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

[nikojen.livejournal.com]

A hearty "Amen" from the peanut gallery. I was away from fandom for a while and apparently missed the mass exodus to LJ, and I've been struggling to figure out the right way to "do" fandom in this new environment since I got back.

Do you friend every single LJ that sounds mildly related to the fandom you're interested in (and end up getting the same information cross-posted six ways from Sunday every time anything noteworthy happens), or do you just subscribe to the most active ones and hope nothing interesting happens on the others? What to do about multi-fandom fic communities like 30Kisses... subscribe and put up with a higher noise-to-signal ratio on the f-list on the off-chance that someone might post something great in one of my fandoms, or not? Or maybe I shouldn't bother trying to keep track of fic journals at all and just pick a few reccers to spoon-feed me the good stuff. And that's just dealing with comms. Friending individuals is a whole 'nother kettle of fish.

And no matter how you work it out, there's still the issue of "NOW"-ness that you mentioned. I've pretty much given up trying to friend the main fic LJ's in most big fandoms (*cough*SPN*cough*) because they invariably swamp everything else that comes across. I'm sure I'm missing some awesome stories, which is pretty sad for a completist like me, but I just don't have the time to keep up with it all as it's coming across. (Hell, it took me an hour just to write up this little comment. =P)

<*Phew...* Sorry, bit of a rant there, and not saying anything you didn't already say more coherently anyway. ^_^>

Anyway, this is *the* big reason why I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the FanArchive movement is a success. Any archive that could get a decent percentage of LJ-writers to put their stuff into a central, *searchable* archive would be heaven.

[ithildyn.livejournal.com]

A hearty "Amen" from the peanut gallery. I was away from fandom for a while and apparently missed the mass exodus to LJ, and I've been struggling to figure out the right way to "do" fandom in this new environment since I got back.

Same here :) I wasn't out of fandom, but I never realized that the reason my lists got so quiet was because everyone came here. Finally stumbled upon that fact last year.

[dzurlady.livejournal.com]

You can do both - just set up filters, and read the larger more active one when you have more time, and the streamlined one when you have less. :)