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Fannish Spaces
With poorly drawn diagrams.
Abstract things often have a spatial element for me. For example, the months of the year go around in a circle, clockwise. But I never see the whole circle at once, only the month I'm thinking about and the ones on either side.
Or this: when I first got onto LJ, it was unfamiliar and so in my mental monitor, it occupied the bottom right corner. Now that it's a comfortable place for me, it's moved to the upper left.
I was talking with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
laurashapiro about LJ and mailing lists and how fandom is different depending where you are and I started to think about how each of them feels to me, spatially, and how it's a metaphor for their function. (This seemed a lot more brilliant then -- I think it was the rum. But I press on regardless!)
I should probably be dealing with Usenet too, but I only ever hung out on alt.tv.x-files.creative. So I will simply say that being on a newsgroup feels to me like being outdoors and move on.
Mailing Lists
A mailing list, to me, is a sphere. A bubble. A discrete entity. Content flows into it, but doesn't flow out -- it's all in there and it doesn't mix with all the other mailing list bubbles. I go from bubble to bubble, depending on what fandoms and subjects I feel interested in. Even if I don't read my email, it still flows into the bubble and waits there for me to sift through it.
A mailing list is, essentially, topic driven. I want to read Legolas/Gimli fanfic and chat, I go to Axe and Bow. I want to discuss making vids, I go to Vidder. I don't post in those groups about the TV shows I watched on Monday night or what I did while I was waiting to read OotP. I stick with the mandate of the list.
I choose the topics, not the other people on the list. So you find quite a range of opinion, despite the fact that we're all interested in the same thing. Discussion can be quite lively, even flamy at times.
Mailing lists are about what you're interested in.
LiveJournal
On LiveJournal, I am at the centre and everything revolves around me. My friends list is like a ring that encircles me. Every person I add makes the ring a little larger. Communities are another ring. The content falls from above and passes through me and my rings. It's transient, it's ephemeral.
LJ is people driven. It's true that I add people because of what they usually write about, but very few people stick to only one topic. So I read about what interests the people on my list, not about what only interests me. Sure, I skip right over those posts about the OC and Smallville. But I read about the movies they're watching and the other shows and sometimes I get whole new fandoms that way. I get opinions and thoughts that I wouldn't see on mailing lists.
But I also don't get all the posts on the subjects I'm interested in. I don't get all the HP fic or all the Stargate discussion. I don't think I'm really connected to LotR fandom on LJ at all. When the RotK trailer dropped, nobody was posting on my flist about it, so I went out to friendsfriends to see if I could find any commentary there. It's not very efficient. Fandom is, to me, what I'm reading.
It's also narcissistic. I post about whatever interests me, me, me! The Fandom of Hal's Brain. But everybody else gets to do the same. It's like when people first started putting up personal homepages. We all can shine like little stars in our own LJ solar systems, surrounded by a cloud of other people, connecting out to the edges of the known universe.
Discussion on LJ has a different tenor than on lists. Because I choose the people that you read, rather than the topics, I'm more likely to be of the same opinion as they are, and, when I'm not, I feel more of a desire to be conciliatory, out of a sense of personal connection. That's not to say that there's not dissension, but even that tends to have more of a personal tone.
LJ is about who you know.
Which Is Better
Eh. I think they're both great. Not like that sucky Usenet. *g*
no subject
Yeah, this is what's really buzzing in my head right now -- it might be interesting to experiment by starting the same discussion in two different journals and see what happens.
The other day someone linked to one of my threads and said I was "hosting a discussion". It made me feel like I had a salon where people would come over and be smart in my space and all I had to do was faciliate by asking some questions. Then I could benefit from everyone else's hard thinking.
is lj actually negative for the writers? Or rather, is it giving more visibility to people like me who don't write? Is it shiftings dynamics ever so slightly? [I really don't know, b/c I've never been fannish before lj and I've never been a writer...I'm seriously asking!]
Do you mean that the writer's writing is devalued somewhat because the non-writers are also writing, even though it's not fic? If the dynamics are shifting, I think it's a good thing. I've had fans who after a while started writing their own fic and I loved the way that our relationship changed as they gained confidence.
I think that the kind of communication and more personal knowledge that LJ fosters helps to de-mystify writers and I think that's good. Fandom is all about community, really, and anything that helps us to relate better is good.
Hmm, this is a little vague, possibly. Sorry!
(Oh, and I've friended you. It's a No Obligation friending, so don't fret about adding me back unless it is your Heart's Desire. *g*)
no subject
No, not vague at all! I've said it before, but I don't think I'd be talking to anyone (heck, made it 4 years with not even a handful of LOC's) if it weren't for LJ. Somehow lurking in different writers' LJ's I felt I got to know them, who they were friends with, what else interested them beyond the particular fandom...I remember my first letters sounding pretty schizophrenic, b/c I knew that person and they didn't know me *g* But seriously, years on ml's never gave me that feeling of intimacy (however false it may be)...
As for the shifting dynamics between various fans...on some level, I guess it has always been the case that various fannish things added onto some form of fan capital (fannish potlatch anyone?), but a lot, I think, may have been going on in 'hidden' space (emails, IM, ...) While that's still the case and still possible, lj seems to initially put everyone on the same level... But then so did ml's...if you had sth smart to say on prospect, it didn't quite matter whether you were a famous writer or not, did it?...so why would I never have dreamed of posting there and just write away in my lj and on virgule???
Maybe it really *is* a personal preference thing. This spring I met a group of Enterprise writers whose entire subgroup (entire fandom?) despised lj and was perfectly happy to continue on ml.
LOL about your salon...when you're getting email notifications and people have started off on a tangent in your post, it sometimes does feel like that...and if they didn't know each other before, you just made a connection there for them, didn't you :-)