December daily meme: fandom infrastructure changes

jedusaur started me off with a great prompt: I will take December fourth, since otherwise your month will be five days late. Can you talk about your feelings on the evolution of fandom infrastructure over the years? I'm only 23 and I feel like a dinosaur when I try to figure out Tumblr fandom.

Still taking questions on the original meme post.

I love this question.

The other day, the kidlet was talking about the fact that one set of grandparents have iPhones and e-mail while the other set don't touch computers, and they said, "Eventually everybody earns the right to stop learning to do any more things." I don't like to think I'm that old as a fan, but I must say that Twitter passed me by completely, and Pinterest lost me by insisting that I sign in with Facebook (pfagh! as if I'm so dull that I'm willing only to be one person at a time!) and I'm totally not using Tumblr as it is used by those in the know.

I'm not the longest-term fan I know -- for instance, I was never involved in Usenet -- but I read my first slash stories in a paper zine, which I acquired by writing someone a paper check and mailing it to them.

When I started out, online fandom was focused on mailing lists, often with companion archives. This had a sort of public feel to me, and when fandom made the shift to LiveJournal and personal websites, it felt like a shift into something -- not more private, exactly, but ... less communal? Like, mailing lists and archives were like a grocery store produce department, where the divisions are: oranges over here, lettuce over there, kumquats over yonder. LiveJournal and personal sites were more like a farmer's market, where the divisions are more like: everything grown on Sue's Sunflower Farm here, everything grown at The Happy Sheep over there, everything grown at Cowgirl Acres over yonder.

When I first got a LJ, I was still sort of in a public-space mindset, and I remember feeling like if I was going to post and use up everybody's bandwidth, I'd better be thinking about what would be interesting to the public. That's thinking left over from mailing lists, where you'd literally edit your subject line so that it would say SEASON 4 EP 3, HEADING OFF TOPIC. Over time, my attitude evolved to, "Well, they're reading my journal, so if they don't want to hear what I dreamed last night or what cute thing my kid just said, too bad."

I am so not an early adopter, and I'm not really involved in Tumblr fandom (other than having like eight Sherlock-themed tumblrs bookmarked so that I can visit them every day). But it seems even less communal than LJ/DW to me; it's great for art and not awful for fiction, but definitely not set up for conversation!

Tumblr-style tags, on the other hand, I often find hilarious, and for some reason it makes it even funnier to me that people are taking tags -- created, with a lot of programming effort, for searchability -- and using them for "john grumbles but he loves it" and "but actually the murder is kind of fluffy" and "what can i tell you it was late and there were jello shots" and other things that are really, absolutely, definitely not for searching! It's somewhere between those Martha Stewart types who make wreaths out of straw hats and planters out of waterproof boots and Marcel Duchamp submitting a urinal to an art exhibition and titling it "Fountain."

edited 2020 to retroactively correct the kidlet's gender pronouns