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gullwhackerOr: Talking about fandom without talking about fandom.
So. I had a good chat with my grandfather today - nearly a century old and still going strong. He talked a bit about his memoirs, visits others have taken to places he's been, and generally what's changed over the past however many decades.
Naturally, I didn't have quite as much insight - but I was able to give some opinion on what I have seen change in my lifetime. And a big part of that, in all honesty, was how social interactions on the internet have shifted over time - etiquette and organization and where we are now.
The role of these media in fandom was ever in the back of my mind, but that's not how I presented it...
Caveat: While I have an order here, I haven't checked citations. Further reflection puts some bits more concurrent, and there's no strict cutoffs for any eras.
Early Days
I come from the Net...through systems, peoples, and cities...to this place: alt.tv.reboot.
Usenet is where I got my real start on the internet, and the first fandom space I remember peeking at was the discussion group for ReBoot. This worked similarly enough to mailing lists that I'm comfortable conflating the two for purposes of discussion.
In some respects, this was the original deluge - held back only by the relatively slow adoption of the Internet as a whole. You signed up for a particular list or watched a particular subgroup, and you could post messages to the group. There was no formal threading of messages in those days; while you could post a reply to another message, the header or contents of the reply were the only link. Anything you were responding to, you were expected to include in-line almost like a citation - but transfer speeds encouraged brevity, and long messages were dissuaded. A bit of a hindrance for novellas.
The advantage and disadvantage was that you basically had to find a community - but once you had, you got full participation in that group. No Big-Name-Posters, no feed prioritisation - if you joined a mailing list for Survey Engineers, you would just get all the survey engineering discussions.
Popular in early days of email, the sheer scale of the Net these days has hindered their popularity - as some groups could get very noisy very quickly. Yahoo Groups was a decent successor until they closed down a few years back, and mailing lists haven't really gone away - but they're much less popular.
Unless, of course, you count IRC or Discord as the micro-post successor to a mailing list. Which is a way to look at it.
Caught in the Web
Some of these ideas are older - I think rudimentary forms existed in BBS form, back when your modem could connect to a particular system instead of to The Internet - but I mostly think of them arising as the World Wide Web became popular.
So. Modems got better. Transfer speeds got better. And websites were the new thing. This is where forums started taking off as the 'social space' in my memory. Still largely delineated by subject matter, though some of them could get very broad - and often containing subforums for more specific topics.
The forums worked similarly to mailing lists - but instead of receiving updates as they were posted (or at set intervals, if you received digests), you had to go to the website to see what was new. Users could post in whatever board suited their fancy, but it was a little more organized - and, as a novel feature, replies were contained to a particular thread.
This meant that an argument spiraling out of control didn't drown out other discussions - people could continue shouting in that one space, while other threads could stick to their subjects.
However, a webspace generally had one or more moderators - the server was run by someone in particular, and they had the power to kick people out more decisively than mailing-list moderation (as I remember it).
But generally the difference was in being able to attach your replies to the topic at hand.
Blogs on blogs
What's better than finding a website to participate in? Making your own website and having people come to you.
As hosting became cheaper - and with the rise of sites like Wordpress - it became increasingly possible to homestead instead of joining a community. No need to find the community interested in your particular opinions on the use of gelatin in baking, when you can make your own blog and make posts on the subject.
In spite of writing this extended rant on Dreamwidth - which is literally a piece of this era - I find this method to have declined somewhat. It's not gone - still alive and well in several forms - but handling comment moderation is a tough job and not so many people want to go to the trouble of running their own space.
Besides which - it's harder to feel like part of a community. Quite a few blogging systems - this one included - supported commenting, but those comments are inherently secondary to the main post - making the blog's author feel more important than their followers. In extreme cases, you wind up getting the Big Names - celebrities of whatever field or fandom - and being part of their space is a different feeling from being part of a collective space.
(Aside: A well-run Dreamwidth community falls more into the 'forum' category than this, to be honest - this section is focused on those individual blogs. And Tumblr is...weird in this regard.)
The Deluge
Modern social media. Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Tumblr dashboards.
In a way, this has looped back to mailing lists all over again, with only one critical difference. The modern internet social space is an endless feed of posts, every update going out to whoever is subscribed to it. The threading is better in some cases - Twitter supporting direct replies, Facebook having comments on updates, Tumblr being whatever it is - but the principle is still more like the mailing list than its successors. There's just a pool of posts, and there's no space to carve out a specific discussion.
There's just a key social difference. On modern social media, you don't subscribe to a subject, a group, a community. You subscribe to particular people.
Or put another way: You're not hearing from the entire community of survey engineers, you're hearing from whichever ones you chose to pay attention to...which might well be the ones who happen to agree with you.
Echo chambers are nothing new, but modern social media seems to combine the worst aspects of blogging and mailing lists. Big names who have devoted followers, and a storm of messages amplifying whatever idea has taken hold - to say nothing of machine-learning Algorithms that quietly prioritize one message over another. The more I think on it, the more this style worries me.
...and that's the history I can comment on. Usenet and mailing lists, bulletin boards and forums, the Livejournal and Tumblr and Dreamwidth eras, and the steady slide into the darkness of modern Twitter.
None of these eras are dead. I could honestly argue that Discord and IRC and Slack all fall into the 'mailing list' category, in the sense that you subscribe to thelist server and apart from some channels all the discussions go on at once. Forums are alive and well, though I mostly notice a few big ones rather than a host of little ones. And blogs continue to persist.
But it's kind of interesting to look back and see how expectations - and how 'polite etiquette' - has evolved with the media on which we are social.
So. Those are my thoughts on the matter. Commentary welcome.
So. I had a good chat with my grandfather today - nearly a century old and still going strong. He talked a bit about his memoirs, visits others have taken to places he's been, and generally what's changed over the past however many decades.
Naturally, I didn't have quite as much insight - but I was able to give some opinion on what I have seen change in my lifetime. And a big part of that, in all honesty, was how social interactions on the internet have shifted over time - etiquette and organization and where we are now.
Caveat: While I have an order here, I haven't checked citations. Further reflection puts some bits more concurrent, and there's no strict cutoffs for any eras.
Early Days
I come from the Net...through systems, peoples, and cities...to this place: alt.tv.reboot.
Usenet is where I got my real start on the internet, and the first fandom space I remember peeking at was the discussion group for ReBoot. This worked similarly enough to mailing lists that I'm comfortable conflating the two for purposes of discussion.
In some respects, this was the original deluge - held back only by the relatively slow adoption of the Internet as a whole. You signed up for a particular list or watched a particular subgroup, and you could post messages to the group. There was no formal threading of messages in those days; while you could post a reply to another message, the header or contents of the reply were the only link. Anything you were responding to, you were expected to include in-line almost like a citation - but transfer speeds encouraged brevity, and long messages were dissuaded. A bit of a hindrance for novellas.
The advantage and disadvantage was that you basically had to find a community - but once you had, you got full participation in that group. No Big-Name-Posters, no feed prioritisation - if you joined a mailing list for Survey Engineers, you would just get all the survey engineering discussions.
Popular in early days of email, the sheer scale of the Net these days has hindered their popularity - as some groups could get very noisy very quickly. Yahoo Groups was a decent successor until they closed down a few years back, and mailing lists haven't really gone away - but they're much less popular.
Unless, of course, you count IRC or Discord as the micro-post successor to a mailing list. Which is a way to look at it.
Caught in the Web
Some of these ideas are older - I think rudimentary forms existed in BBS form, back when your modem could connect to a particular system instead of to The Internet - but I mostly think of them arising as the World Wide Web became popular.
So. Modems got better. Transfer speeds got better. And websites were the new thing. This is where forums started taking off as the 'social space' in my memory. Still largely delineated by subject matter, though some of them could get very broad - and often containing subforums for more specific topics.
The forums worked similarly to mailing lists - but instead of receiving updates as they were posted (or at set intervals, if you received digests), you had to go to the website to see what was new. Users could post in whatever board suited their fancy, but it was a little more organized - and, as a novel feature, replies were contained to a particular thread.
This meant that an argument spiraling out of control didn't drown out other discussions - people could continue shouting in that one space, while other threads could stick to their subjects.
However, a webspace generally had one or more moderators - the server was run by someone in particular, and they had the power to kick people out more decisively than mailing-list moderation (as I remember it).
But generally the difference was in being able to attach your replies to the topic at hand.
Blogs on blogs
What's better than finding a website to participate in? Making your own website and having people come to you.
As hosting became cheaper - and with the rise of sites like Wordpress - it became increasingly possible to homestead instead of joining a community. No need to find the community interested in your particular opinions on the use of gelatin in baking, when you can make your own blog and make posts on the subject.
In spite of writing this extended rant on Dreamwidth - which is literally a piece of this era - I find this method to have declined somewhat. It's not gone - still alive and well in several forms - but handling comment moderation is a tough job and not so many people want to go to the trouble of running their own space.
Besides which - it's harder to feel like part of a community. Quite a few blogging systems - this one included - supported commenting, but those comments are inherently secondary to the main post - making the blog's author feel more important than their followers. In extreme cases, you wind up getting the Big Names - celebrities of whatever field or fandom - and being part of their space is a different feeling from being part of a collective space.
(Aside: A well-run Dreamwidth community falls more into the 'forum' category than this, to be honest - this section is focused on those individual blogs. And Tumblr is...weird in this regard.)
The Deluge
Modern social media. Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Tumblr dashboards.
In a way, this has looped back to mailing lists all over again, with only one critical difference. The modern internet social space is an endless feed of posts, every update going out to whoever is subscribed to it. The threading is better in some cases - Twitter supporting direct replies, Facebook having comments on updates, Tumblr being whatever it is - but the principle is still more like the mailing list than its successors. There's just a pool of posts, and there's no space to carve out a specific discussion.
There's just a key social difference. On modern social media, you don't subscribe to a subject, a group, a community. You subscribe to particular people.
Or put another way: You're not hearing from the entire community of survey engineers, you're hearing from whichever ones you chose to pay attention to...which might well be the ones who happen to agree with you.
Echo chambers are nothing new, but modern social media seems to combine the worst aspects of blogging and mailing lists. Big names who have devoted followers, and a storm of messages amplifying whatever idea has taken hold - to say nothing of machine-learning Algorithms that quietly prioritize one message over another. The more I think on it, the more this style worries me.
...and that's the history I can comment on. Usenet and mailing lists, bulletin boards and forums, the Livejournal and Tumblr and Dreamwidth eras, and the steady slide into the darkness of modern Twitter.
None of these eras are dead. I could honestly argue that Discord and IRC and Slack all fall into the 'mailing list' category, in the sense that you subscribe to the
But it's kind of interesting to look back and see how expectations - and how 'polite etiquette' - has evolved with the media on which we are social.
So. Those are my thoughts on the matter. Commentary welcome.
