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.
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Date: 2005-11-28 06:59 am (UTC)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.