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Fannish homes
Apr. 7th, 2020 01:06 pm(This is a public post and I'd love to have a discussion beyond the people who read my journal. If it interests you, feel free to link elsewhere or respond on your own journal)
Every generation and subgroup of fans has its own platforms, norms, ways that people become part of the community, memes. People are always coming and going from fannish life, too, and in every movement of a community that's formed -- to new fandoms, to new platforms -- some people get lost. Many of us have times of intense fannishness and also breaks in between where we're not so active and only keeping up with people we are already close to.
When I first found transformative fandom, everything seemed to be happening on LiveJournal. There were still mailing lists — I remember having to promise I was an adult and join a particular Yahoo group to get access to one popular fic — but what was visible and accessible to a lurker was the LJ communities. The way you could find a writer you liked and follow their journal to see whatever they shared publicly, both fictional and personal. LJ and its offshoots have a format that's never been duplicated by the next generation of social media and communication tools: a hybrid of personal spaces (journals) and shared topic-focused spaces (communities) that use the same tools and visual language. Both spaces were crucial to the unique culture of fandom at that time. People had a space to make very personal posts and build a circle of people who were interested in reading those, and also spaces that weren't so personal, often with clear rules and facilitation to keep things on topic.
None of the tools that are most popular today have the same dynamic. Twitter and Tumblr let us follow people personally, but with few tools for filtering. If that's the way you're keeping up with fandom, you have to follow whoever's into what you're into or you won't see what you're looking for — and you get their posts about other fandoms or their personal lives whether you want that or not. People to follow are only discovered through serendipitous retweets and reblogs. Dreamwidth doesn't have a strong comm culture despite support for it technically. I go to DW friending memes, try to find a few people who are interesting, read their posts feeling like I don't know how to be friends because we haven't connected over something fannish yet. Discord servers are the opposite, with only the community or interest and no option of getting personal updates. AO3 falls somewhere else, a place where we can subscribe to get a favorite artist's fanworks but not see much of a window into their lives or what they themselves like, cutting us off from the spontaneous discovery of your favorite author's recs.
Fandom abides. We stitch things together in various ways. We go to an author's tumblr that's linked in their AO3 profile, or find a discord server that's linked in the end notes of a fic. We look to the people we're already connected to to find new communities, and then use the communities to connect to some of the people in them on a more personal level. And of course none of these communities are or have ever been spontaneous. They take a lot of labor to build, curate, moderate. I haven't found a fannish discord server that was both active and felt like home to me yet, but even the ones I have been in have a clear hand in inviting, vetting, structuring, and moderating to create a unique culture. A few people are still out here on Dreamwidth trying to build communities.
How do you use the tools we have today to find community? Are you trying to build communities yourself? How is that going? What can we do as "fandom," this vast sprawling network, to create authentic connections, be accountable, find communities and friendships that make us better people?
Every generation and subgroup of fans has its own platforms, norms, ways that people become part of the community, memes. People are always coming and going from fannish life, too, and in every movement of a community that's formed -- to new fandoms, to new platforms -- some people get lost. Many of us have times of intense fannishness and also breaks in between where we're not so active and only keeping up with people we are already close to.
When I first found transformative fandom, everything seemed to be happening on LiveJournal. There were still mailing lists — I remember having to promise I was an adult and join a particular Yahoo group to get access to one popular fic — but what was visible and accessible to a lurker was the LJ communities. The way you could find a writer you liked and follow their journal to see whatever they shared publicly, both fictional and personal. LJ and its offshoots have a format that's never been duplicated by the next generation of social media and communication tools: a hybrid of personal spaces (journals) and shared topic-focused spaces (communities) that use the same tools and visual language. Both spaces were crucial to the unique culture of fandom at that time. People had a space to make very personal posts and build a circle of people who were interested in reading those, and also spaces that weren't so personal, often with clear rules and facilitation to keep things on topic.
None of the tools that are most popular today have the same dynamic. Twitter and Tumblr let us follow people personally, but with few tools for filtering. If that's the way you're keeping up with fandom, you have to follow whoever's into what you're into or you won't see what you're looking for — and you get their posts about other fandoms or their personal lives whether you want that or not. People to follow are only discovered through serendipitous retweets and reblogs. Dreamwidth doesn't have a strong comm culture despite support for it technically. I go to DW friending memes, try to find a few people who are interesting, read their posts feeling like I don't know how to be friends because we haven't connected over something fannish yet. Discord servers are the opposite, with only the community or interest and no option of getting personal updates. AO3 falls somewhere else, a place where we can subscribe to get a favorite artist's fanworks but not see much of a window into their lives or what they themselves like, cutting us off from the spontaneous discovery of your favorite author's recs.
Fandom abides. We stitch things together in various ways. We go to an author's tumblr that's linked in their AO3 profile, or find a discord server that's linked in the end notes of a fic. We look to the people we're already connected to to find new communities, and then use the communities to connect to some of the people in them on a more personal level. And of course none of these communities are or have ever been spontaneous. They take a lot of labor to build, curate, moderate. I haven't found a fannish discord server that was both active and felt like home to me yet, but even the ones I have been in have a clear hand in inviting, vetting, structuring, and moderating to create a unique culture. A few people are still out here on Dreamwidth trying to build communities.
How do you use the tools we have today to find community? Are you trying to build communities yourself? How is that going? What can we do as "fandom," this vast sprawling network, to create authentic connections, be accountable, find communities and friendships that make us better people?
