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A Sense of Community...
I should be filing in a design brief for a supplier of Infographics, except it's early and I need more coffee before I do that so I thought I'd follow up from something we were discussing at the Seattle Tun meeting. For those that don't know, the meeting is based on the first Thursday meetings the London SF community have, except it's on the second Sunday...
I came into SF fannish things at University, while there were a small number of us that played AD&D at school, several weren't all that into SF, at least not like I was. Getting to University, with a large and active SF Society was a revelation for me, not to mention that the local 'public' SF group was large, well organized and amazingly well connected. I think Iain Banks and Terry Pratchett (while still at the AEB) were the first people I saw at the Preston SF Group in 1987... I didn't actually get to a convention until 1994, an Eastercon, in Liverpool. But some of the people I met that first week at Lancs Poly in September 1987, or the PSFG in November, or even the Adelphi Hotel 1994 are still friends and we still are in contact.
When I ended up living in London dealing with the aftermath of a divorce which left me pretty damn close to bankrupt, I was able to joke that at least I got Fandom in the divorce. And London Fandom, through people I knew from conventions and got to know, involves people and friendships still strong after 15 years, even living 5000 miles away.
In the 1990s with the interwebs, I came across newsgroups and internet discussion boards and met a whole new layer of people. Some of whom are now personal friends, some of whom are still arms length trollbait (yes, Jordan, I am looking at you)...
So I've been lucky with fandom. Privileged, which I think works in this context, to have come into convention fandom via close and well connected friends, and lucky to have met some fantastic people. This has been pure luck, and I can certainly agree that going to a convention or fan meeting the first time, face-to-face can be fairly daunting, but also rewarding.
The topic on Sunday was about Community and if the people newly entering Fanish things through Blogs and the like were lacking the sense of community that something like Newsgroups gave you and if what fandom is lacking is a place where, on the whole, everybody will be. And I think this is probably what's driving some of the generational issues I'm seeing. It's almost as if there's genuine surprise that people who have come to self identify as fans are shocked to find that there are other people out there who've been doing this a long time and actually know different groups of people. I don't think it's really an issue of online fandom meeting convention fandom for the first time... I think it's different groups of fans meeting for the first time in different online contexts without having had a standard meeting place.
It was Newsgroups, it was Livejournal... Blogs don't seem to have that mechanism for community where everybody will easily pass through and chat. There's probably a new community tool needing to be built, and not just for fandom.
Facebook is actually lousy for this. Google+? Not sure. Twitter is frankly crap for it and the need for different Twitter IDs for different things is a challenge for many people if you keep personal and professional separate.
I don't have an answer to this problem. It just seems that for all the talk of the online world being public and connected, it's actually quite lonely and spread out in a way that fandom didn't used to be.
I came into SF fannish things at University, while there were a small number of us that played AD&D at school, several weren't all that into SF, at least not like I was. Getting to University, with a large and active SF Society was a revelation for me, not to mention that the local 'public' SF group was large, well organized and amazingly well connected. I think Iain Banks and Terry Pratchett (while still at the AEB) were the first people I saw at the Preston SF Group in 1987... I didn't actually get to a convention until 1994, an Eastercon, in Liverpool. But some of the people I met that first week at Lancs Poly in September 1987, or the PSFG in November, or even the Adelphi Hotel 1994 are still friends and we still are in contact.
When I ended up living in London dealing with the aftermath of a divorce which left me pretty damn close to bankrupt, I was able to joke that at least I got Fandom in the divorce. And London Fandom, through people I knew from conventions and got to know, involves people and friendships still strong after 15 years, even living 5000 miles away.
In the 1990s with the interwebs, I came across newsgroups and internet discussion boards and met a whole new layer of people. Some of whom are now personal friends, some of whom are still arms length trollbait (yes, Jordan, I am looking at you)...
So I've been lucky with fandom. Privileged, which I think works in this context, to have come into convention fandom via close and well connected friends, and lucky to have met some fantastic people. This has been pure luck, and I can certainly agree that going to a convention or fan meeting the first time, face-to-face can be fairly daunting, but also rewarding.
The topic on Sunday was about Community and if the people newly entering Fanish things through Blogs and the like were lacking the sense of community that something like Newsgroups gave you and if what fandom is lacking is a place where, on the whole, everybody will be. And I think this is probably what's driving some of the generational issues I'm seeing. It's almost as if there's genuine surprise that people who have come to self identify as fans are shocked to find that there are other people out there who've been doing this a long time and actually know different groups of people. I don't think it's really an issue of online fandom meeting convention fandom for the first time... I think it's different groups of fans meeting for the first time in different online contexts without having had a standard meeting place.
It was Newsgroups, it was Livejournal... Blogs don't seem to have that mechanism for community where everybody will easily pass through and chat. There's probably a new community tool needing to be built, and not just for fandom.
Facebook is actually lousy for this. Google+? Not sure. Twitter is frankly crap for it and the need for different Twitter IDs for different things is a challenge for many people if you keep personal and professional separate.
I don't have an answer to this problem. It just seems that for all the talk of the online world being public and connected, it's actually quite lonely and spread out in a way that fandom didn't used to be.
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I think it creates a false sense of community and prominence.
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I noticed in Vox Day's blow up at John Scalzi that he (Beale) was placing a lot of value in his Unique Visitor number being, in his opinion, larger than John Scalzi's and therefore concluding that he was more popular, widely read and influential, whereas I think, based on empirical evidence - press coverage, book sales, recognition by peer group etc... - the opposite is demonstrably true.
The reality is, as you say, the sense of community is highly over estimated.
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