My introduction to fandom was on the HP4GU board - which didn't feel very interactive because there was so much traffic that posts tended to get lost in it all - and then on the Fiction Alley message boards. I started here in 2004, and really missed the writing discussions on FA, and also that everyone (everyone on FA, that is, but that was a fair range of folk) was in the same place. I found so many interesting fics through people's signatures, whereas the LJ fandom felt much more fragmented into ships and genre interests. But I did like the way people could post on LJ about RL and could get to know each other in a more rounded way.
It's inevitable that things would get quieter in HP-land after canon closed. I think a lot of the excitement stemmed from speculation about what would happen next - many of the questions about motivation, for example, have been answered by JKR. I feel fandoms are colliding more than they were; it's just different fandoms - Sherlock, Hunger Games, Merlin... Buffy was a scarily long time ago now.
I agree with your point about middle-aged fans not changing so much. A lot of people who were around ten years ago were in their teens and early 20s - some have stuck around and for others that was just something they were into at that stage of their lives. Those of us whose life patterns were more settled have less impetus to move on.
Another difference is that the younger generation seem less guarded about privacy issues - for me, linking twitter, FB, LJ flickr etc is a bug, not a feature. But back then writing slash, let alone porn, was viewed askance by many people so perhaps there was more to hide.
I think the newer platforms aren't designed so well for interactivity - perhaps fairer to say that they're not designed for the same form of interactive activities as we have here. I find Facebook incredibly frustrating in that regard but I think I'll have to bite the bullet and get to grips with it one of these days! And too, there seems to be a growing trend of fandoms for fanworks (Starkid and the like), which divides fans more into producers and consumers than in a community when it felt like we were all writers. Perhaps really what's happened is that the new forms of social media have enabled more people to get access and have their say, even if that say is 'just' commenting on others' creativity. Access to internet was less widespread in 2004 so perhaps the online fandom then was drawing from a different pool of people?
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2012-09-24 10:34 pm (UTC)It's inevitable that things would get quieter in HP-land after canon closed. I think a lot of the excitement stemmed from speculation about what would happen next - many of the questions about motivation, for example, have been answered by JKR. I feel fandoms are colliding more than they were; it's just different fandoms - Sherlock, Hunger Games, Merlin... Buffy was a scarily long time ago now.
I agree with your point about middle-aged fans not changing so much. A lot of people who were around ten years ago were in their teens and early 20s - some have stuck around and for others that was just something they were into at that stage of their lives. Those of us whose life patterns were more settled have less impetus to move on.
Another difference is that the younger generation seem less guarded about privacy issues - for me, linking twitter, FB, LJ flickr etc is a bug, not a feature. But back then writing slash, let alone porn, was viewed askance by many people so perhaps there was more to hide.
I think the newer platforms aren't designed so well for interactivity - perhaps fairer to say that they're not designed for the same form of interactive activities as we have here. I find Facebook incredibly frustrating in that regard but I think I'll have to bite the bullet and get to grips with it one of these days! And too, there seems to be a growing trend of fandoms for fanworks (Starkid and the like), which divides fans more into producers and consumers than in a community when it felt like we were all writers. Perhaps really what's happened is that the new forms of social media have enabled more people to get access and have their say, even if that say is 'just' commenting on others' creativity. Access to internet was less widespread in 2004 so perhaps the online fandom then was drawing from a different pool of people?