![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nym_wibblyYesterday's Snowflake Challenge asks for our thoughts on fandom's future deveopments. I have a 23 year history of wrongly guesstimating which way the internet fandom herd is going to bolt next, and which will be the next big shiny thing that lures us, so I'll just say that I'm glad plenty of it's currently congregating back around Dreamwidth.This platform has stabilised a great deal since my last try, and the pace, the layout, the features - it all suits me so much better than rapid-fire Tumblr ever did. Pillowfort looks good, but it's so very far from being ready to meet fandom's needs.
The downside of all the various blogging options today is that it's harder to find people and their fannish output - especially if their username varies from platform to platform. Fandom seems to have lost a lot of the intricate, home-made, make-do-and-mend infrastructure that made the word-of-mouth thing work in the Livejournal-and-clones era, or before that when we were scattered across the various services (Yahoo, mailing lists, newsgroups, private websites/servers, IRC, Geocities, themed fanfic archives...) that could accommodate our specific needs. Webrings and mailing lists/autoresponders were clunky and crude, but damned effective. Search engines were actually about finding content that matched the keywords, not about rankings, clickthroughs, and advertising. Busy communities (of whatever sort) acted as an information hub. I've watched that ease of finding fannish intrastructure fragment since the swandive fandom-suicide of Livejournal, and the creation of AO3, and I don't know what we can do to get it back. It's counter-intuitive that we've lost it thanks to better and faster technology, but the reality is that it takes hardworking people, working consistently and at least loosely together, to make that network happen.
Having tried to build a corner or two of that infrastructure in the modern era myself, and found the project defeated by search engine ranking, fragmentation of interest groups who would once have shared the links around, and lack of engagement on the part of 99% of fannish consumers, who suffer a Facebook-etc-induced disconnect between the ease of content consumption and the concept of a hardworking creator/considered infrastructure behind the content, I don't honestly see a way back short of more projects like the Organisation For Transformative Works. That is one hell of an undertaking, requiring expertise, responsibility, and dealing with serious money in a way that's beyond most of us. Dealing with ungrateful, self-entitled people in a way that's definitely beyond me! Most of us are here to find, consume, and create fannish material. Permanence is a mindset that doesn't fit in the consume-and-discard Tumblr era, where keeping a blog vibrant and up-to-the-moment has become prioritised over preserving and networking content long term, for its own sake.
We've gained a heck of a lot in terms of luxuriously easy tech, storage space, speed, and freedom of speech. We've paid a price in terms of community, interpersonal experience, and (bizarrely) ease of access/use. Fandom will go on, even if we (so to speak) get bombed back to the stone age and have to go back to tape trees, fanzines, and snail maiil. I can't really envision how we go forward into the pocket-computer age. I'll continue to hold out for the day when techology allows me to literally think fanfic onto the screen.
The downside of all the various blogging options today is that it's harder to find people and their fannish output - especially if their username varies from platform to platform. Fandom seems to have lost a lot of the intricate, home-made, make-do-and-mend infrastructure that made the word-of-mouth thing work in the Livejournal-and-clones era, or before that when we were scattered across the various services (Yahoo, mailing lists, newsgroups, private websites/servers, IRC, Geocities, themed fanfic archives...) that could accommodate our specific needs. Webrings and mailing lists/autoresponders were clunky and crude, but damned effective. Search engines were actually about finding content that matched the keywords, not about rankings, clickthroughs, and advertising. Busy communities (of whatever sort) acted as an information hub. I've watched that ease of finding fannish intrastructure fragment since the swandive fandom-suicide of Livejournal, and the creation of AO3, and I don't know what we can do to get it back. It's counter-intuitive that we've lost it thanks to better and faster technology, but the reality is that it takes hardworking people, working consistently and at least loosely together, to make that network happen.
Having tried to build a corner or two of that infrastructure in the modern era myself, and found the project defeated by search engine ranking, fragmentation of interest groups who would once have shared the links around, and lack of engagement on the part of 99% of fannish consumers, who suffer a Facebook-etc-induced disconnect between the ease of content consumption and the concept of a hardworking creator/considered infrastructure behind the content, I don't honestly see a way back short of more projects like the Organisation For Transformative Works. That is one hell of an undertaking, requiring expertise, responsibility, and dealing with serious money in a way that's beyond most of us. Dealing with ungrateful, self-entitled people in a way that's definitely beyond me! Most of us are here to find, consume, and create fannish material. Permanence is a mindset that doesn't fit in the consume-and-discard Tumblr era, where keeping a blog vibrant and up-to-the-moment has become prioritised over preserving and networking content long term, for its own sake.
We've gained a heck of a lot in terms of luxuriously easy tech, storage space, speed, and freedom of speech. We've paid a price in terms of community, interpersonal experience, and (bizarrely) ease of access/use. Fandom will go on, even if we (so to speak) get bombed back to the stone age and have to go back to tape trees, fanzines, and snail maiil. I can't really envision how we go forward into the pocket-computer age. I'll continue to hold out for the day when techology allows me to literally think fanfic onto the screen.
no subject
Date: 15 Jan 2019 13:18 (UTC)Same!
I don't honestly see a way back short of more projects like the Organisation For Transformative Works
That's what I think has to happen. We need a group of fans with the know-how to build a space that's fandom friendly and suits, if not all, at least the large majority of users, from authors to artists to vidders etc.
no subject
Date: 15 Jan 2019 21:44 (UTC)Meanwhile, my wobbly brain loves the pace of Dreamwidth!