A bit of musing on where fandom/fandoms communication has oft gone awry

[elisem]

The following excerpt is taken from an email conversation with friends about some online reactions to a screed someone had posted about how kids these days should get off of their lawn with their "fandoms" with an s and their fanwriters who are not oldphart fans, among other things. I was trying to explain to my friends how one particular misunderstanding involving the usage of "fandom" versus the usage of "fandoms" was making things so much worse, and how I had had very little luck explaining the particular connotations involved to either group of the fans involved.

Please note that the following has been edited for clarity, but I'm not guaranteeing I actually reached that destination.


That version of fandom at that time? Was how I got into fandom (or, now, fandoms, and so forth) at all. So there's a lot of First Time experiences in my memory about it, and it really truly was a revelation to finally find people who thought as fast as I did, and about some of the same stuff, and who loved math and physics and imagination and stories, and who did not slink off when mainstream people taunted them as weirdos but instead let their freak flag fly.

The thing a lot of people (who weren't there for that epoch of fandom) do not get is that fandom was an extended social network where not everybody knew each other but where you were at most two hops away from everybody. It was small. Most importantly, it was a social network, not just a set of interests. People could be fans of a show but that did not make one a fan, not back then. What people meant when they said someone is a fan, at least when I got there, was that either they publish a fanzine or get a fanzine (which were mostly available for trade for your fanzine, or you could mail a quarter or two taped to a post card -- which are called poctsards due to a typo that stuck once -- which is why there was a zine called Sticky Quarters. But I digress. Which is probably one of the most fannish things to do, digressing I mean, but anyhow, the point was that trading was preferred because then you were reading each other's stuff, and that was the ONLY WAY to do so back then, through zines and apas, which were the tiny paper version of the net before there was a net), or you went to conventions or ran conventions or wished you could afford to go to conventions, or you wrote into the prozines and your name and address was published there and then sometimes another fan in or near your home town would contact you from that, and then you usually started a club.

Finding fandom was almost always an occasion of "Holy shit, you mean there's other people kind of like me? How can I connect with them? I've been so alone!" And these days, that's not where people are coming from, so they don't see that particular web of established contact and resulting social connections between fans as "fandom"; they see the book or show or genre as the "fandom."

I think maybe this is part of why oldphart fans are sometimes incredulously angry at newstyle/young fans, because the oldpharts believed in the beauty and delight and shared sense of wonder that was the connections between people who loved stuff and the events those people built -- in the community there was -- and young/newstyle fans now, in the eyes of the oldpharts, are taking a term which used to refer to people caring about connecting with each other, and instead using it about a commercial product. It feels blasphemous, or like empty consumerism, or something. It might be a significant part of how these different groups are misunderstanding each other repeatedly. An oldphart hears "What are your fandoms? My fandoms are My Little Pony and Battlestar Galactica," and the oldphart misinterprets it as "All my good experiences are ones that I bought! People and connections? What the fuck are you talking about? Those aren't what I care about!"

I know, and you know, that the newstyle/young fans also care passionately about people and connections. But there's that misinterpretation.

I think that misinterpretation would be useful to keep in mind. And I think it's already cost us a lot.

Comments

[batrachian]

As very much of the newer school (though how much I classify as a Proper Fan, as opposed to fandom-adjacent, is an...extended digression) this was enlightening.

Thanks. <3

[athenais]

People hate seeing what was once rare and precious become the norm and lose its rare and precious status. We can no longer point at something ("this is fandom!" for instance) and essentially mean the same thing if we're defining it as a static experience. Also, it is sort of a dream come true to have our beloved speculative fiction become widespread and the love of it equally widespread, but the dream (like all dreams) has found its own internal logic and that can be disorienting and upsetting.

[firecat]

I love some language change and rail in fury at other language change. I'm not personally railing about this, but I get the feeling that people have when someone takes their word away and makes it mean something different.

[davidgoldfarb]

You made the daily roundup at File 770! Nice!

[tournevis]

It's all making me sigh. I'm an oldphart, in terms of chronology at least, but you are right that it's mostly about misunderstandings. Older-pharts not getting Tumblr. Older-farts not getting how online small-world networks work and miss the time when the only fannic small-world networks to be had were by mail, zine and in person. They misunderstand how one can have entirely online small-world networks, direct, constant, completely transformative, and entirely ephemeral. Because the world has changed. Sighing for generational misunderstandings.

[brittlekins]

Back in my day! No but really. I was a fanfic writer, and I remember the “oh shit there’s weirdos like me”. I think I’m in that middling ground.

Btw That fanfic is still out there too. I wonder if older me would sneer at it

[mrissa]

I think, too, that there is a huge difference between "there are a few people already in fandom but it is fairly small and I can contribute significantly to its cultural mores and experiences" and "this is a huge, established thing, take it or leave it" in terms of how much beauty, wonder, and acceptance your average new person feels coming in.

"We are all building this thing together, wow, isn't that great!" is a different experience than "this thing is substantially built and you will have to like it or lump it but OUR WAY is HOW IT IS"--and that affects how much someone actually experiences "this is a thing where connections with people are the crucial bit." I absolutely believe that some of the people in the same age cohort (or fandom-joining cohort, which is not the same thing) as the yelliest people believe in connections and wonder as the fundamental thing...but it's very hard to see that reflected in any way in the actual behavior of the yelliest.

[chaiya]

Mrissa and Elise, I think you've got something key here, at least in how I've experienced some parts of elder fandom.

I worked on Worldcon for a decade, chaired or co-chaired 7 SFF cons in the past decade, etc. I feel like I've been a contributing member of fandom for a while now, and I started contributing because it was how I could spend time with friends in fandom, or people I wanted to make friends with.

What I came to feel, however, is that many people saw me as inherently wanting to change fandom, and change it in ways they did not want to see happen, and those people often attacked me in public or in private. I have had some horrific experiences of people at cons coming up to me to say horrendous things because they thought that addressing sexual harassment and assault at conventions meant that people wouldn't be allowed to flirt or have fun anymore. As far as I could tell, they literally saw it as taking away from them the mechanism by which many had found their partners or their spouses. Whereas I saw it as making fandom safer for the next cohort (though I didn't have that language for it at the time) to participate and find their own way in fandom.

It is sometimes hard for me to hold onto individual differences within a cohort in the face of outright awfulness. I'll never forget having 3 old white dudes come up to me (at Boskone, because of course) and tell me they wouldn't come to my convention (Readercon that year) because they were afraid of staring at women's breasts in elevators and getting into trouble for it. And it's hard to remember those 3 dudes don't represent the rest of their fandom-joining cohort, for sure. Those 3 dudes were loud.

It's really hard for me to believe that those 3 loud dudes care about connection with anyone not in their cohort, is what I'm saying, and it's hard to remember they don't represent their cohort.

[elisem]

Yeah. And I wish they didn't make it so hard to believe and so hard to remember. They're making things worse.

[elisem]

I absolutely believe that some of the people in the same age cohort (or fandom-joining cohort, which is not the same thing) as the yelliest people believe in connections and wonder as the fundamental thing...but it's very hard to see that reflected in any way in the actual behavior of the yelliest.

It really, really is.

It's hard some days not to conclude that they only wanted homogenous connections and familiar wonder. And that "homogenous connections" means "people I see as people, which is a limited group." Then again, I am having a very disappointed day about some Stuff right now, and would like people to stop disappointing me on that Stuff already.

More thoughts to come, especially about coming to fandom from another community where Received Wisdom was paramount (no, not Paramount, stop that), but I might wait until I am not quite so disappointed. If such days comes. I sheesh people about Stuff. Sheesh.

[elisem]

This is a placemarker to remind me to write that dang essay on leaving the (hard-core fundamentalist wing of the) Lutheran church and entering fandom, and what both of those experiences had to do with Received Wisdom.

As soon as I am ungrumpy enough to set fingers to keyboard without cussing, I hope.

[mrissa]

Yes please.

[elisem]

I am still pondering that essay. It has to do with growing up hard-core fundie Lutheran, finding ways to escape that involved reading, and more particularly, reading science fiction, and then a long time later realizing that escapees who were brought up in communities of Received Wisdom and Required Conformity might wind up applying some of those frameworks and assumptions and navigational skills to the communities they fled to when they escaped, the communities that they may feel saved their lives.

Somewhere in that paragraph is the place where I should mention all the extremely intense negative reactions to the word "scifi" during certain decades. Seriously, fighting words, you know? Which is ... not how it is at all, now, when there are podcasts and TV networks that say "scifi" and "skiffy." ("Skiffy" was, at one time, a contemptuous and derogatory term that fans used to make fun of non-fans who called science fiction "scifi." That's, um, not what it is today.)

But back on leaving one community and entering another, i.e. fundie Protestant religion and fandom-as-it-was-in-the-early-80s, which was a helluva journey. Finding out that anthropology was A Thing is part of it, as is realizing that participant-observer stuff is fraught with peril, especially if you don't realize that that is what you're doing. Or probably should be doing. If you're not observing in certain ways, it's just... uncritical participating? Something.

There's also how, when I got there, fandom was so very obviously not really One Big Thing, despite the ... suggestions? assumptions? doctrine? that it was. I remember zine fans (note the modified term!) complaining that now they had a modified term applied to them when once they had roamed the Earth as giant thunder lizards of fanac, browsing on hecto jelly and twilltone, and what on Earth was fandom coming to, anyway? Not to mention the way people had applied a modifier to Trek fans or Trekfans or don't-you-dare-say-Trekkie-Ghu-dammit-we-are-Trekkers!-fans.

Anyhow, there were a lot of fights over words.

The above is why the essay is not finished yet, because gaaaah.

[mrissa]

Also: "we were once absolutely central and now have to share" is something very few groups of people handle well.

[rosefox]

Finding fandom was almost always an occasion of "Holy shit, you mean there's other people kind of like me? How can I connect with them? I've been so alone!" And these days, that's not where people are coming from, so they don't see that particular web of established contact and resulting social connections between fans as "fandom"; they see the book or show or genre as the "fandom."

Hm, this doesn't at all match what I've heard from younger fandoms-plural fans; they also very often have a sparkly exciting "you mean it's not just me?" experience when they get online or find a particularly welcoming group. Fandoms ARE communities. When I say "Harry Potter fandom" I mean "the people who have built a community around being Harry Potter fans". Each fandom is, precisely, a "web of established contact and resulting social connections between fans". What else would it be?

And this is why multifannish people like me sometimes say "my fandom is fandom". We don't have specific fandoms but are still absolutely part of the broader community of fans-in-the-fandoms-plural sense. Which very definitely exists.

[mrissa]

Oh, that's interesting, Rose, because the younger fandoms-plural fans I've talked to about this sort of thing definitely have NOT had the "you mean it's not just me?" reaction to finding a particularly welcoming group--because they've generally known that there are Harry Potter fans online. They've had the "you-all are so great! I'm so glad to have found THIS community, THIS community is more than I ever dreamed of!" response, but not at all the "I had no idea people did Harry Potter fandom!" response.

My godkids, for example, at 12 and 17, take it for granted that they will be able to find people who share [old term] fannish interests with them and [new term] fandoms with them. I will be extremely surprised if they have a moment of "there's other people kind of like me" for any fandom they develop, because their world is so interconnected--and this is true of most of the 20-something fans I've talked to as well.

I wonder if this skews differently for people whose parents restrict their internet access beyond what their peers have--not so much the "don't go wandering the net freely at age 6" but "you're 16 and you can't search for anything that isn't a school project and I will hover over you to enforce that" style of parenting or what the difference in demographics we're seeing would be.

[elisem]

Note: In the comments on File 770, Andrew Porter pointed out where I got it wrong about sticky quarters. Here, have useful info:

"#1: They get it wrong about quarters taped to a postcard. You never could send a postcard with anything attached to it besides a glued-on piece of paper. Nope, you put the quarters on an index card, then mailed that in an envelope, so the postal machinery couldn’t destroy the envelope in processing."

[elisem]

Another note: In writing the original piece, which was a comment in email to friends as an aside from a larger conversation, I elided things in ways that made certain fans feel I had done a disservice to the very fans I was saying were being misunderstood by olderstyle fans. Here's the most pertinent place where I did that thing:

Finding fandom was almost always an occasion of "Holy shit, you mean there's other people kind of like me? How can I connect with them? I've been so alone!" And these days, that's not where people are coming from, so they don't see that particular web of established contact and resulting social connections between fans as "fandom"; they see the book or show or genre as the "fandom."

Well, no. What I was attempting to say (and probably not succeeding) is that the newstyle phrasing of fandoms-with-an-s combined with the (not just newstyle but we'll get back to that) prefacing of fandom with [title of intellectual property around which said fandom builds their activities and communities] is where many oldstyle take the (mistaken, as I did say later) impression that the thing the newstyle fans are doing is foregrounding the intellectual property rather than the community/connections.

Mostly what I was musing about there was how big a difference saying "fandoms" versus "fandom" seemed to make in some conversations; one little s is for some people a huge marker for a whole bunch of assumed stuff, and the people about whom stuff was being assumed were having a lot of trouble focusing on the plural-vs-singular thing per se. I agreed that they were being misunderstood, but pointing out one particular fraught spot there where the misunderstanding seemed to me to be shaped if not started was... difficult in ways that also seemed to illuminate the point I was aiming for. (I should write the thing about "are you going to the con?" versus "are you going to con?" too, because that happened around Minneapolis/St.Paul area fandom and wow, was that a tangle of jagged spiky bad feelings around the presence or absence of a part of speech: the article "the".)

Attempted Summation with Plea:

"S" (and "the") are probably linguistic marker ingroup outgroup thingie wossnames, and somebody who studies this stuff ought to say something useful about it, because I am floundering here. But I'm pretty sure it's actually a thing.