wheels within wheels, hamsters within wheels

[sab]

Things I'm not working on right now, 19:37, 11/27/05:

1. WBC homework, times four. Functional slacker. (For Richard Linklater's "Slacker," see 'slacker (disambiguation)'). I'm on chapter headings and battle scenes, over here; character misbehaviour and want and need. This is USEFUL homework; if only I were a less disambiguous slacker.

2. The story where Ronon is an 18-year-old lazy-ass wisecracker in military school.
3. The story where Rodney is put on a forced exercise regiment and is super embarassed and doesn't tell anyone until John starts noticing Rodney's getting all cut and svelte, and Rodney's like, "it's probably a tapeworm, don't worry about it!"
4. The BUGMASTER.

Instead, I'm contemplating WORLDWIDE FANNISH REVOLUTION. So here's my question:




First. Livejournal, courtesy bradfitz, is by no means the biggest social networking tool out there, right? I mean, more people are on MySpace, probably more people on Friendster, maybe even more people on Blogger and AOL and Yahoo and other, you know, clickable communities?

But here we all are! Or ARE we?

Is it possible, great sprawling universe of fandom, that there's a similar society, just like us, off on MySpace somewhere? Another fannish continent with its own leaders and ideologies and cultural jargon?

I am under the impression -- and I'm so curious to know if YOU are too -- that this LJ six-degrees-of-Venn-diagram overlapping world of fandom that I'm part of, that we're part of, here on LJ, is the APEX of good fannish space, like, the space where all the BEST people and the BRIGHTEST and the SMARTEST hang out. A perfunctory pass through ff.net always seems to justify this impression, because we always have this vague concept of the stragglers out there whose names we come across now and again, on vestigial mailing lists, on ff.net, on various artifactual fandom-specific archives --

And I figure THEY all hang out somewhere, but in the geography of my brain it's still a pocket of LJ somewhere, where it's possible that through a friend of a friend of a fried I could end up in their circle just as easily as I'm six degrees of 3jane or anyone else in Our Greater Fannish Circle.

My perspective makes for a really, really tiny globe (where "globe" is paramatized by the English-speaking Internet; but for my purposes I think trying to allow for a BIGGER fannish space than that is just, well, psychotic) -- the fannish slice of the WORLD is all roughly right HERE, all packaged and interlinked and indexed. And if you think about rec sites, or services like crack_van or multifannish reviewers like makesmewannadie or permetaform -- I operate under the impression that they're able to somehow trawl all of fandom, or at least -- in my elitist mind -- all of fandom that matters, all of GOOD fandom.

So first, is it logical to assume that we, this, HERE, this is the fannish hub of the UNIVERSE? That we're some sort of capital city over here, defining the language, the whats-hot-whats-not, the yearly trends and most sophisticated analysis of fandom writ large?

It makes me yearn to take a CENSUS, to create a society, to analyze and sample our demographics and figure out just what kind of a force we really ARE. Do we, for example, outnumber the population of a small European city? A large American city? A large Asian country? What's the balance of political ideology? Of race and class and economy? What can we, as a society, DO for the world?

The great fannish migration to LJ's like the creation of the state of Israel, and fannish evolution can so vividly be read as pre-LJ and post-LJ history.

Before LJ we were fragmented, divided into mailinglists, and before that, yahoogroups, and before that, usenet and BBS, and before that, zines. And before that, probably cave paintings and book groups and ladies' sewing circles, and each with their own political hierarchies, their own local leaders, local diplomats, local critics, local philosophers, local pimps. Then we all collapsed, as universes do, into a single spacetime, and our diplomats and critics and pimps joined other critics and pimps and formed rec LJs and icon communities and drabble communities and ficathons --

And if I'm right, if my initial hypothesis is correct (and I haven't done the necessary legwork to prove that there isn't a similarly large and powerful fannish society of equal numbers and insular isolation operating somewhere on MySpace or Yahoo, but the internet gives me the impression that if there were, I'd've/we'd've seen it -- and assimilated it! -- by now), there's something kind of wonderful about this sprawling, anarchic state, but I'm just SO, what's the word? drawn to, attracted to, LUSTING after the notion of what this neighborhood, this town, this city-state, this CONTINENT of fandom could do as a single political unit. We could take down the FCC and the RIAA and revolutionize the packaging and sales of media for the whole wide world!

I mean; we have a language, we have a culture, we have etiquette and morality and jargon that is -- if not universal -- certainly part of a greater understood live-and-let-live sort of friendliness. I've got a Neighborhoodie that I ordered from Neighborhoodies that reads "livejournal," because this place is my neighborhood more than Williamsburg or Greenpoint or Los Feliz or Farmington, where a neighborhood has the classic interpretation of barn-raisings and neighborhood-watch and coveting thy neighbor's wife and celebrating one another on various secular holidays and looking after one another's various crises. How many more fans' names do I know than names of people on my city block?

Oh, you guys. I am just so glad to be here; this is an awesome place to visit and an even better place to live. And if trying to herd fans weren't harder than herding Democrats (if part of the problem we have with the Democratic party is that we're too diverse to support ourselves on a single platform, IMAGINE trying to please all the fannish people all the time) or herding cats, I'd be first in line to write us up a mission statement, define our ideology (We came, We consumed, We appropriated!) and, viva la revolucion!, dare the rest of the world to TAKE US ON.

ETA: The point corinna_5 made is really good; what LJ has given us for the, yes, largely female, TV/movie-consumerish, slash-friendly population of fandom is a place for like-minded individuals to set up camp and then go ahead and open up OTHER, non-fannish parts of our life for public consumption. Which is why I'm looking at this like a CITY, because I'm not just talking about LJ as a hub for fannish people to find fannish PRODUCT to consume; I'm envisioning a city-state set up for people, brought together by that kind of likemindedness, to settle among kindred spirits and create our own politics and our own society! And I do think -- though I totally don't know the depth and breadth of off-LJ comic fandom, or, you know, furries -- LJ is unique that it has created that kind of virtual homeland. Which is why everyone should want to come live here (!), but of course there are always expatriate groups and lost tribes wandering around making homes for themselves, and the Internet is especially friendly to those kinds of nomads, offering all sorts of single-blog oases and mailing lists and IRC channels and whatnot.

And so I am still curious: are we the biggest fan-populated city? Do we, as I suspect, have the most elaborate system of services and economy (ficathons, barter systems, birthday presents!) as yet evolved on the Internets? Isn't it SUPER AWESOME that we built this city on rock and roll?!

Comments

[hesychasm]

Hrmm. I haven't been to a con in a while, but the last one I was at (Escapade?), there were definitely people there who had no idea who anyone was on LJ, who had never come anywhere near an LJ. Their fannish spaces were entirely elsewhere. Where exactly, I dunno -- mailing lists? Actually, I do still know a couple of people who are only on mailing lists. Only a couple, though. (g)

And I was recently pointedly reminded by this person that LJ =/= fandom.

Also, for instance, isn't that whole crowd on Haven and Ephemeral still mostly LJ-shy?

Still, I'm with you. This definitely seems like the best and most cutting edge place to be a fan right now. *ducking the glares of anyone not on LJ who might still, somehow, see this comment*

[iamsab.livejournal.com]

Right, but are they CENTRALIZED? I mean, in terms of resources, and numbers, and services -- the GDP of fandom, you know, from crack_van to ljseek.com to a 100word drabble community for everything under the sun -- in the same way we are?

They're still in shantytowns and migrant tent cities (she said, arrogantly) while we're in the bustling metropolis, no?

[empressaurelius.livejournal.com]

You raised a really interesting topic of discussion. I think that LJ is the main hub for fandom, and I think that it's become as such for several reasons.

To start with, LJ is one of the easiest-to-access and use bloggers out there; lazy people like me love this. I've used other blogging setups, and they're just a pain in the ass. There are other fun things that LJ offers, such as icons; granted, greatestjournal offers you MORE icons on their free accounts, but it's just not as popular. Other fandom meeting places, such as Yahoo groups, don't have the membership that LJ does, and aren't as fun.

That being said, I am, like you, so very glad that LJ exists. I love meeting people and making friends through it. It's like nothing else out there. Aaah, dear old LJ-how we love thee. You've done more for fandom than possibly anything else.

[cofax7]

You know, that's my question too: Like, not even "are there other multi-fannish conglomerations out there on another forum somewhere", but "are there other conglomerations on LJ we're just not seeing?" Because I'm convinced there has to be: LJ is just too large, otherwise.

Every once in a while I run into someone who's got serious fannish history in one of "my" fandoms, and they've been on LJ for a while, and yet we've never crossed paths before, and I'm reminded again about just how large just this place is.

And yeah, what Jintian said about folks who just never took to LJ. There's a lot of feral fans out there (I work with some) and people who just cling to the familiar boards and lists they've always known. LJ seems prime real estate for people who want to blur their boundaries: multi-show fans, multi-media fans, fans who also want to talk books and movies and fashion and food and weightloss and personal shit all in the same unconfined space. Mailing lists and many forums are far more topic-driven than LJ is, and moderated (either by actual mods or by community consensus, like B.org): ergo it's not a complete free-for-all when it comes to topics and content.

But on LJ, you can say ANYTHING you want, and no one can stop you (unless you're actually advocating violence). It's possibly a bit too freeing to some people.

THinky thoughts.

[iamsab.livejournal.com]

You know, that's my question too: Like, not even "are there other multi-fannish conglomerations out there on another forum somewhere", but "are there other conglomerations on LJ we're just not seeing?" Because I'm convinced there has to be: LJ is just too large, otherwise.

Yeah, exactly. But even if they're on LJ and I don't know them or have never come across them, I still feel like...they're part of this CITY, they share our rules and etiquette, our memes and pairing conventions and ancestry and SERVICES.

I mean -- have they heard of yuletide? Do they use the Christmas wishlist meme, did they participate in fan_the_vote?

Because in my mind those are emblematic of the services and utilities of this virtual city, and what I'm trying to get my mind around is whether other fannish "cities" have similarly elaborate infrastructures, you know?

[somedaybitch.livejournal.com]

but then you have fans like moi, on lj...i go very far out of my way to stay very far out on the edges of the fandoms of choice because the "hub of fandom", makes me psychotic. i, therefore, don't know most of the links that you posted and i have no deep inkling to investigate them.

so then, how much do fans like me mess with the equation? or do we?

[paradise-city.livejournal.com]

I think that's a great point. If you count the weekend suburban fans in addition to the BNFs in the mansions on the hill, I think the city of fannish LJ (which, incidentally, really needs a name for purposes of easier reference in addition to, y'know, being really effin' cool) is much larger than some might imagine.

For example, I participate in several fandoms, but only as a weekend hobby because I simply don't have time it requires to be an active fan, the sort of fan who moves from the suburbs to the city. As such, I have no idea who lives in the city, what they drive, where they work, etc. But I do have a group of fellow weekend suburbanites that I'm sure the city folks have never heard of. And though we are more of a backyard barbecue than a block party, we are still part of the fannish collective even if our distance makes it difficult to count us in the census.

...and that concludes a rousing round of How Far Can You Take That Metaphor.

[somedaybitch.livejournal.com]

that? was the most brilliant metaphor-extension i do believe i've ever read. :::applauds:::

i love backyard barbeques.

[corinna-5.livejournal.com]

So first, is it logical to assume that we, this, HERE, this is the fannish hub of the UNIVERSE?

Where fandom = female slash-friendly omnimedia fans, it seems to be, yes. Comics fanboys and some girls seem to hang out largely on web boards, either creator-specific ones or sites like comicbookresources.com (where Gail Simone's You'll All Be Sorry! forum is a great, fun space). Certain sorts of music fandom are served best by MySpace. Other than that, I don't know, but I'm sure everyone's got their own spaces. That's the other cool thing about the Internet -- the more you build, the more space there is to build on. Chew on that, grasshopper!

[iamsab.livejournal.com]

Where fandom = female slash-friendly omnimedia fans, it seems to be, yes.

That's a really good distinction, thank you.

I'm mostly wondering in terms of INFRASTRUCTURE, you know? Because we are both so sprawling AND so well-organized, cataloged and hyperlinked and with, as I said, our own SERVICES and meta-cultural analysis. And I'm wondering if these other groups, the comics fanboys and the MySpace people et al have a comparable infrastructure, both in complexity and size?

We're more than just a multifannish mess of people over here, you know? We have a CIVILIZATION, in a way that we never did on mailing lists and usenet.

[corinna-5.livejournal.com]

I know comics fandom and don't really know MySpace, so I'll speak to that.

Comics fandom is more sprawlingly distributed, across blogs and boards, but there are definitely some of the same sorts of services (lists of the Batman books coming out this week in the CBR Batman forum!) and meta-cultural analyses. In fact, comics fandom recently lost its best meta space, the great blog Fanboy Rampage. Fanboy Rampage was somewhere in between a newsletter and a one-man fandom_wank, in that he'd post the news and his commentary on it, but he'd also post highlights from ridiculous threads on other boards. I will always treasure the post about some board's "name the three best things about comics" thread: it went from fairly meta commentary on the nature of the form to "DOCTOR. FREAKIN. DOOM!!!" Warren Ellis, in the comments, posted "Kill me now."

(That's another difference between comics fandom and whatever you want to call this -- the creators are part of it, are often sponsors of it and/or moderators, and frequently come out of the comic fan community. Which means that fanfiction in general and slash in particular gets acknowledged, but definitely marginalized. (Though the slash marginalization is also about gender, but I digress.) Whereas the creators who come out of this community frequently don't or can't acknowledge that genesis, and there are good legal-department reasons for creators from outside the community to not join it.)

I think this is definitely more of a "personal" space than boards are, and that's what makes it more of a civilization, to use your terms. You can blather on about your personal life in your journal -- heck, the name implicitly encourages it -- and even the people who are there for the hot gay pr0n are likely going to get caught up in the rest of it too.

[eliade.livejournal.com]

3. The story where Rodney is put on a forced exercise regiment and is super embarassed and doesn't tell anyone until John starts noticing Rodney's getting all cut and svelte, and Rodney's like, "it's probably a tapeworm, don't worry about it!"

*eye gleam* I would like that, yes.

4. The BUGMASTER.

I...don't know what this is, but if you write it, I will come. Er. To read it.

I like your thoughts on fannish space. I think we are the hub here. We Are the Hub! Tee-shirts for everyone.

Also, I sent you another e-mail yesterday. Not that you have to answer, but with e-mail, LJ, etc, as it is right now I wanted to make sure you got it. If not, let me know. If you did, ignore this. ;)

[iamsab.livejournal.com]

I totally got your e-mail. I have big plans to respond. BIG PLANS!

Also, I'm going to write this goddamned workout!Rodney fic, seriously, AFTER I do my homework, or, you know, eventually. Because Rodney does SIT UPS at night, when no one will see him, and then he just gets so excited that he can actually change his own BODY and he starts seeing, like, muscle definition and he HIDES it, but all it will take is for John to casually grab his arm to drag him somewhere and John's all, "hmm, hard!" and then there's some sort of Diet Coke Break where Rodney takes his shirt off and he's buff underneath! And Ronon knows all along, and just, casually starts giving Rodney heavier stuff to carry when they're out in the field, and Rodney almost complains but then realizes that he CAN zip around without getting winded -- and also when he works out he wears SHORTS and gets SWEATY and never tells anyone and spends a lot of time staring at his body and trying to accomplish things with it.

And as for fannish spaces, I just want to make sure I'm here when we incorporate as a legitimate city, so I can vote ANNA FOR MAYOR!

[corinna-5.livejournal.com]

OK, I'm already volunteering to beta this one.

[iamsab.livejournal.com]

Awesome, because I foresee struggling with what exactly Rodney's circuit-training regimen is. He's going to overshoot, of course, and the next day his thighs will be all burning and his shoulders will pop and then he'll try something low-impact, and discover that he CRAVES the burn because it helps him FEEL those hard ab muscles buried under all the pudge, or the hard ridge of tricep, aching when he pushes on it, or big powerful thigh muscles throbbing around his, um. groin.

Feel the burn, McKay! You know you LOVE IT!

[corinna-5.livejournal.com]

Rodney has to learn that one can only do the circuit every other day, but maybe he will try to do upper body one day, and lower body the other, or do circuit training one day and run secretly in parts of the city that aren't generally inhabited the other, and then he runs into John doing a little recon work and John's like "Rodney! what's wrong! what are you running from!" and he has to make up an excuse.

I will admit that when I first started getting stomach muscles, I spent way too much time in front of the mirror admiring them. It's an excellent motivator.

[apathocles.livejournal.com]

Other people have said it better than I ever could, so, yes. I think you have some good points, but I don't think LJ is quite as central as we like to think it is. As someone said above, most of comics fandom is on boards; I only ever visit them when someone links to a particularly horrific statement made on one of them, and my masochism takes over. Fanboys make up an enormous amount of comics fandom, and the number of them on LJ -- or, at least, in the parts of LJ that I frequent -- are incredibly low.

And it's not just the guys, either. What I see as being 'DC fandom' on LJ is, really, just one particular aspect of it. I was drawn to it because I got interested in the animated Justice League series -- and, in particular, the Flash. This is where the vast majority of fiction for Flash and my other favourite characters is, so this is where I hang out. (Also, shrift is largely responsible for my becoming a Flash fan in the first place, and so I just kind of followed her lead on the issue. ;) If I'd been converted by someone I knew from elsewhere, well, who knows where I would've ended up?)

I haven't been able to find a huge amount of good fic for my favourites outside of LJ, but I have noticed a lot of fic for other characters. If we're talking animated DC, there's a lot of Green Lantern/Hawkgirl, Batman/Wonder Woman, and so on at other sites, while there's virtually none around here. Are they also being posted at other parts of LJ? I have no idea.

To be honest, I don't know if I'd be spending nearly as much time here if MBTV hadn't gone to shit. While it wasn't as convenient as LJ, it was still a good place to discuss a lot of fandoms with a bunch of friends. I left because of mods going nuts (banning people indiscriminately, getting rid of all the Australian threads, which meant I had no place where I could post without encountering spoilers, and so on), and I think that, had that not happened, I would now be dividing my time between there and here. A lot of my LJ friends are people I met through fandom on MBTV, and it worked fine while it lasted.

Which, I guess, just demonstrates another advantage of LJ: your LJ is unmoderated, and, if a mod kicks you out of a comm, you can start your own. There are, of course, disadvantages, such as people posting unmarked spoilers to comms (and I'm not about to defriend comms on this basis, because we're so far behind on stuff that I'd never be able to add them back). And I am so far from my original point. Crap.

I think what I was trying to say is that LJ is good, but there are definite upsides to other forms of fannish interaction. I really did like being able to go to a site that had fora for a vast range of shows, and just jump in on the relevant thread; searching LJ for a comm that a) covers what you're looking for, and b) doesn't suck can be a deeply frustrating process. I can totally see why people stick with fora, lists, and otherwise. Hotmail deleted the account I used for mailing lists, awhile back, and I haven't yet gone about re-subscribing; and I know I should, because there were always plenty of stories posted to these lists that weren't posted to LJ (AFAIK). I think that it's good to cover all your bases, and follow different forms of fannish interaction. I'm currently not doing that, because pretty much all the characters I love are being covered right where I am; but, if I got back into Farscape fandom, I would totally be back on the lists.

Having said all that, LJ is pretty damned cool, and I can certainly see where you're coming from. ;) It's the best way of becoming a multifandom ho. (The downside, of course, is that when you drift into a new fandom, the fannishness of your friendslist suddenly becomes irrelevant, and you're mentally yelling and screaming for people to SHUT THE HELL UP ABOUT SGA, ALREADY, while said people are probably having the exact same response to your rambling about comics. ;) )

[jenavira.livejournal.com]

I keep meaning to write something about newsletters, how they can pare fandom down and probably in many ways direct the trends of a fandom simply by what goes on there and what doesn't (because it's certainly not everything). Except I'm not in any huge fandoms with lots of work right now, so I have nothing to base observations on...

[fourteenlines.livejournal.com]

1. Rodney + tapeworm = LOVE.
2. While LJ has nearly 9 million registered users, only 2.5 million (only, she said) are active users. I wonder if there's some way of determining the ratio of all LJ users to fannish LJ users. Of course, then you have the problem of how to define "fannish." Even this, I think, would only give you an idea of how big fandom is on LJ - I tend to think that there are a LOT of other fans out there, but that LJ is the best organized and the most easily accessible. At the same time, it usually isn't the place for complete and utter newbies, because I don't believe it's usually the type of place that's first thing that comes up on a Google search, for example - mainly because LJers don't have that much control over their meta tags. So, in sum: *shrug*

[sorlklewis.livejournal.com]

I wonder if there's some way of determining the ratio of all LJ users to fannish LJ users.

I would like to state for the record that Sab did not consult me regarding population sampling, incidence within the population, etc., before making this post. ;)

[permetaform]

because this place is my neighborhood more than Williamsburg or Greenpoint or Los Feliz or Farmington, where a neighborhood has the classic interpretation of barn-raisings and neighborhood-watch and coveting thy neighbor's wife and celebrating one another on various secular holidays and looking after one another's various crises.

::nods:: hear hear.

I think part of what's made LJ such a great place for hmm...how to say it...I guess maybe "cutting edge" fandom? "organized" fandom? is it's interconnectivity. Because sure, an LJ *can* opperate like a blog, but I find blogs more...isolationist? individual? loner-like? than LJs.

Granted that makes indexing LJ entries difficult, but gah, the *community*. ::beams::

[faith-girl222.livejournal.com]

Even if LJ *isn't* the fannish hub of the universe, I think there are some very good reasons that it often feels like it is:

1) Unlike most mailinglists, boards etc. all the show and character specific comms are part of the larger LJ community - whereas, when I was using message boards at ezboard, I never felt "this board is part of ezboard", so it has a sense of scope.

2) Most boards are topic specific, and you go there looking for that one thing. LJ is all about many fandoms - and pimping new ones is almost a daily part of my flist. LJ is not a 'make a board and see if fans will come', LJ is about making more fans, so it's always getting *bigger*.

3) A lot people came to LJ from a lot of different corners fandoms, and brought parts of those spaces with them.

4) You don't need to have an LJ to be part of it for the people who do have them. Neil Gaiman does not have a livejournal, but because someone made a RSS feed of his blog, he shows up on people's flists and people comment on his posts are though he did. LJ consolidates, it brings in things going on off-site, so we *are* connect to whatever fandom is happening out there.

4b) People doing posts of random links from all over the internet connects LJ to the rest of fandom as well - because offsite things are being incorporated and discussed in LJ space.

5) Because one doesn't have to worry about coding a page or a website, the content and it's quality, I've found, is usually better. More time to make the thing, and then faster delivery to the fannish consumers. Plus, with the ease of comments function, constructive feedback and improvement of the product is quicker and more painless, and thus rightly giving the impression of the item being of yet better quality.

5b) You mention ff.net - horrid cesspool that is it - and I think it's telling that not only does LJ not *do* that, people actively makes fun of the conduct there. And in a way, we police ourselves by having fandom_wank (which, beiing on another blog service entirely, feels to me like it's impartial) there to poke fun.

Personally, I think 4 is most important, because it means LJ takes credit for things happening elsewhere, which both acknowledges an elsewhere and says 'but it's part of LJ anyway'. So, at the very least, LJ is a portal into fandom. But I'm more inclined to agree with you, because my fannish experience got immeasurably better when I came to LJ.

(Whoever said blogs are isolated - god yes. There is such a weird, constricted, talking into the vast emptiness of internet space about them. Even the ones hosted at blogspot).

[thassalia.livejournal.com]

Because you are you, and because this is beyond intriguing and distracting, and makes me say, "Dude, I'm glad I'm not the only one wondering about these things," you get a brief, brief pass on not working on #1!! But your pass is a day pass and will expire quickly:)

I often feel like my sense of fannish participation is largely limited to LJ because it allows me the type, level and quality of interaction that I crave, but then I rejected other activities almost immediately so my sense of scope is limited. I'm sure there are a slew of people who aren't on LJ, who might be lovely and intriguing additions to the fannish pot here, but I think that LJ draws people who have a different variety and scope of interests and who are intrigued by ways of sharing that personality and interest. You can be a fan here, but you also have to put something more into the pool, have to live up to certain expectations I think, which makes it interesting.

But the idea of other fannish circles (fans for the same media, forming their own interconnections and hierarchies and rules) is intriguing and likely and makes me wonder how they've chosen their ways of interaction and response to the media.

[iamsab.livejournal.com]

but I think that LJ draws people who have a different variety and scope of interests and who are intrigued by ways of sharing that personality and interest. You can be a fan here, but you also have to put something more into the pool, have to live up to certain expectations I think, which makes it interesting.

Totally! That is exactly right.

[permetaform]

ohhh! Your comment made me ::lightbulb:: in that are you saying perhaps that LJ not only facilitates community, but *attracts* those that are willing to form a community and/or willing to open dialogue on their shows? Thus, it attracts those people who are actively looking for *fandom* and also allows for the free exchange of ideas that spawn the most discussion/meta/fic, more so (and possibly with better quality, because I know that I and several others have never had a beta before LJ made it easy to find one) than say fans working in isolation?

[iamsab.livejournal.com]

See, I think so! This is why thassalia is so damned clever.

We came here and DECAMPED, is what!

[permetaform]

::nods:: ...and it's not like there aren't other fandoms that don't occur on LJ, just that our idea of Fandom (with all it's interconnections and organizational structures and both online and offline interactions) doesn't really occur anywhere else to the degree that it does here.

[thassalia.livejournal.com]

I think it does attract those who are interested in community because it is immediately a dialogue (I've never done the boards so I'm not sure what sort of community that forms), but you come to LJ with a sense of participation and reciprocity as well as staking out your own personal corner. It's like moving into a co-op: you know the neighbors share at least a few basic interests, and what keeps it fun is learning how your interests diverge and intersect in other areas while still playing in the same playground that brought you together.

[palebluebell.livejournal.com]

May I order a Story number 2 for main, with a side of 1, please. -begspleads-

Also - I've been thinking the same sorts of things. Especially about the possible numbers making up the fandom community. It's hard not to when 200-300 people comment on a story.

I look at those numbers and wonder curiously whether each actual commenter stands for an indiscriminate number of anonymous readers, and from there it's an easy road to 'Mmmm...I wonder how many of us there actually are?"

[copracat]

What an interesting and intriguing post! I wonder no-one has yet argued with you that usenet was very centralised for fandom because of the nature of the alt hierarchy, where fandom gathered.

I suspect that there are hordes of people who remain with zines/con/letterzine/apa/mailing list/usenet fandom.

[noelleleithe.livejournal.com]

I think of LJ as the world's biggest crossover. Sure, there are boards like Haven and the Buffistas, and usenet, and other blog services, and mailing lists, and etc. But with some small exceptions (ie, Buffistas = Jossverse), those are segregated into individual fandoms. People may be members of more than one of those forums, and there may be personal life discussions galore, but each forum is automatically self-limiting, just by its nature.

LJ is one of the few places where EVERY fandom is represented -- TV shows, movies, books, comics, music, sports, you name it. I couldn't begin to list all the different fandoms just on my own flist, much less the literally hundreds I've seen represented on communities and friendsfriends. LJ is also designed specifically to allow conversation. I'm betting even if other service like MySpace have as many fandom-active people as LJ, they aren't as actively involved in conversations with each other.

LJ is a social network like others out there, but I'd say it's got a much more highly developed set of neural connections.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I don't think LJ is the biggest thing out there (but I don't know what is) but I know that of my forays into other means of gathering fans-- conventions, usenet, etc-- LJ has produced by far the most actual friendships. Even on a private bulletin board called dueling modems, which was the best before that, with most of the people there who I ended up meeting in person, it came about after and partly because they'd migrated to LJ.

Because I ended up getting closer to people who I knew before from usenet, conventions, DM, once they had moved to or were also on LJ, I conclude that LJ facilitates friendship formation better than the other forms.

[unwinding.livejournal.com]

ha ha you make me laugh and shake my head, you crazy cat. i love ya.

[sylvertongue.livejournal.com]

Hiya. Poking around in the aftermath of being blown away by The Pegasus Society, and wow, this is a seriously cool post about a seriously cool concept.

Would you mind if I friended you?

[wearemany.livejournal.com]

mmm, coveting thy neighbor's wife.

this is itemized

[projectjulie.livejournal.com]

i. I love you madly. and not just because you used the word "paramatized."

ii. you need to friend cyborganize, yo. because I just gave a whole lecture all about this which is phoneposted and annotated with links, and then tonight I just posted again about fandom politics. and it's going to be a fucking dissertation someday.

iii. I think it's inaccurate to celebrate LJ as "centralized" -- the incredible dynamism of LJ fandom is possible precisely because it's decentralized (perhaps even distributed -- for the moment I'm not going to quibble about network diagrams). boards and listservs have a robust capacity for centralization -- take ASCEML and its archive trekiverse.org, where one can find almost all the treksmut ever written. the genius of LJ is in its swarms and eddies, its friends and friendsfriends and multiple ways of connecting things up and splitting them apart (as you say, a virtual city). it's a tremendously flexible organizational system, and I'm interested in mapping out the specific technical characteristics that have encouraged this mass fannish migration. and the limitations and drawbacks (that lead some to stick with boards or listservs or blogs or archives) as well as the undeniably vast advantages.

iv. why oh why did it take me so long to move here? it's not like you didn't TELL me. it (the great fandom hiatus of '00-'04) is a mystery. a developmental process, because I suppose I had to be READY. I really couldn't overstate the impact that LJ has had on my life, and not just its fannish aspects.

v. I still have wetheaudience.org. I still don't know what to do with it. viva the nonspecific fannish revolution!

vi. I'm going to try to find you on IM. yes I am.