livejournals and mailing lists, take two

Okay, this is kind of weird thing to ask, but Minisinoo got me thinking in my earlier entry on the LJ/blog stuff.

Oh! Damn, before I wander any further, you have to read this.

Here lexluvsclark give us the Top Ten Reasons She Loves LJ. Totally rocks. ICONS! YES!

Okay, now to the boring stuff.

If this topic bores you to tears? Don't worry, I swear I'll stop jumping on the corpse of this horse really soon, as it's starting to make my shoes all gooey. You know. I'm all 'Oooh! Shiny!' girl.

Entire thread can be found here if you want to see how it developed.

minisinoo said:

Yes, I'm meandering. (g) But I wonder if the "birthplace" of various fandoms has to do with the strength of different avenues of communication within them? I can't really answer this much myself, being more of a "serial" fandom girl, but there might be others with more experience in a single fandom across a long period of time?

And I said:

I do think--and this is tentative, just from observation and discussion--that the time period a fandom began has a lot to do with its dominant form of communication. Smallville, for instance, exploded around the same time LJ use came into common usage, so the cause-and-effect there is kind of blurred. Part of it, definitely, was more SV fen moving into a convenient communication route, but a proportion of it seems to be from simple exposure--and I sometimes wonder if part of the spread of relentless multifandomness comes from that very LJ exposure, where your friends list isn't single-fandom, single pairing, selective, but often covers a variety of different people, different fandoms, etc.

Hmm. That could be an entry all in itself. The thing is, I'm not sure about the cause and effect, or which led to what? Were multifandom people more likely to go to LJ to get that easy variety that mailing lists couldnt' quite provide, or did the LJ community encourage more fen to try out other things?

And Min replied:

Now THAT would be a really interesting study, you know. :-) Have no idea how one would go about DOING it (or how anyone would have time ), but in terms of a sociological exploration ... yeah.

Oddly, a lot of this crystallized in chat for me Friday night with a variety of different fannish people all in the same chat room--chatting. Most of whom were either multifandom/multipairing/etc in either read/write or read-only. And the variety was surprising--most of us, if not all, were SV fans of some type, but proportionally, most of us weren't SV fans first and foremost. And it sort of made me wonder if there actually ARE boundaries anymore, or if the boundaries of fandom have become this incredibly flexible. Very cool, btw.

Honestly, I was thinking of polling LJ members just to get some simple results, but I have no idea how to even phrase the question for a proper poll. The gist is sort of twofold, but honestly, the input on the hows and whys is more important.

So. Here's my question.

Has LJ led you to be more multifandom/multipairing/more open in your writing and reading tastes? Or just your writing? Or just your reading? Or is it that multifandom/multipairing/more open people were already attracted to LJ for that very multifandom vibe? Chicken or the egg, chicken or the egg, lalala.

And if you're not an LJ user but a lurker? Leap right in on this one. I think the variety of answers between LJ and non-LJ users would be interesting to see.

Delurk, in other words. As thdancingferret** put it, motivation, not force. *grins*

**edited to fix the username for thdancingferret, because I kept putting in the 'e' and for the life of me, could not figure out why it wouldn't work! *sighs*

Comments

Chiming in (g)

[minisinoo.livejournal.com]

Has LJ led you to be more multifandom/multipairing/more open in your writing and reading tastes? Or just your writing? Or just your reading? Or is it that multifandom/multipairing/more open people were already attracted to LJ for that very multifandom vibe? Chicken or the egg, chicken or the egg, lalala.

Okay, I think I'm a "serial monogamist" when it comes to fandoms. I tend to be HIGHLY interested in one, and then dabble in others. I used to be fixated on X-Files, and dabbled in reading Forever Knight and Homicide. Then I moved to X-Men (where I still am), but I dabble (or have dabbled) in reading Lois & Clark, Smallville, Pros, various other comic -verses and still (occasionally) X-Files.

The one use LJ has been is with recommendations. I know I picked up a lot of SV recs from you, Jenn, and others. I will say that meeting Bren K and Jennie in Pros caused me to read some of that, even though it's a show I've never seen!

I think, though, that what influences me more in "crossing" to dabble in a second fandom is the AUTHOR. I'll follow an author and then maybe read some recommendations by that author. Or, if I *leave* a fandom (as X-Files) I'll still read stories by certain favorite authors there ... although I check for new stuff MUCH more rarely (and alas, in X-Files, I think about EVERYone I used to read has now moved on).

With LJ, I'm more interested in meta discussion or (my) fandom specific discussion. (I need to figure out how to do filters, but that's a different topic.) I find that I read journals *regularly* based on how well I personally know someone, or if they're posting about my fandom in particular. But there are a lot *more* journals that I skim at least once a week, looking for interesting general discussions. And I'm sure I'm not the only one who does that. :-)

But for me, I'm not sure I'd say that LJ has directly affected what other-fandom fanfic I read that much. What it HAS done is allow me to get to know a variety of interesting people in other fandoms who I wouldn't otherwise have met, and that *may* lead to me reading their fic (though not necessarily). But I've only been on LJ about 7 months, so I might have a better answer to that in a year. I will say that I used to get most of my other-fandom recs via email conversations, and *that*, at least, has changed.

Well, that was pretty meandering. LOL!