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

[seperis.livejournal.com]

I think I got accustomed to reading outside 'my' fandoms when I became a badfic tragic. We had threads at MBTV and Meta devoted to the stuff, and I'd go trawling some extremely weird-seeming categories at ff.net for the worst things I could find. Blue's Clues rapefic? Bible slash? Snape!regression? NASCAR RPS (I have big problems with that, sorry)? Anne Frank fic? Been there, scrubbed my brain out with the Wire Brush Of Doom.

I'm still recovering from the concept of Pac-Man and Minesweeper fic. Seriously. *shakes head* ff.net is WEIRD.

I may not know much about a particular fandom, but good writing is still good writing. I'm OK with missing some of the intricacies of the author's interaction with canon/fanon elements if the piece has some sort of inherent narratological integrity, which most of the good stuff in any fandom (or genre) does.

*nod* Yes and yes. I've read authors write in fandoms I didn't know existed, know nothing about, just for their ability to tell a story. Completely with you there.

*grins*

Thanks for commenting!