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

[rushin-doll.livejournal.com]

From metafandom

Two things. In order of brevity!

First, I think you're operating under an assumption which may not be entirely warranted: that people write fic for a general audience. While I think this is true in many cases, I also think there's a growing movement toward writing for smaller and smaller (and more and more specialized) communities (I rambled about this in my own journal (http://rushin-doll.livejournal.com/7697.html)). LJ has been huge in facilitating this. Maybe it's not a good thing (since it raises barriers to entry into those specialized communities), but I'm not willing to say it's bad yet.

Second, I think that there are some significant advantages to the short life-cycles of discussions in LJ to go along with the disadvantages. One of the big ones is that the topics worth discussing come up over and over in many different contexts. And in each one, no one is expected to be familiar with what has come before. In some ways this is bad: it means you retread the same ground over and over. But in some ways it's very good: you're not locked into the conversational material that's come before.

Consider for example: in a lot of forum discussions the initial post could spark several different conversations. The first reply or two generally locks in only one of those as the one being undertaken. While in LJ the topic will likely come up again and one of the other conversations can be had, on a forum where you have the single thread those other conversations are likely never had. With organizational unity comes the silencing of voices. Some people won't get involved in a thread because the discussion has veered off in an uninteresting (to them) direction.

Of course by decentralizing things (a la LJ) you also tend to end up repeating yourself an awful lot. Because we don't have expectations that you've read other similar discussions, we can't just say "go read what I said there".

I think that ultimately the part of me that wants to know everything that's going on is upset that we don't have things in a more forum-like environment, but the part of me that wants to encourage dynamic and growing and evolving communities is glad that things are so decentralized.

I love discussing how interfaces shape interaction,
Ana

Replies

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

>First, I think you're operating under an assumption which may not be entirely warranted: that people write fic for a general audience.

Well, no, I've noticed that that isn't the case anymore. I just *regret* that it isn't, and think fandom would be a nicer place for *more* people if it still were. And, as someone who's an archaeologist, a literary student, a sometime ethnologist, and a collector and archivist at heart, I feel that the cultural artefacts of this community (i.e. fandom) are worthy of being preserved and widely disseminated, for the joy and, sometimes, enlightenment they could bring vast amounts of people. Fanfiction-as-a-conversation and fanfiction-as-an-ephemeral-community-activity, that's all nice and well, but so much of this stuff is good enough that it *deserves* to be collected, preserved, and turned into the kind of cultural heritage that is available not just to immediate participants at a certain moment in time, but rather to later 'generations' (in fandom those may be just people who join a fandom six months after a certain fic has been posted - but they might also really *be* a next generation, if we take measures now to preserve stuff well enough that it will still be around in ten or twenty years).

Now, I am aware of the problems with the idea of preserving an ephemeral culture, something that is essentially a process. But - fanfiction, no matter how much it is created in a certain context, *is* written culture, and as such it is eminently preservable and able to be enjoyed by 'future generations'. So, this isn't *really* like mounting a butterfly, thereby killing it.

>While I think this is true in many cases, I also think there's a growing movement toward writing for smaller and smaller (and more and more specialized) communities

Exactly, and I find that worrying. Or maybe not really *worrying* - but sad, yes.

>One of the big ones is that the topics worth discussing come up over and over in many different contexts. And in each one, no one is expected to be familiar with what has come before. In some ways this is bad: it means you retread the same ground over and over. But in some ways it's very good: you're not locked into the conversational material that's come before.

But you also can't build on it, can't develop it. But yeah, I mostly agree with you on the pros and cons of discussing on LJ. (Though forums can have exactly the same advantages - it depends on how big the forum is, and how it is managed.)

>on a forum where you have the single thread those other conversations are likely never had.

In my experience, this is not true. People on good forums will join discussions and add new viewpoints, push the discussion in entirely new directions, even months after a discussion started.

>I think that ultimately the part of me that wants to know everything that's going on is upset that we don't have things in a more forum-like environment, but the part of me that wants to encourage dynamic and growing and evolving communities is glad that things are so decentralized.

See, and I'm just wondering why it shouldn't be possible to have the best of both worlds.

Re: Replies

[rushin-doll.livejournal.com]

I can see where you're coming from, and I sort of sympathize. I mean, this stuff could be archived and publicized without harming the communities producing. I like your "it's not like pinning a butterfly" metaphor.

The problem is simply: who does the work? I mean, people who participate in fandom tend not to care about some "general" audience, they care about their community. It takes time and effort to post a piece to a central archive. Further, there are so many archives out there that I'm not sure that posting to one of them would solve the problem of general availability.

Anyway, the thing is this: most people (judging by the way things tend to go) don't care enough to put in the extra work. So, who does it?

As to pros and cons of LJ vs Forums, I think that there are some pretty clear structural things that make LJ better at some things. Sure you can overcome those things with social structures rather than technical ones (like moderation), but the same works in reverse. There are ways to do the same with LJ, but it's generally more hassle than its worth.

I do think that you can build on past conversations using the scattered system of LJ still allows for building on past discussions, there's a lot of cross-pollination of conversation going on, for instance.

And, yeah, the truth is that I'm with you: I'd love to have both, and further it should be possible! I'm just worried that a push to emphasize archival may deemphasize community.

Also, sorry for getting all structural. I spend a lot of time thinking about structure and social systems.

Hmm... this is pretty incoherent,
Ana