We agreed Tumblr does not facilitate community. Some folks suggested a couple of chat tools, but they seem to lack the archiving and personal journal space that's kind of important. The most hopeful idea was that eventually OTW might set up some sort of community space--but it's not going to happen anytime soon, given the massive expense and infrastructure required. They may be the best long-term home for it though.

[astrogirl]

I confess, I don't understand the appeal of Tumblr. I mean, I don't get it at all. It's just so utterly not set up to enable the kinds of engagement that I've always seen as fundamental to my own experience of fandom. I keep finding myself wondering whether it's mostly just historical accident or a tendency to want to adopt whatever the new social media thing is that's led to so much of fandom embracing Tumblr, or whether the things it provides -- broad but shallow engagement, an overwhelming emphasis on visuals over text, sharing by reposting others' content as much as (or more than) creating one's own -- are simply the things fandom (or the younger segment of fandom) wants nowadays. It does seem to be in line with general online trends, though. Which is already sort of leaving me mourning that brief, beautiful period when the world and I were perfectly compatible in terms of preferred modes of interacting with people.

[astrogirl]

Space City?

I really enjoyed those lists, back in the day.

[vilakins]

I miss those days so much. That RPG was huge fun. I also had found my people, but most of them seem to have left. There just isn't that deep involvement in fandom any more, which is a pity as I still have more to write, including adapting the time I played the alien Keezarni as well as Vila and Kerril in that game, and unnerved at least one other player with the sheer strangeness of the Keezarni.

[labingi]

I remember really enjoying the romance between Vila and Kerril in that game, even though her actual appearance in series involved a degree of fail. :-)

It sounds like we're both in agreement with Astro here that it's sad--and a bit weird--that deep fandom involvement seems to have waned. I wonder if there's been much scholarship on this. I think the kinds of engagement we're talking about are all fundamentally pre-internet: fan fic, zines, deep discussion at cons, RPGs. Maybe the meta took off as an internet thing? I am a little sad to reflect that maybe this depth is, in fact, a marker of an earlier generation, less distracted, less overworked, less on info. overload (and maybe better educated in long-form writing)?

[labingi]

I don't get Tumblr at all either.

It does seem to be in line with general online trends, though.

Yeah, and this makes me feel superannuated. A few years ago, I was reading Jaron Lanier about how we need to take mindful control of how we want the internet to evolve as a social tool before coding infrastructure becomes too embedded to be adaptable and simply drives us in more of the same direction. He used the example of communication by forms, where you tick one of three boxes and if none provide an accurate description of your situation, tough. I think fundamentally he's right that we have to undertake, on a large scale, a long overdue discussion of what we want out of internet culture and how to get it.

I don't know how that may relate to fandom. But simply liking and replicating copies of posts would not be on my list of desires for internet communication.

Well, maybe parts of fandom will move offline again, and that would be interesting.

[labingi]

Yes! Space City.

[vilakins]

I came along after the era of zines so can't speak to it, and once got into trouble of the now moribund B7 mailing list for daring to suggest that fiction should be online. Outrage!

I don't really have an explanation though apparently a lot of fandom has moved to tumblr which fails at conversation and friendship; LJ and now DW are the best for that. We introverts do crave connections on our terms, but I don't get tumblr though I succumbed and joined.

I explain Kerril's behaviour in various fics as 1) repelling her fellow gangsters by cultivating a pervasive stink, 2) cleaning up and acquiring a Kezarni dress (they were that green) to interest Vila, and 3) acting helpless and screamy to engage his protective instinct. Because c'mon, a tough gunhand scared of spiders? She obviously wanted out of the gang with her dreams of a new world but she made a serious mistake going with aliens who IMO use a form of hive telepathy with only Norl being their speaker.

[astrogirl]

Yeah, and this makes me feel superannuated.

You and me, both!

I think fundamentally he's right that we have to undertake, on a large scale, a long overdue discussion of what we want out of internet culture and how to get it.

What you say (or paraphrase from Lanier) doesn't sound wrong to me, but, for good or ill, I don't think it's ever really been possible to shape social forces with that kind of careful, deliberate planning. People, both individuals and corporations, will keep doing whatever it is that seems to meet their needs in the moment, and how do you stop them?

The really big, spontaneous trend in social media of all kinds seems to me to be an emphasis on, well, less. Everything shorter, quicker, more easily digested. I'm not a fan of that trend, despite falling prey to it in a lot of aspects of life, but I think the social and psychological and technological forces that make that short-attention-span engagement attractive are really strong, and make it really hard to fight.

Well, maybe parts of fandom will move offline again, and that would be interesting.

Interesting for some. But I remember what it was like before online fandom, and it was a cold and lonely time for me. :(

[astrogirl]

I am a little sad to reflect that maybe this depth is, in fact, a marker of an earlier generation, less distracted, less overworked, less on info. overload (and maybe better educated in long-form writing)?

I've also been wondering a bit lately how much of these changes are due to increasing distraction, overwork, and too many things demanding everyone's attention, and how how much is due to the fact that, in the days before images and video and voice chat could be easily transmitted over the internet (and before text could be exchanged as casually and immediately as speech), the only people who participated in online fandom (or, before that, zine fandom) are the people who liked and were good at the longer, slower forms of engagement, even if that just means typing an entire paragraph at a time before expecting an answer. Maybe all the people who couldn't be bothered with that sort of thing now feel happy to participate... and there happen to be a lot of them.

Maybe we were always in the minority, and just had no way of knowing it?

[sallymn]

Very probably :) It was Space City than changed to Freedom City IIRC (showing my age here...)

[labingi]

Maybe we were always in the minority, and just had no way of knowing it?

I think that's probably true. It seems to me that given the expansiveness of the internet, there ought to be a way to have a flexible system for multiple types of engagement. In the LJ days, for example, there were a lot of icon communities, which I always found a bit boring but seem like an ancestor to the more image-based feeds on Tumblr, and those communities coexisted easily with more long meta-based communities. It seems like theoretically there could be another platform where it's easy to post images and videos as on Tumblr but also easy to post text and have threaded discussions, and then folks could just choose what feeds to follow or communities to belong to. Too utopian? :-)

[labingi]

Sorry for a late reply. I really love your explanation of Kerril. Makes so much sense!

[labingi]

I don't think it's ever really been possible to shape social forces with that kind of careful, deliberate planning.

This fits right in with work I'm doing through my Workable Utopias platform, so I have to mount a gentle rebuttal. I agree with you that precise planning of human affairs won't work, and when it's been tried, it's been oppressive, as in the USSR. But deliberate social planning that has been more or less successful at changing systems and improving cultures is everywhere. A few examples:

* US Constitution
* Global abolition of slavery
* Social safety nets (ex. Scandinavia)
* Universal public education
* Democracy
* The Civil Rights Movement

We probably mean different things by social planning, but these are all examples/outcomes of deliberate movements to change how social systems work, and they're all imperfect, but they've all done a lot of good.

As to fandom, you're right, it was a cold and lonely offline place for me too.

[astrogirl]

Well, I do concede that it's possible I may be too cynical and/or defeatist about this sort of thing. Let's just say I'm still not optimistic... But I'd be happy to be proved wrong!

[astrogirl]

It seems like theoretically there could be another platform where it's easy to post images and videos as on Tumblr but also easy to post text and have threaded discussions

That seems to me not just possible, but as if it should not be remotely difficult! Hell, LJ wasn't all that far off. It's not hard to imagine some tweaking that would make it friendlier for image posting and give you the ability to upload video.

What kind of gets me about Tumblr is that, despite being set up for videos and images, it's not actually very good at delivering them. It can be ridiculously slow to load and can bog down your computer. I've heard the code for it is absolutely awful. So it's not even ideal at what it's supposed to be ideal for.

(I also wonder whether any platform is doomed eventually, just because when a new generation comes along, whatever the older folks are already using is automatically an uncool and old and boring place to be.)