Something that's been confusing me about 'recent' changes in fandom:

[hmpf]

fandom seems to have moved to livejournal almost completely, even for those things that aren't necessarily best served by LJ. In fact, very little except the pure socialising part of fandom - which is, of course, an important part, no contest about that! - is *really* best served by LJ. Forums are better suited for discussion, since they allow discussions to stay in the public eye, and thus stay *active* longer, whereas on LJ a discussion will drop off people's friends page pretty quickly, turning discussions into quick, transitory, blink-and-you'll-miss-them things. (Sure, those people who noticed and joined the discussion when it popped up on their friends page often keep at it for days - but on a forum, a new contributor might discover it months after it started, and bring it back to the top by posting to it, and *everyone who contributed until then would notice*, and the discussion would be revitalised. A good LJ discussion goes on for days; a good forum discussion can go on for months.) And archives are much more suited for presenting fan-made content, esp. fanfic, because they don't require the potential reader to first learn about the individual LJs of three or four dozen writers and then search those LJs for fic; also, archives usually allow searching for different categories of fic, *and* they keep stuff accessible. Etc.

But, my general reservations about fandom's near-complete move to LJ (and f-locked LJs, for that matter) aside, my issue here is mainly with fanfic. I find the posting of fic to LJ and *only* to LJ, as seems increasinbly the practice in fandom, a bit antisocial, to be honest. (After turning into one of the official naysayers of Life On Mars fandom, I am now working on discrediting myself in fandom at large... ;-)) And I don't *understand* the attitude behind it, either. I mean, *why* would people not want their fic to find the widest possible readership? And how can they not care if it will still be easily accessible to new readers in a year or two?

The cynical part of me can't help wondering if there's a tendency to move away from fandom as a community and treat it as merely a tool for instant, personal gratification. I.e. as soon as you've posted a fic to your LJ and received an amount of feedback for that fic, you move on to the next fic for which you will get feedback in turn, and old fics become uninteresting simply because they don't generate large amounts of feedback anymore - so why bother keeping them easily accessible? That readers who come into the fandom later might still want read those older fics just doesn't matter, because the gratification to the writer is negligible, and the reader's gratification simply doesn't figure into the equation.

As I said, it's the cynical part of me that came up with that explanation.

Well, no matter what the reasons, it seems to me that the decentralised, dispersed nature of fandom on LJ is a good way to make sure that, instead of amassing a wonderful, huge collective treasure of fanworks for 'later generations' of fen to discover and enjoy, most of our work will simply disappear into obscurity and relative 'un-findability' fairly soon after it's posted.

Am I the only one who finds that perspective a bit sad?

(Also, I dislike the tendency for fandom to happen in a - however slightly extended - big 'NOW' for the personal reason of often being stressed out of my mind. The fact that fandom - discussions, fics, everything - seems to happen so quickly now, and requires you to constantly stay on top of things because you'll never be able to *find* the good stuff again if you don't notice it immediately when it's posted is a considerable additional stress factor. Which is sad, because I'd much rather 'do' fandom at my leisure, and I'm a naturally slow person. So, instead of 'doing' fandom at my own pace, I tend to go into hyperactive fannish phases when I manage to keep up with things for a few months, and then drop out of everything completely for months in turn. Needless to say, that way I hardly know what's happening anymore, and miss most of the good fic, debate etc.)

I've been out of the meta game for ages, so I don't know if this has been discussed on metafandom, recently or at all. If anyone remembers related discussions and can point me there, that would be much appreciated. I'm mostly interested in the question of why people aren't interested in keeping stuff accessible, because that is something I really, truly do not 'get'. So, if anyone can explain that mindset to me... I'm really curious about it.

Comments

I so agree with you about archiving and the pace of LJ.

[trascendenza]

Here from metafandom.

Well, being as I'm a person who's incredibly *obsessed* with archiving and making my work accessible, I probably can't be very helpful. *g* But I do solely archive on LJ (well, I had a brief stint on FF.net, but eventually I gave up on that account).

I think the thing with LJ isn't that people don't *want* their work to be accessible; it's just that it's more work. It's day-to-day maintenance. There's no automated way to have your posts organized, which doesn't work well for people who just aren't organizationally-minded.

But I'm in the process of devising an almost frighteningly comprehensive tag list for my fic, in addition to memorying all of it, AND I'll be bookmarking it all on del.icio.us and do extensive tagging there, as well. And I'm sure there are other authors out there that would like to make their stuff more accessible but just don't have the time/energy/etc. to put into setting up an infrastructure.

God, I just wish more people would do fic indices/tagging/memorying. Even just one of the three (though preferably not solely tagging if any category goes over 100 entries). There are so many communities and personal fic journals that would be about 1,000,000% more useful if they did this.

Although, I have to say another reason I don't post to archives is not because of feedback, at all. In fact, to my numbers-hungry mind, it's MORE satisfying for me to post to an archive that tracks stats and tells me how many views I get per story. But the reason I like and continue posting to LJ is because of the friends network; fanfiction, in many ways, is how I interact and dialogue with people about the characters. I like chatting about my fandoms; coming up with crack plot bunnies; or just the general silliness that can happen in comment threads. It makes posting fic a more social experience, which keeps me coming back to LJ and forgetting about archives.

I do really, really feel you on the frenetic pace of things on LJ. It's really not my typical modus operandi and frustrates me a lot, because I can never keep up. For instance--people apologizing because they comment on a fic a week after it's posted. Um. Hello, feedback is *always* appreciated! And a lot of people are surprised when I comment on their old fic, but I'm one of those people who *will* look back through memories and tags to check out other stuff an author's done if I like them.

I wish more communities on LJ would use the sidebar links feature to link to current discussions (the page summary thing would also be a lot nicer if it were placed at the top of the page like a navigation bar). Or that there was a *way* to keep these discussions more in people's eyes even after they aren't on the most recent entries page. LJ has a transient nature that makes it very difficult to me to feel like I'm ever getting a full comprehensive picture of what's going on.

Oh, I love LJ, too, absolutely!

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

It's the best tool for fannish social interaction we've ever had, bar none.

It's just not the best place for keeping our creative output. And I just don't understand the 'either or' mentality regarding LJ and other places for posting fic. I mean, why not post first to LJ (for the instant feedback, for the great discussion and interaction etc.) and then post to a couple of archives, too? (Rhetorical question for fandom-at-large, not addressed to you specifically, because you do seem to understand where I'm coming from.)

And, using tags and memories intelligenly, a reasonably useful archive could even be hosted on LJ, as a community - it's not so much the independent website format that I'm after here, but the idea of an easily searchable, central place for all or at least most of the fic in a fandom.

Re: Oh, I love LJ, too, absolutely!

[trascendenza]

It's just not the best place for keeping our creative output.
Definitely agreed.

Ahhh, yes, the searching problem. LJ irritates me to no end with that. But if fanarchive ever does get off the ground and will let users post simultaneously to the archive and LJ at the same time, I would definitely go for that. I just have problems posting to more than one place at once (like, when I was on a forum everyday--I'd sometimes post drabbles there and only think about re-posting to LJ months later). I need something that will let me archive multiple places with one entry field, otherwise, I'll never keep up.