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Privilege, entitlement and Teh Kidz
Sep. 10th, 2013 09:49 amI wasn't working much yesterday, between a cold and turning OLD, I spent much of the day on the sofa reading the current round of blood letting about how the world of lit fandom is going to die and thinking about what did and didn't trouble me about that and also about what should and shouldn't be done. So I wanted to break this into a few bits, some of which is flame bait, some isn't. I'll preface what comes by all the usual, why yes, I am a white, middle class, white male and I am quite aware that I have a lot of privilege.
Privilege: this, whatever you actually mean by it, gets bandied around a lot. While I'm fairly poor at the moment, mostly due to the trials of starting a new business (long story, those of you that know know, those of you that don't probably don't care...) I am in the position to raid my pension savings and keep my company going. It does mean that this year I can't do things like SF conventions. I am fully aware that being born in a moderately stable, white, middle-class household with a good income meant a lot for my education. Of course like any good slacker I wasted loads of the opportunities which explains why I've got a 3rd Class Honours degree from a polytechnic and not a better degree from somewhere else. I digress.
On the whole, as you get older, whatever your starting point, you get to do more things and have more. There's nothing magical about it, the last 4 years of economic horror aside. You just tend to reach a point where debt is under control, you are earning money and you have disposable income. That meant, in my case, once I reached my late 30s I could start going to more SF Conventions. Not many, but the odd one or two and yes, at Worldcons I often feel like I'm one of the youngest in the room. That's mostly bollocks really, I'm not usually. And we had to enforce serious ID and carding policies at the Loncon room parties in Chicago because of this.
I've written on this before and I still tend to reject this as much of a complaint because it tends to go hand in hand with my other thought.
Entitlement: There's a lot of moaning, mostly by people my age and older (Gen-X and late Boomers - which by a weird accident of parentage I count in both columns) about the Millennial Generation, that which turned 18 around the millennium and have always known the internet etc... There's been so much written about this, I can't be arsed to go over it all again, if only there was an interwebs based database that people could use to look things up eh?
Where this intersects with the Fandom discussions has been in a few of the suggestions I've seen about how to make Fandom 'better' and more 'relevant to Teh Kidz;'. One suggestion I've seen is that the Hugo Awards should be given to members of DragonCon to vote on. This is entitlement. The Hugos 'matter' because a group of people spent 60 years making them so and working on making them matter. You don't get to pick up something that is working and shiny because you want to have it. It's not privilege for the people running the Hugos to not want to have the thing they've worked on for decades to be given to people who want it. You want DragonCon to have awards? Off you go. The internet is over there, Call them the Dracos. Set up web nominations, web voting for attendees etc... have at it! You don't get to have something you like because it's there and you don't like how it works now. You can have it when all the people currently running the Hugos have retired or died. It's a bit like running companies and countries.
At the core of this seems to be a cognitive split. The complaints I've been reading are that Worldcon's aren't really being run with things that interest younger fans and that DragonCon, ComicCon and others do that better. At the core of this is organization. Commercial conventions that operate to entertain will spend a lot of time looking at where the market is.
So here's my analogy. Fandom is kinda like a family party with a DJ. The DJ operates off people on the dance floor. He plays modern stuff and people dance, he plays older stuff and fewer people dance. He starts to skew to playing stuff to keep the dance floor full. That's how he thinks he is measured and he is very, very good at judging what gets the kids up and staying on the dance floor. The thing is, the old farts, like me, also want some 80s crap because they've a bunch of school friends there and they want to pretend its 1986 again and they might have a hope in hell with Tracy Britton later in the evening. And their parents and grandparents are there and they want to pretend its 1950/40 and to have a good time and forget the fact that their hip is giving them hell and they're going to regret having that 4th drink in the morning. The thing here is that somebody is paying that DJ, and in these scenarios it's generally not the kids, it's the people who organized the party and to quote my wonderful wife 'if you don't start playing stuff I like and can dance to with my friends you're going to be driving home with your iPod shoved up your arse' and because we were paying, he started doing so.
The Worldcon is a family party. It covers a wide range of ages and tends to clump around the people in middle years who've got some money and are actually bank rolling it. There are fewer kids, more old people, but the DJ is taking requests and can be driven by weird and eclectic tastes. It's not a nightclub you go to because the DJ who ignores you gets to pick what will keep the dance floor moving. He's even going to play some of the really heavy thrash metal with the 10 minute drum solo that will piss everybody off. But that gives you a chance to sneak out and do something else.
Anyway, back to Teh Kidz and want can be done?
I reject the idea that the only options are to have a fixed location with essentially a nightclub DJ running things and making sure that there's a full dancefloor. Yes, old farts care about weird things like Heinlein (I read a piece yesterday where somebody in their 20s admitted to having to look him up) but forcing the old farts to sit at a side table at the back where they can get drunk and complain about the noise doesn't help.
So thoughts:
- Drop the fun names - call it the Worldcon - Loncon3? If you like it will you be looking for Loncon 4 next year? Better Worldcon 72 or LXXII - THAT'S IMPRESSIVE, that's serious, that's a thing that's been around since before people grandparents were born!
- More age relevant fun stuff to do. There was blood letting over an Eastercon deciding to have a disco! Yes, more stuff that matters. Hell, that doesn't even skew things to the 20 somethings....
- YA Track - I saw this and like it, although many of the suggested topics fit within the lit track, I think it's a good idea
- Panel parity - it may surprise people but I'm generally ok with this, give or take some variations. I think a YA track should skew young and yes I know it makes things a LOT harder to program but I think it's worth the pain. We have to be realistic and realize that we've had panels on subjects where we as a bunch of fans look as out of touch as the US Congress debating Birth Control
Final thought. I don't think Worldcon needs to be a 75,000 person mega-con to be relevant. Trying to make it one is the wrong reaction. Sure, make it more fun for people, play music they want to dance to, but that's a two way street. Old people are allowed to have fun too. Occasionally. We'll just pay for it for several days afterwards.
Privilege: this, whatever you actually mean by it, gets bandied around a lot. While I'm fairly poor at the moment, mostly due to the trials of starting a new business (long story, those of you that know know, those of you that don't probably don't care...) I am in the position to raid my pension savings and keep my company going. It does mean that this year I can't do things like SF conventions. I am fully aware that being born in a moderately stable, white, middle-class household with a good income meant a lot for my education. Of course like any good slacker I wasted loads of the opportunities which explains why I've got a 3rd Class Honours degree from a polytechnic and not a better degree from somewhere else. I digress.
On the whole, as you get older, whatever your starting point, you get to do more things and have more. There's nothing magical about it, the last 4 years of economic horror aside. You just tend to reach a point where debt is under control, you are earning money and you have disposable income. That meant, in my case, once I reached my late 30s I could start going to more SF Conventions. Not many, but the odd one or two and yes, at Worldcons I often feel like I'm one of the youngest in the room. That's mostly bollocks really, I'm not usually. And we had to enforce serious ID and carding policies at the Loncon room parties in Chicago because of this.
I've written on this before and I still tend to reject this as much of a complaint because it tends to go hand in hand with my other thought.
Entitlement: There's a lot of moaning, mostly by people my age and older (Gen-X and late Boomers - which by a weird accident of parentage I count in both columns) about the Millennial Generation, that which turned 18 around the millennium and have always known the internet etc... There's been so much written about this, I can't be arsed to go over it all again, if only there was an interwebs based database that people could use to look things up eh?
Where this intersects with the Fandom discussions has been in a few of the suggestions I've seen about how to make Fandom 'better' and more 'relevant to Teh Kidz;'. One suggestion I've seen is that the Hugo Awards should be given to members of DragonCon to vote on. This is entitlement. The Hugos 'matter' because a group of people spent 60 years making them so and working on making them matter. You don't get to pick up something that is working and shiny because you want to have it. It's not privilege for the people running the Hugos to not want to have the thing they've worked on for decades to be given to people who want it. You want DragonCon to have awards? Off you go. The internet is over there, Call them the Dracos. Set up web nominations, web voting for attendees etc... have at it! You don't get to have something you like because it's there and you don't like how it works now. You can have it when all the people currently running the Hugos have retired or died. It's a bit like running companies and countries.
At the core of this seems to be a cognitive split. The complaints I've been reading are that Worldcon's aren't really being run with things that interest younger fans and that DragonCon, ComicCon and others do that better. At the core of this is organization. Commercial conventions that operate to entertain will spend a lot of time looking at where the market is.
So here's my analogy. Fandom is kinda like a family party with a DJ. The DJ operates off people on the dance floor. He plays modern stuff and people dance, he plays older stuff and fewer people dance. He starts to skew to playing stuff to keep the dance floor full. That's how he thinks he is measured and he is very, very good at judging what gets the kids up and staying on the dance floor. The thing is, the old farts, like me, also want some 80s crap because they've a bunch of school friends there and they want to pretend its 1986 again and they might have a hope in hell with Tracy Britton later in the evening. And their parents and grandparents are there and they want to pretend its 1950/40 and to have a good time and forget the fact that their hip is giving them hell and they're going to regret having that 4th drink in the morning. The thing here is that somebody is paying that DJ, and in these scenarios it's generally not the kids, it's the people who organized the party and to quote my wonderful wife 'if you don't start playing stuff I like and can dance to with my friends you're going to be driving home with your iPod shoved up your arse' and because we were paying, he started doing so.
The Worldcon is a family party. It covers a wide range of ages and tends to clump around the people in middle years who've got some money and are actually bank rolling it. There are fewer kids, more old people, but the DJ is taking requests and can be driven by weird and eclectic tastes. It's not a nightclub you go to because the DJ who ignores you gets to pick what will keep the dance floor moving. He's even going to play some of the really heavy thrash metal with the 10 minute drum solo that will piss everybody off. But that gives you a chance to sneak out and do something else.
Anyway, back to Teh Kidz and want can be done?
I reject the idea that the only options are to have a fixed location with essentially a nightclub DJ running things and making sure that there's a full dancefloor. Yes, old farts care about weird things like Heinlein (I read a piece yesterday where somebody in their 20s admitted to having to look him up) but forcing the old farts to sit at a side table at the back where they can get drunk and complain about the noise doesn't help.
So thoughts:
- Drop the fun names - call it the Worldcon - Loncon3? If you like it will you be looking for Loncon 4 next year? Better Worldcon 72 or LXXII - THAT'S IMPRESSIVE, that's serious, that's a thing that's been around since before people grandparents were born!
- More age relevant fun stuff to do. There was blood letting over an Eastercon deciding to have a disco! Yes, more stuff that matters. Hell, that doesn't even skew things to the 20 somethings....
- YA Track - I saw this and like it, although many of the suggested topics fit within the lit track, I think it's a good idea
- Panel parity - it may surprise people but I'm generally ok with this, give or take some variations. I think a YA track should skew young and yes I know it makes things a LOT harder to program but I think it's worth the pain. We have to be realistic and realize that we've had panels on subjects where we as a bunch of fans look as out of touch as the US Congress debating Birth Control
Final thought. I don't think Worldcon needs to be a 75,000 person mega-con to be relevant. Trying to make it one is the wrong reaction. Sure, make it more fun for people, play music they want to dance to, but that's a two way street. Old people are allowed to have fun too. Occasionally. We'll just pay for it for several days afterwards.
