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

[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.