I don't see how you draw that conclusion.

The site you linked notes that the gulf between skeptical, non worshipping fans who will bolt from a room if Shatner sings, and those who will try to get close enough to be spit on.

He doesn't argue that all fandom is celebrity worship, merely that that potion of it which is (and there IS a portion of Fandom that consists of mere celebrity worship), is excessive, cruel to artists, and generally not something that should be encouraged.

I can't see how it's possible to disagree with a point like that really.

I don't even know where to begin answering that, except to remark that the "fandom" I've spent nearly thirty years hanging around wouldn't have gathered in a crowd to listen to William sodding Shatner in the first place. Whether or not he threatens to sing.

The point isn't that TV is bad or that there's anything discreditable about being obsessively interested in a TV show. The point is that the "fandom" I care about, the one that traces its descent back to the the 1930s and before, is about conversation, not devotion.

"He doesn't argue that all fandom is celebrity worship, merely that that potion of it which is (and there IS a portion of Fandom that consists of mere celebrity worship), is excessive, cruel to artists, and generally not something that should be encouraged."

No, you're wrong. His basic model of what "fandom" is about is a species of anorakism:

"I think fandom and celebrity worship are really fun, enjoyable, culturally productive and often creative activities when they92re confined to message boards, fan societies, fan fiction, encyclopedic mastery of the entire opus of a particular actor or writer or genre. Somehow when they translate into a tangible material connection to the everyday lives of the performers themselves rather than the text of the performance, it92s a different story."

In other words, all very well and good fun in a geeky way, but nothing to do with real life and moreover probably quite creepy if it happens to get into the face of real grownup artists and such.

I can't even begin to articulate the extent to which this is orthogonal to my entire life. But I do acknowledge that this is the growing model of what "fandom" is and has been all along. Thus the headline on this post. What we have known and been is gone, because it's too hard to fight the tide.

This is where I wish Teresa’s use of “fandom” as a countable noun would spread more widely.

I think one of the things that makes it so tiring and annoying to refute this kind of thing is the way that the things he's talking about -- the obsessions, the fanfic, the worship of actors, are there in fandom, even our fandom, around the edges. So it isn't a denial, it's a redefinition.

It would be possible for him to point to people and things that support his view at the cons we go to -- not many of them, but some. (Worship? The kid too awestruck to speak to Terry Pratchett, though he'd brought a bag of all his books a hundred miles on public transport; the way everyone mentioned that some actors from some film turned up at last year's Hugos; me trembling and tonguetied before Samuel Delany.) The distinction that's really clear to us about where the important thing is vanishes -- it's like the Spock ears that always get in the paper, because if you look at me and six other ordinary people passionately discussing books at breakfast there isn't anything to photograph.

Conversation is invisible.

I recognise the kind of fandom he's describing, it just isn't a fandom I want to hang out in. The fandom I'm most at home in, slash fandom, which sits comfortably somewhere in the time-space interface where media fandom and science-fiction fandom meld into each other - gets vilified often enough by other fans that an article like this, which acknowledges that there are many perfectly good ways to be a fan (just not this one, which I happen to agree with) strikes me as fairly mild and reasonable.

When you hang out in several fandoms, a comfortable part of each one, the really annoying thing to stumble across isn't the myths that some fans believe about other fans, but that some fans believe that only their fandom is true fandom: everything else is clutter round the edges.

I, for one, would probably not go out of my way to see William Shatner, but I would want to hear him "sing" (quotes definitely deserved). Anyone who considers himself a connoisseur of bad music and "personality" records (as I do, of course) should appreciate Shatner. And for sheer hamminess, it's hard to beat his record of Hamlet's soliloquy (with background music).
Now if Leonard Nimoy was singing...I'd definitely travel to hear a live version of "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins" or "Highly Illogical"...though I'm sure he'd never deign to grace us with one...

Here's the closing sentence, again: "Somehow when they [fans] translate into a tangible material connection to the everyday lives of the performers themselves rather than the text of the performance, it?s a different story."

There are two things implied by that sentence that don't apply to fandom as I know it. The first is the separation of celebrity from audience. I'm sure we're all sick of that lecture, so I won't go there. The short form is: even if you are over-awed by Chip Delany, Chip is not there to be over-awing, but to hang out and meet people like you. The second implication is that the work itself, the books or whatever, isn't really very important. The "text" must remain boxed up, and is most certainly not a link between the audience and the performer, and by extension, not a legitimate link between the audience and their understanding of the world. It's all trivial.

The model that he describes also has each fan being, in an important sense, alone. The interest that a celebrity generates causes agglomerations of people, but not cooperative communities, nor long-term friendships partially based on shared passions.

The frustrating thing is that all of this is in implication, and so it's easy for someone to insist that I've misread him. I don't believe that I have. It's easy to get distracted by some silly argument about whether slash fandom is really fandom, or if media fans can also be trufans. Bah! This isn't a religious debate about the text. The differences are in how we relate to the text, and what roles it plays in our lives and the relationships we have with other people, including the ones who create the damn texts.

Patrick writes: "I can't even begin to articulate the extent to which this is orthogonal to my entire life. But I do acknowledge that this is the growing model of what 'fandom' is and has been all along. Thus the headline on this post. What we have known and been is gone, because it's too hard to fight the tide."

Ah. We've seen this before.

"Hacker."

Lydia: "The second implication is that the work itself, the books or whatever, isn't really very important. The "text" must remain boxed up, and is most certainly not a link between the audience and the performer, and by extension, not a legitimate link between the audience and their understanding of the world. It's all trivial."

I'm trying to figure out how you reconcile that with the sentence right before the one you quoted, the one that says "I think fandom and celebrity worship are really fun, enjoyable, culturally productive and often creative activities when they92re confined to message boards, fan societies, fan fiction, encyclopedic mastery of the entire opus of a particular actor or writer or genre." He's talking very specifically about using the text as a link between the audience and their understanding of the world.

Bill Higgins: he shoots, he scores!

My post makes a distinction overly crudely, yes, and a hackneyed one at that. It's rather like the people who spend time distinguishing between erotica and pornography in order to validate their masturbatory practices and consign someone else's to the outer darkness.

But in fact, this is exactly what my little essay is about, really: getting squicked by people whose operational practice of being fans is radically different than my own. Squicking being a slightly irrational, vaguely indefensible sense of disgust when you see something similar to your own way of being but just so slightly different. Furries doing cybersex squick me, but cybersex per se doesn't. I can't quite clearly articulate the difference, but there is a difference to me, and it doesn't quite seem like a "you say tomat-oh, I say tom-ateo" thing.

Here the distinction I'm trying to put my finger on is maybe not really about fandom at all, but about how or when we recognize the humanity of cultural production. Honestly, yes, I do relate to texts differently than I relate to the person I'm having lunch with. Texts are, in some very important sense, things. Things have identities, characters, a persistent nature; I relate to things, not merely use them. But a human being is something else, at least when they're here and in my presence and worthy of the same ordinary respect I accord anyone else.

I am a fan, of a number of things. A devotee. Even an obsessional--which is not the same thing as being a fan. Some things, my fannishness is about a canonical command of the totality of a particular cultural form, text or practice. Some things, it's about collecting--my home bookcases are festooned with action figures. Some things, it's even about creating sustained fictions and ancillary cultural productions of the kinds Henry Jenkins talks about, stuff that I know looks like bizarre effluvia to anyone else. I've written narratives of the adventures of my computer game characters and posted them to message boards. That surely qualifies me as a card-carrying member of the Klingon forehead-wearing Klub.

It's just that fan identification is for some people a passport to the kind of narcissism that licenses them to ignore the humanity of the objects of their devotion. It's one of the roads, and by means not the only or even most important one, to celebrity worship. And celebrity worship, when it brings someone into the presence of the object of their devotion, is at the least kind of sad, and at the worst, grotesque. In that respect, yes, I'd like to throw down the temple and smash the graven idols.

But I'm still a fan, and like most of you, because in my heart of hearts, I think I'm a slan, you know?

I'd add that it seems to me that Patrick's sense of fandom seems largely synonymous with what I'd call "criticism": a body of interested readers and writers knowledgably discussing, criticizing and interpreting a particular cultural form, text or genre. Where he got the idea that I was slagging off on that, I don't know, but either I made some big boo-boos in my little piece or he made some big boo-boos in reading it.

Or both.

That's all really interesting. Thanks.

"I'd add that it seems to me that Patrick's sense of fandom seems largely synonymous with what I'd call 'criticism': a body of interested readers and writers knowledgably discussing, criticizing and interpreting a particular cultural form, text or genre."

That's just the point. Fandom isn't about worshipping celebrities and it isn't "largely synonymous with" what you call "criticism" either. It's a bohemian network of affinity groups, some of which are "about" these or other things to a greater or lesser extent--and a great number of which are about themselves.

In a very real sense, the kind of long-term "science fiction fandom" I've been involved with for decades is a loose international network of people all of whom were devoted to written science fiction at some point in their lives. Some of whom still are. And many of whom aren't. Admirable though the critical enterprise is, it's not the central ceremony.

Oh, I'd agree with that too, and it is another problem with my original piece, to some extent: many fandoms, whether the kind you're describing, or the kind I'm squicked by, intermingle and intertwine with the texts, performances and practices to which they are devoted, often to the point where you can't really tell the difference any longer. That's another of Henry Jenkins' points in his work Textual Poachers, that the culture industry and fandoms are often very productively connected to each other.

Science fiction is an especially good example of that: the fecundity of fandoms (both the Klingon costume stalking-James-Doohan wearing your Starfleet uniform to a jury selection process kind, and the "bohemian network of affinity groups" kind, clearly has had an enormous, mostly positive, effect on science fiction. Sometimes it also constricts the possibilities of the genre, perhaps, by creating market-reinforced rules, but mostly not.

In the end, my point is pretty simple: anything that keeps you from recognizing that Greg from the Wiggles is trying to load his luggage on the tour bus or have a quiet lunch, or recognizing that the author whose work you love appreciates that you've bought his book but doesn't really want to know you personally because he's just that way, is a bad thing. Stephen King said it best in Misery, I guess: it's not like the fan there is typical or normal; fannishness is only the alibi for her descent into madness.

"But I'm still a fan, and like most of you, because in my heart of hearts, I think I'm a slan, you know?"

Uh, really?

Please forgive me if I run away if you offer to show me your tendrils.

http://www.brunching.com/images/geekchartbig.gif

Now that's a work of beauty, that chart.

Speaking as someone publicly known to be empowered to convey the holy grail of prodom onto aspiring authors, I can assure you that I'm in sympathy with the observation that "anything that keeps you from recognizing that Greg from the Wiggles is trying to load his luggage on the tour bus or have a quiet lunch, or recognizing that the author whose work you love appreciates that you've bought his book but doesn't really want to know you personally because he's just that way, is a bad thing." It's not precisely the same burden, but imagination is a muscle that improves with exercise.

Elsewhere, in a post headed "Circle the Wagons," Glen Engel-Cox claims that I'm "upset that someone wants to talk about fandom who isn't one of us."

This is a well-contrived slur, since any effort by me to say, no, actually, I wasn't beating my wife in the first place, can be adduced as evidence of the model in which "wagons" are being "circled." As opposed to the model in which Glen Engel-Cox is, casually and not very thoughtfully, attributing a bad motive to me on basically no evidence, along with claiming that I'm making moral distinctions between "SF fandom" and "media fandom" which I avowedly did not and do not make. Was I "upset" at Tim Burke? No, but I did use his post as an occasion to try to prod at a certain feeling of subcultural dissonance that I know I'm not the only one to feel. (See Jo Walton's post above; also Bill Higgins's.) Am I actually upset (no scare quotes) at Cox? Yes, I think so. Being lied about does that.

I think this is an unfortunate passage:

I think fandom and celebrity worship are really fun, enjoyable, culturally productive and often creative activities when they92re confined to message boards, fan societies, fan fiction, encyclopedic mastery of the entire opus of a particular actor or writer or genre. Somehow when they translate into a tangible material connection to the everyday lives of the performers themselves rather than the text of the performance, it92s a different story.

I think perhaps what Timothy Burke means to say is: Have some common sense, people! If you encounter your favorite celebrity at an autograph-signing or some other public appearance, knock yourself you and gush! But if you run into him or her in a public place where they're just going about their business, buying groceries or trying to get through a hotel lobby, give 'em some space. If you're at a party, and you are introduced to a doctor, it is rude to pump the doc for medical advice. Similar rules apply to celebrities.

But it's easy to see where that passage can be interpreted the way that Patrick interprets it.

The celebrity-worship that Timothy Burke describes is part of a larger kind of rudeness. For example, I'd say everybody reading this thread qualifies as a computer expert of one kind or another, and we've probably all had the experience of being dragged off at a social occasion to fix the host's PC problem. My feeling is that if you're my friend and you're having a problem with your computer, give me a call and I'll help if I can. But don't invite me over for a visit and THEN spring the computer problem on me. That ain't right.

This is not a hard-and-fast rule, by the way. There's one particular family I'm friends with where I always seem to end up straightening out their computer when I come to visit, and for some reason I don't mind. Perhaps because they're really great people, one of the family members is one of the people I've been friends with for longer than anyone else in the world (since the fifth grade! Jinkies!) they are otherwise exceptional hosts, AND the woman is kind of a financial genius and is always willing to help me out with some advice (and I have a very tiny brain indeed when it comes to personal finance).

My own history of celebrity encounters:

Recently I attended my first Comic-Con in San Diego, and had my first encounter with the celebrity signing booths. Two of the people doing signings were actresses I consider quite attractive indeed: Andrea Thompson, formerly of "N.Y.P.D. Blue" and "Babylon 5," and an actress who had a recurring role early on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" as a "techno-pagan" teacher and love interest for Giles (her name and the name of her character escape me). The lines for both of them were not too long, and I gave a moment's thought to approaching them, but then decided it would be too creepy - Fat Married Middle Aged Guy Flirts With Cuties - and also not appropriate behavior for a monogamous married man. It's okay to say "hubba hubba" and leer at them and pause the TiVo when they're on TV, not so much when they're in real life.

Of all my favorite writers from my childhood, only one of them is someone I've spent any amount of time with in person: Joe Haldeman, and his excellent wife Gay. They've gotten to be friends, they've stayed at our house. The rest of my teen-age favorites are all dead (alas - Asimov, Heinlein, Niven, Zelazny) or not moving in the same fannish circles that I do (Larry Niven, Harlan Ellison).

Gene Siskel was asked once if he was intimidated meeting all these movie stars, he responded that the only ones that are intimidating are the ones who were stars BEFORE Siskel got into the entertainment business. Siskel said he nearly plotzed when he interviewed John Wayne, but the stars of today are, to some extent, just his co-workers. I've noticed the same phenomenon in my own encounters with sf writers - I've been fortunate enough to meet a lot of really, really talented writers, but the only ones who make me fidgety are the ones who were big-shot writers when I was a teen-ager.

That said (and the following will somewhat contradict what precedes) it is INHERENTLY somewhat uncomfortable to meet someone whose work as an artist has touched you deeply. Your relationship with your favorite actors or writers becomes personal, akin to a deep friendship in some ways. How could I *not* be uncomfortable if I ever found myself sitting next to Dennis Franz on an airplane - he's been coming to my living room every Tuesday for 10 years, and his character Sipowicz on "N.Y.P.D. Blue" reminds me a lot of my favorite uncle, uncle Nat, who is a New York cop, blunt and volcanic, something of a bigot, frankly, but also big-hearted and tough and honest. There's a mojo there, a connection which is not entirely eliminated by the rational knowledge that Dennis Franz is not Sipowicz, he is an actor playing a character, and he doesn't know me any better than he knows any of the other 10 million people who watch his TV show regularly.

A follow-up essay at my blog now.

But Mitch Wagner expresses very well what I was trying to get at, and takes it deeper. Yes, it is also hard to know what to do when you meet someone whose work has touched you deeply, particularly when you think you've come to know something about that person from reading their work, when you feel (as you should) a quality of connection to them. I've felt that also as a historian, actually, when I have met someone who has been a part of events that I have studied or who has written archival documents that I have read. I feel ten kinds of awkward, even worse than I do ordinarily in collecting oral histories. You don't really know whether you know this person or not, and what you're entitled to say or think in their presence.

Believe me, if I'm ever at a dinner and Dan Simmons or David Zindell or John Barnes or Greg Bear or Vernor Vinge or Ursula K. LeGuin sits down next to me, I'm going to have to stab myself with a fork to keep from gushing praise in an intrusive way. I almost wet myself in anxiety when the students asked me to be on a little panel here at a local SF convention with Greg Frost and Michael Swanwick, as an academic commentator. So yes, this is complicated.

But yes, some fans--not just or even primarily SF fans--cross a boundary of sorts. Maybe they're just assholes, and fannishness has nothing to do with it.

Lydia: "The second implication is that the work itself, the books or whatever, isn't really very important. The "text" must remain boxed up, and is most certainly not a link between the audience and the performer, and by extension, not a legitimate link between the audience and their understanding of the world. It's all trivial."

I'm trying to figure out how you reconcile that with the sentence right before the one you quoted, the one that says "I think fandom and celebrity worship are really fun, enjoyable, culturally productive and often creative activities when they're confined to message boards, fan societies, fan fiction, encyclopedic mastery of the entire opus of a particular actor or writer or genre." He's talking very specifically about using the text as a link between the audience and their understanding of the world.

It's the confined to that bugs me. Timothy Burke's essay gave me the feeling that I should be an sf fan in my spare time, and I'm not. It's pretty basic to who I am all the time, and in a way which is actually different from the various activities that he lists.

He writes later about being squicked about people who treat celebrities as if they were commodities instead of people. I agree with him. I tend to feel very awkward with people whose stuff I've read and loved, but whom I've never met. One of my big concerns is not trying to build on a personal relationship that isn't there. Actually, I'd be better off if I didn't worry quite so much. :-) And they'd be happier, too. Fans, pros, etc. mingle pretty easily at the fun conventions. The ones where the "famous" people feel a need to hole up to avoid idiots like me are the ones that aren't much fun.

Patrick wrote, In a very real sense, the kind of long-term "science fiction fandom" I've been involved with for decades is a loose international network of people all of whom were devoted to written science fiction at some point in their lives. Some of whom still are. And many of whom aren't. Admirable though the critical enterprise is, it's not the central ceremony.

Doesn't this, by example, mean that these people have moved beyond fandom to something else? So, are they really served by being called SF Fandom, except for the need to have some label to call that subcultural landscape wherein Patrick owns a large house in the center of town, where I used to live in an apartment and now just visit on holidays, and where Timothy flies in for the occasional convention?

I hate to go semantical on this, but maybe that's the breakdown in communication here. "Fandom," as a word, exists outside of the self-identifying subcultural town described in the paragraph above, and trying to change the definition in the larger culture to match how one fairly unique subculture uses it seems quixotic.

Or am I off the mark again, Patrick? (Note that I never said you agree with me or I agree with you here--let me have some brownie points for that, at least.)

And my sincere apologies for "lying about" what you said, Patrick, which I had no indication of doing so (or else I wouldn't have linked to your post in the Glenn Reynolds tradition; that is, by linking to your post, I offer people a chance to check my perceptions against theirs and so they can judge whether or not my comments were thoughtless and baseless).

Not to be too much of a brown-noser, but I admire you too much to actively seek to lie about you or your comments. But I thought you were being snarky in your original post and follow-ups, and that's what I was trying to say.

(off to read Tim's follow-up)

Fandom is a tricky subject.

I'm not, in a number of senses, a trufan; I have never pubbed an ish or worked on a con, there are a lot of jokes and social rituals and outright history I don't know. (If the golden age of science fiction fandom is anything like the golden age of sicence fiction, well, I was effectively under social house arrest through my teens, so I missed that part.)

I go to conventions, and occupy fannish space, because these are people who are really neat to have conversations with, and that's a very valuable thing.

I think perhaps what Patrick is noting is that if there isn't that possibility of conversation, it's not the fandom Patrick knows, or indeed the one I know a little bit about.

Doesn't this, by example, mean that these people have moved beyond fandom to something else? So, are they really served by being called SF Fandom, except for the need to have some label to call that subcultural landscape wherein Patrick owns a large house in the center of town, where I used to live in an apartment and now just visit on holidays, and where Timothy flies in for the occasional convention?

I hate to go semantical on this, but maybe that's the breakdown in communication here. "Fandom," as a word, exists outside of the self-identifying subcultural town described in the paragraph above, and trying to change the definition in the larger culture to match how one fairly unique subculture uses it seems quixotic.

I understand most indigenous people's name for themselves generally turns out to mean "the people" or just "people" in their own language. This despite the fact that in the larger world that word refers to something different, and the different meanings might lead to some confusion. I also understand that the terms "form" and "idea" have meanings in the common coinage that have nothing whatever to do with Plato's ontology. Indeed the English language is littered with terms of art that are false cognates to words in common coinage. If this is quixotry, it is very thick on the ground. Yes, it's true that "fandom" is a term that can lead to confusion, if the specialized meaning is conflated with the everyday one, but I find most people can actually cope with learning what the term of art means, once they've let go of assuming that they already do.

Bugger. Closed my italic tag too soon.

"I think perhaps what Patrick is noting is that if there isn't that possibility of conversation, it's not the fandom Patrick knows, or indeed the one I know a little bit about."

I think perhaps what Patrick is noting is that the experience of realizing that the future will completely misunderstand one's home subculture, due to adverse cultural and linguistic shifts, is sad.

That's why Patrick said "I92ve run out of heart for explaining yet again" and "I do sometimes understand what it must feel like to be, for instance, Welsh-language literature." Because this entire discussion makes me feel: sad.

But no, that can't be it. Here's Timothy Burke's followup post:

"Deflector screens went up pretty hastily over at Electrolite once the faintest hint of a critique of science fiction fandom was sensed in my piece...I think Patrick92s reaction also has a lot to do with what I have come to think of as the 'Comics Journal approach to cultural devotion', which is to react with a mixture of erudite fury and defensive praise of the comics form to even the slightest whiff of someone failing to appreciate the genius of comics and more importantly the legitimacy of devotion to comics."

Yeah, that's exactly what I was doing, because as we all know I can't stand to see science fiction fandom criticized. Goodness knows I never do it, nor does anyone I like and respect!

Never mind what I actually said.

I really do give up.

I do sometimes understand what it must feel like to be, for instance, Welsh-language literature.

You mean, you have mutations? Ych a fi!

Lydia -- I think what Timothy was saying was that when fandom extends beyond the textual/critical realm (all of the activities mentioned in the paragraph you quote) to the personal interaction with authors/musicians/pros/etc, people tend to forget that they're dealing with other human beings, with all of the negative consequences he is deploring. I don't read it as saying one should only be a fan in one's spare time; I would also say that a lot of what's involved in being an active sf fan (certainly in terms of conventions) is somewhat different from the stuff he's talking about.

Too bad. I'm just trying to figure out why you (and a couple of others) so assertively mistook me for a boojum that I think you have some legitimate right to regard with annoyance. Never mind what I actually said, either, I guess, because you haven't bothered with most of it (either essay).

The only real or meaningful disagreement here, as far as I'm concerned, is this: is fandom necessarily and intrinsically social, a "network"? Or does it also encompass mostly solitary acts of devotional knowledge and study, and also obsessional activities of the kind that I view with distaste? If you want to insist that fandom is nothing more and nothing less than the social networks that form the central axis of your own sense of fandom, and that all other things commonly associated with it are something else then yeah, we disagree. Because I think fandom is all those things as once. If you just want people to understand that fandom is largely or centrally constituted by the networks of affinity that inform your sense of it, and the other sorts of practices are bookends or outliers to that central core, I'm hip to that, but I nothing I've written is meant to contradict that assertion, and I object to being made, in that case, to stand in for some other target--and seek explanation for why you would have me do so.

Patrick: FWIW, I read your initial post the same way Glen and Timothy did. You didn't seem sad, you seemed upset and somewhat dismissive. That's clearly not how you meant to come across, but re-reading the initial post it still seems like a reasonable interpretation.

"Yeah, that's exactly what I was doing, because as we all know I can't stand to see science fiction fandom criticized. Goodness knows I never do it, nor does anyone I like and respect!"

Hey, Cyrano de Bergerac was perfectly happy to make fun of his nose. No one else was allowed to, though...

I've discussed these issues with Patrick for many years. Fandom has been an important part of my life since - at the latest - 1989, when I discovered the Science Fiction RoundTable on Genie. And if it's possible to be a part of fandom without having any contact with other fans, I have been a fan since before I hit puberty; I've always been an avid reader of sf, and my view of the world is shaped by that reading.

I think Patrick cherishes egalitarianism in sf fandom, and hates the current trend in some quarters to view big name actors and TV and movie producers as the POINT of the convention, that the fans go to the cons to see the pros in the same way that sports fans go to the stadium to see the team play. (Actually, I'm pretty damn pleased with that analogy - let me pause to savor it a moment.) I think Patrick likes fannish activities where the celebrities and pros and fans all mix it up together in one big crowd of equals, all of whom being people who found sf to be important at one time in their lives (and some of whom find it continues to be of importance).

By that measurement, an sf con is just one big party. Maybe you've been to a party where one of the guests is a huge movie star. You're at a barbecue fishing through the trash can full of ice and soft drink cans, looking to see if there's any Diet Coke left, when all of a sudden you look and say, "Oh, my God, is that JOHN TRAVOLTA over there?! Holy crap, it is!" If you're the host of that party, the whole point of the party isn't to show off John Travolta, the point is for everybody - including Travolta - to get together and have a good time. If you're a guest at the party, you should treat John Travolta like any other guest - certainly compliment him on his movies (and don't say anything about "Battlefield: Earth"), but otherwise just talk to him like anyone else. And if you're the Big Movie Star, you shouldn't put on any airs, but rather you should just behave like a person, and if you notice that there's no Diet Coke left, would it kill you to hop into your Big Movie Star Car and run down to the convenience store to pick up another case?

I agree wholeheartedly with all these sentiments that I have tentatively attributed to Patrick. The puzzling thing about this whole exchange is that I think Timothy Burke does too, so what is everybody arguing about?

Timothy, I'd sign off on the notion that (in your words) "fandom is largely or centrally constituted by the networks of affinity that inform [my] sense of it, and the other sorts of practices are bookends or outliers to that central core."

But at no point was I asking you to "stand in for" any kind of "target." My original post was simply a cri de coeur -- I was marvelling at the long-term weirdness of watching the meaning of one's subculture and its practices get worn away by the relentless forces of misprision, cultural misunderstanding, and linguistic change. For many people in this thread, "fandom" simply means "devotional obsessiveness." They're entirely open to the idea that it can be leavened with reasoned moderation, or ironic self-awareness, but at the end of the day that's what "fandom" is about.

The snarkiest thing I said was "Maybe someone will explain to Timothy Burke that there92s a whole range of subcultures for whom the word 'fandom' means something quite different from 'celebrity worship.'" I also said a bunch of other things which I really think are mostly accurately characterized as wistful. With all due respect to Josh, I really don't think this merits portraying me as this intolerant, fanatical defender of science fiction fandom, as you went out of your way to do in your followup post. "Deflector screens," indeed. Along with the whole Comics Journal bit, that was very slickly done, and certainly put me in my uncultured, uncredentialed, dropout place.

Patrick, I didn't say that anything merited portraying you as an "intolerant, fanatical defender of science fiction fandom", I said that the message you were intending to communicate *did not get communicated*.

But if you're going to complain that you've been portrayed as such, doesn't it seem relevant that the person who's portraying you that way sees himself the same way?

What can I say, man? We don't seem to be disagreeing about much except about who was snarky to whom first. Since I didn't mention you in my first essay, I think I win that argument. Then the next argument is who was snarkier to whom overall, and maybe I lose there. I think we need to get our straw men together for a party, we can just park them by the poolside with some drinks in their hands while we go talk about our favorite SF writers.

The Comics Journal phenom is a real one, though, and I stand by my characterization of it as a *general* dynamic among SF fans, even if I wash my hands of it as a response specifically to your response to something that annoys you about the culture which my first piece accidentally seemed to remind you of.

For many people in this thread, "fandom" simply means "devotional obsessiveness." They're entirely open to the idea that it can be leavened with reasoned moderation, or ironic self-awareness, but at the end of the day that's what "fandom" is about.

Well, that is probably pretty close to the original meaning of the word (1903: baseball fandom). Except that you missed an important word out of the definition: fandom means "shared devotional obsessiveness".

A couple of years ago three friends drove from Reading to Edinburgh and back again in the same weekend because they wanted to go see a four-hour movie that they were unlikely ever to see on the big screen in Edinburgh (it was part of the Edinburgh Film Festival) and to attend an interview with an actor starring in the film. I went to the film with them, and enjoyed it: and we had an enlightening conversation over dinner between interview and film, agreeing that what made us fans - in the shared fannish sense - was that we perfectly understood how one may need to do things that would, to a non-fan, appear strange and weird. I cited an example from I, Lena Geyer (Marcia Davenport) of a young woman who is a fan of Lena Geyer's voice, and follows the singer from city to city simply to sit in the audience night after night and listen to her sing: she has no thought of intruding on Lena Geyer's life, she merely wants to hear her voice.

Fandom is the social network, yes: the conversations, the social understanding, an inner world that celebrates intellectual achievement over physical: but what I see that fans have in common as fans is that we see obsession as a positive good. Fans accomplish things in their "free time" that many non-fans would consider to be full-time jobs, and we do it because it's fun. We do what we do for the love of doing it. We are obsessive about things that mundanes often consider absolutely trivial.

I don't consider that I am revealing the True Nature of Fandom: I'm just saying this is what I have noticed that all fans seem to have in common, at root: the ability to take joy in obsession.

"the ability to take joy in obsession."

But it is far from given that that obsession means
being a socially clueless dweeb.

Odd Synchronicity:

I re-read this thread while _Galaxy Quest_ was playing on my in-cube TV. (I'm responsible for monitoring ten channels of output from a digital video-on-demand server, which sounds cool until you learn there are just six movies, one of which is _Pearl Harbor_ and another is a Spongebob collection, and we don't get to choose what's on because there's a simulator starting and stopping the streams.)

The movie's costumed dweeb-fans come accross as both familiar (I've helped run what eventually become a media con) and aggrevating (because most of my fannish cohort Isn't Like That).

I don't think there's anything necessarily obsessive about it, either.

And I think I just got what Patrick is talking about in terms of relentless change, too.

Patrick - Are you describing anything new? Science fiction fandom has always, as far as I've known, been viewed in the mainstream as the domain of antisocial geeks who obsess about some TV show or movie or book or another, generally "Star Trek," "Star Wars" or "Lord of the Rings." I've been surprised to find references in fannish writings of the 1930s and 1940s describing similar attitudes in the society at large. That was well before Trek, "Star Wars," or LOTR, of course; the standard dismissal in mainstream society was to describe sci-fi as "that Buck Rogers stuff."

I've always been intensely uncomfortable with the more antisocial elements of sf. But over time I've come to see a few things, and my discomfort has mellowed:

Part of the reason for my discomfort is because I recognize the worst elements of my OWN personality in the 350-pound hairy guy in the too-tight "Let the Wookie Win T-Shirt." I see this guy at a con party, and I think, "Am I like that?"

Some of the most antisocial elements of fandom aren't just weird, they're mentally ill. They don't have a choice but to be the way they are, and it's fortunate that fandom exists to provide them with a support group.

Many people in fandom are way cooler than I am and I have no business even THINKING about looking down on them.

Your average convention of any type - doctors, lawyers, dentists, accountants, architects, restaurateurs, any convention at all - is no more sane than the average sf convention, they're just on the average more polite and well-groomed than the average sf fan. But not necessarily better behaved - I've seen many, many reports about how hotels first have to be talked into hosting sf conventions, but then the hotels LOVE the cons, because the convention-goers are well-behaved, don't trash the place, pay their bills, and don't result in calls from the police.

Of course, there are sectors in society that persist in viewing sf as somehow Satanic and an evil influence, and sports as wholesome and character-building. I think about that every once in a while when I turn on the news and see another athlete doing the perp walk after being charged with violent crime.

Timothy Burke - By the way, your incident mentions when Dustin Hoffman strolled into the kitchen of a restaurant, just to look around. Would J. Average Customer have been able to do that? Celebrity has its advantages, too.

I'm sorry, I know I have a long history of talking with Patrick about the nature of fandom so I'm coming at this discussion with a lot of knowledge which might be slightly obscure to other people, but: Timothy Burke, it seems that you are consistently misreading Patrick to a degree which borders on the deliberate.

Here's an exercise: Pretend that everything Patrick says in this thread, he really means, and that it makes sense. It makes sense to me; it makes sense to Lydia and Ulrika and Mitch; it seems not to make sense to you, since you keep not understanding that he's drawing a distinction between "celebrity worship" and "fandom" that you keep missing. Yes, there are types of "fandoms" which are built around celebrity worship. That's not what it means to Patrick, and he's part of a community which has used it to mean something else since the 1930s.

Notice that he's reacting first and foremost to your repeated equation of "fandom" to "celebrity worship"--which your essay does, or else why would you drag your encounter with Dustin Hoffman into it? That has nothing to do with any kind of fandom, and everything to do with celebrity. There's no causal relation between "fandom", as Patrick knows the word, and "hanging out in a hotel lobby hoping to shag a celebrity".

Which isn't to say that there aren't people in fandom who do just that. But if that were central to "fandom" as Patrick understands it, and as "fandom" uses the term, conventions like Corflu and Ditto and Contata could not exist. Zines like Dillinger Relic could not exist if that were the whole of fandom, nor essays like "God and I".

"Fandom" as Patrick understands it, and as I understand it, is a lot more like, well, this blog than it is like a book signing. I don't think this point is obscure. And it's clear that Patrick is weary of making the point, and upset that it gets harder and harder with each passing year to make that point and have it understood.

You know, when the word "fan" has its root in "fanatic," you're always going to have this problem. In particular when you have fans who are also actual fanatics. Occasionally scary ones.

With the books versus film versus what-have-you, I'm wondering how long the arguments have been going on. Did Wizard of Oz fans a hundred years ago who first saw the stage play get slighted by those who first read the books? What about the horror fans who first heard stories on the radio, rather than reading them on the page? Were there "Pulps vs. Wireless" arguments back then? (There are even some fans who'd be able to answer this from personal memory.)

I think perhaps only geeks have a more unfortunate pedigree to their name, and even though I don't know of any who currently bite heads off chickens, there's still a certain leeriness from the outside. And defining fandom, geekdom and all the rest from the outside is something humans do as much as they do it from the inside.

Whether one's outside or inside depends on perceptions and a matter of degree. Right now I'm catching up on my Clark Ashton Smith (and making a vocabulary list) but was just off on a trip, helping to chaperone my niece and nepphew to Legoland, where I decided as a consolation prize that I'd see if I could get together a Lego Cthulhu playset. Unfortunately, the squid is discontinued, but two sets with skeletons and mummies furnished the beginnings of a Zothique playset (and a really neat diorama next to my computer).

Some would find a grown man spending $8 on Legos to be silly and childish. Others would think I didn't buy nearly enough. Whichever, reading Klarkash-ton and illustrating the stories with Legos both go somewhere on the fannish/geekish spectrum.

Star-watching? It gets embarrassing and faintly creepy when it turns into celebrity worship, but it isn't inaccurate to say that there are certain actors who excel at our beloved genre and do some pretty cool things in it.

Look at Johnny Depp. Nightmare on Elm Street, Edward Scissorhands, The Ninth Gate, Sleepy Hollow, Pirates of the Caribbean. Not only does he turn in a good performance, but he has a habit of saying yes to pretty good scripts.

Following an actor's career is a perfectly reasonable part of fannish behavior. Whether it's central or core is another matter, but most of the people who watch movies do also read books, even if not as many as some might like, so it's just a matter of degree, as before.

Then there's the elephant in the corner that if book-reading fen want to throw paperbacks at media fen, then why not also at the leather-fetish transgender furry Libertarian polyamorous fat-acceptance-activists we see at cons? Or is it just because they look like the product of a Gor/Narnia/Stranger-in-a-Strange-Land crossover, as written by Ayn Rand?

There are things that will squick anyone in fandom, and I think we should all reserve the right to look askance at them.

"Of course, there are sectors in society that persist in viewing sf as somehow Satanic and an evil influence."

Well, my mother always told me that reading SF would rot my mind, ruin my morals, and lead me into hanging around with disreputable characters. And thank God, she was right!

Timothy, I'll join you for that party. Except I don't see why we should let the straw men have the drinks.

Yonmei, the idea that the ability to "take joy in obsession" is one of fandom's unifying principles is interesting. I'll have to think about that.

Kevin Maroney, thanks for the reassurance that I'm not actually out of my mind.

Kevin Andrew Murphy, you make some good points, but I trust you understand that none of what I've been talking about has to do with "books" versus "media". Many people apppear to want to have a big subcultural civil war over that distinction. I'm not among them.

Well, when you start in on not wanting to hear Shatner, rather than say, Harlan, it does give a books vs. media slant, rather than the community vs. "star" angle you're going for.

I'll admit to annoyance at the groupies, but a lot of the beauty of a con is the ability to change focus, depending on the events. Here are the panels, there are the parties, here are the klatch rooms and so on. Shatner singing is just a program item, same as Harlan reading. To each his own.

The trouble is the people who can't change gears. The stars who can't go into cocktail party mode at the parties, the groupies who haven't figured out that while the X cheering section may be appropriate at the X panel or fan table, it isn't the focus of the whole con.

Fandom of course doesn't consist of the obnoxious and clueless people, but they're the ones you first notice and stick in your memory. And when they're obnoxious, clueless and flamboyoant, they do a great job of both.

I'll admit to annoyance at the groupies, but a lot of the beauty of a con is the ability to change focus, depending on the events.

Yes, exactly! One of my favourite stories from Beyond Uhura concerns just that. Nichelle Nicholls is a space fan, and at one sf con that she had been invited to as a guest, one of the other guests was a famous NASA spokesperson, and Nicholls wanted to hear him speak. The con organisers had hired security for the con guests, so Nicholls was flanked by three or four security guards - Securior types - dressed as Klingons, which was supposed to help them blend in. Go figure.

Nicholls steps out of the lift into a crowded hotel lobby. The fans spot her and start heading in her direction. The security guards see a mob, and close up around her, muttering in her ear that she needs to go back to her suite, now, please, Miss Nicholls!

Nicholls says "No, you don't understand," and raises her voice and tells the fans: "Tomorrow I'm going to be here as Nichelle Nicholls, as Lieutenant Uhura. But right now I'm here because I want to hear this man talk about NASA and space--flight: I'm here as a fan, just like you, and if you treat me like this you're going to worry my security and I won't be able to stay for the talk."

And, she said, the fans all collectively nodded, said "Sure, we understand" and backed off, and Nicholls got to go to the NASA talk. Her security guards were stunned, and Nicholls said "No, you just don't understand Star Trek fans."

But I like to think that any large group of fans in fandom would have behaved just like that. The few inclined to behave rudely and continue to harass Nicholls would have been moved off by the others.

Er, I begin this comment with some trepidation because I'm not sure that I've been forgiven yet. I said thirty "Hail Heinleins" last night, so I hope I can buy a round at the bar and snub the straw men.

I think I understand Patrick's stance, and I can understand the frustration, but I'm concerned because it seems that this wasn't necessarily a battle that was ever going to be won--"fandom" in the mainstream was never going to be understood as Patrick understands it, for some of the reasons placed here by the Kevins. I thought Hartwell did the best job of trying to explain it (I gave Age of Wonders to my parents, and my mom replied as I had hoped she would with a comment like, "Oh, I think I understand you a litte more now"), but it takes an entire book to encompass that idea correctly for those who have no experience whatsover with it. Between that and ten second sound bites or the endless right-before-the-end of the 30 minute local news broadcast about the local SF convention going on "in our town," the odds are not favorable.

Now, I'll take the blame for interjecting (and misinterpreting [or worse, creating whole cloth] Patrick's stance) more of the media/written distinction (apologizing once again for assuming I understand Patrick's meaning enough to say I agree with him), but that was from my own experience where I have seen first hand a startling difference between fan communities that get together for SF and those that get together for "Star Trek." The problem may be that I'm working from a limited set of data (I only went to one media con and decided I wasn't interested in attending another) and that other conventions/groupings centered on media aren't like that. Again, major massive mea culpa.

I think I've figured out an appropriate term for the overly persistent, inappropriately timed fans who annoy their objects-of-worship/admiration:

"Spam That Walks"

Glen, it very much depends what kind of "media con" you went to: there are a couple of businesses who call the large events they organise "media cons" which are really nothing of the kind - all they consist of is enormous rooms with manufactured trivia to sell at inflated prices, plus actor "guests" who give short talks followed by long queues for autographs (and frequently you are not permitted to present for autograph anything you did not buy at the "con" itself). I went to just one of these events, many years ago, and never intend to go to another. (Mind you, I enjoyed it then: I was 16, it was my first con, and I met lots of other fans while standing in the queues. Effectively, I was their ideal target audience: enthusiastic but completely ignorant of what real fan cons are like.)

Anyway. I have since attended many fan cons, some media, some not, and while the topics of discussion may vary from con to con, I've not noticed any fundamental difference between one convention and the next.

Though there are considerable surface differences, of course: slash cons tend to be overwhelmingly female, media cons tend to have more women on the con committee, Worldcons tend to have more utterly exhausted and braindead people on the concommittee - though that may be an end-result rather than a prerequisite - and so on. But fan cons are overwhelmingly about fans getting to get together and talk obsessively about their topics of interest: that is my experience, over twenty years of attending cons ranging from small slash cons to Worldcons and most sizes in between.

A key distinction that Patrick is drawing--that Yonmei's anecdote about Nichelle Nichols illustrates well--is not the "actor versus writer" distinction but the "audience versus conversation" distinction. While "audience" dynamics can often be found even in the most fannish of venues, they are not, I think, central. (Thanks to Kevin Murphy for nailing the point that one of the causes of friction in fannish gatherings is people who can't move properly between the "audience" mode that is appropriate at some events and the "conversation" mode that is approprirate at others.)

Fandom, as Patrick uses the term and as I prefer to use it, is not largely about going to conventions to "hear" Harlan Ellison. It is about going to conventions to "speak with" people who might include Harlan Ellison and who might include The Talking Dog, Elise Matheson, Lydia Nickerson, Samuel R. Delany, Kevin Maroney--anyone who wants to be a part of the conversation.

This is why it's meaningful to talk about "zine fandom" and even "macrame fandom"; fandom is an community and an approach to interacting with other fans, not a body of celebrities around which fandoms coalesce.

Well, when you start in on not wanting to hear Shatner, rather than say, Harlan, it does give a books vs. media slant, rather than the community vs. "star" angle you're going for.

*chortle* *snort* *splutter* *gasp* *wheeze* *koff*

I think this contrast would work possibly just a wee bit better if you had picked almost anyone but Harlan fergoshsakes. I don't think I've seen the man appear in public in the last decade but that he was flacking for Joe Straczinski. Hardly the man with the purest pure lit cred to his name. Harlan's been happily sucking at the glass teat for a while now.

It also seems there is a mild sense of shame or embarrassment in Timothy Burke's essays. I read (maybe wrongly) his fannish activities as guilty pleasures. I don't get that sense from the other side of the discussion. And I would be confused (at least) at having one of my hobbies/interests described as embarrassing.

Actually, I'm very sympathetic to the wry confessional self-awareness Tim is reaching for.

Which probably just adds to the confusion that you're noticing.

Points well taken, Yonmei, and thanks. I don't think the media con I went to was one of the commercially-run ones, but it was in Los Angeles, and that may have been more the cause of the slant to it that I perceived, as I had also already been well-indoctrinated into what I considered the "writer" con (ArmadilloCon in Austin, Texas) and perhaps it was the change in coast (I always consider Texas the third coast) that was jarring.

Imagine, if you will, that I had posted to As I Please an article about reading the spicejar.org httpd access logs and remarking on the script-kiddies who keep hitting our FreeBSD server with Windows XP buffer-overflow attacks. Imagine that in this article I refer to these people as "hackers," and perhaps mention in passing my stint as a subscriber to the Cypherpunks mailing list.

Now, imagine further that someone — Cory Doctorow in boingboing, perhaps — picks this up, and sighs wistfully about the days long gone when "hacker" meant someone like Jon Singer rather than someone like Kevin Mitnick.

Would it then make sense for me to respond along the lines of "The firewall went up pretty hastily at boingboing"? Would it be appropriate for someone else — I dunno, maybe Scott Marley? — to slam Cory because he's upset that "someone wants to talk about hackers who isn't one of us"?

Bill Higgins already said this, above. I get the distinct impression that this point has been missed, over and over again.

Just as the usage of "hacker" has indelibly come to be dominated by "someone who breaks into computer systems", the usage of "fandom" is dominated by "the activity of obsessing inappropriately with celebrities."

This can't be changed. But those of us who grew up with other usages don't have to be happy about it, and there's nothing with saying so.

Nicely said, Alan.

Patrick wrote,

None of what I've been talking about has to do with "books" versus "media". Many people apppear to want to have a big subcultural civil war over that distinction. I'm not among them.

Earlier, Patrick wrote,

The kind of long-term "science fiction fandom" I've been involved with for decades is a loose international network of people all of whom were devoted to written science fiction at some point in their lives.

Which is where I got confused when this topic came up in a previous thread, when I tried to propose something akin to Patrick's comment quoted second above, and Patrick responded with something akin to his comment quoted first above; and I also got a comment from someone else, Yonmei IIRC, who said that my image of fandom as something to which books were central, was completely orthogonal to the fandom that that person knew.

I got the impression that I don't know much about science fiction fandom, which may be true, but the impression I had of it was a loose international network of people all of whom were devoted to written science fiction at some point in their lives, so I feel a little at sea here.

Mitch Wagner wrote,

Gene Siskel was asked once if he was intimidated meeting all these movie stars, he responded that the only ones that are intimidating are the ones who were stars BEFORE Siskel got into the entertainment business. Siskel said he nearly plotzed when he interviewed John Wayne, but the stars of today are, to some extent, just his co-workers. I've noticed the same phenomenon in my own encounters with sf writers - I've been fortunate enough to meet a lot of really, really talented writers, but the only ones who make me fidgety are the ones who were big-shot writers when I was a teen-ager.

But he then went on to add,

That said (and the following will somewhat contradict what precedes) it is INHERENTLY somewhat uncomfortable to meet someone whose work as an artist has touched you deeply.

I find the first point applies to my awe at the individual, and the second to my discomfort with having a relationship to the person who produced that work.

A fairly close friend of mine, many years after I met her, started writing fiction and getting published. I found that I admired her work greatly.

I find I can't talk to her about her work. I babble. I can talk to other people about it, though, and I can talk to her about anything else just as we always have. It's a strange phenomenon.

This I have taken as a lesson. I talk to people whose work I admire, but I talk about something else. Once I found myself, at a literary event, by happenstance standing in front of an author I've deeply admired since I was 12. What do you say? I said, "Hey, nice tie." (It was, too.) He said thanks, and that was that.

For cripes' sake. I said that I come out of written-SF fandom, which is true enough. I've also said repeatedly, here and in many other venues, that I don't think the participatory and egalitarian customs that I value in written-SF fandom are unique to it or unknown in areas of fandom that happen to be more about visual media. Which is also true.

I've been saying this for more than a decade, and yet every single time I try to talk about the culture or history of fandom, some people seem to want to turn it into a books-versus-"media" food fight.

I recognize that a lot of self-righteous aficionados of written SF have copped a lot of attitude toward other kinds of SF fans over the years. I've sure you can find records of me doing the same thing in 1977 or something. But that's not my position, even if you can find something that sounds vaguely like a hint of a whisper of a dis toward "media" fandom if you play "gotcha" on my prose long enough.

Jeez Louise. How many different ways do I have to say it?

This is like the stupid late-1990s fights over Minicon, where I went in determined to defend the "media" fans against the false idea that they were particularly responsible for the growth of the "performers"/"audience" model at Minicon -- and came away convinced that a heck of a lot of "media" fans are committed to the idea that We Don't Like Them and have their fingers wedged in their ears against any evidence to the contrary.

(And if this post doesn't convince innocent bystanders that this subculture has internal politics as baroque as, for instance, the gay world, or modern art, I can't imagine what would.)

Simon, you're certainly right about the sometime dissonance between one's relationship to the person and one's relationship to the art.

I have found, for what it's worth, that even world-class geniuses generally don't mind well-mannered, easily-digested praise. "Gene, The Book of the New Sun just about blew my head off. Say, nice tie!"

(By the way, the exasperation of my post before last isn't particularly directed at Simon, more at the persistence of a certain kind of argument dynamic.)

Even celebrity worship can be a more complex and interesting activity than just sitting around and waiting to worship the celebrities, and then worshipping them when they arrive.

I thought that was one of the points of the wonderful movie "Almost Famous." The groupies in that movie had a rich and vibrant little community. The bands they worshipped had become almost incidental and unimportant - they were no longer the REASON for the community's existence, they were an EXCUSE for the community to exist. The groupies were having more fun, and were more likeable and more worthy of our respect, than the musicians. I wonder how much of that picture of the groupie subculture was based on truth?

I think this jibes nicely with Patrick's definition of his own subculture of fandom: a group of people for whom written science fiction was very important AT ONE TIME. For some, it's still important. For others, sf is something they used to do. But they still hang out together. Hanging out together has become the whole point of the thing.

This is not so different from the rest of life. I'm still friends with a few of my childhood friends. We got to be friends because we went to the same school, had the same teachers, and lived within bicycling distance of each other. None of those things are true anymore, but they're still my friends.

Bruce Arthurs - "Spam that walks." LOL!

Alan Bostick - I'm a journalist and I use the word "hacker" in its modern meaning - a bad guy who breaks or breaks into other peoples' computer systems - but I'm aware of the derivation of the word.

But the people who want to turn back the clock on the word "hacker" are people who, I think, don't entirely understand the derivation themselves. First off, the original hackers were pretty much doing the same thing the modern crop is doing: breaking into systems, trying to crash computers, etc. etc. etc. It's just that THEN these activities were okay, now they're not.

Also, I've known people who never wanted to be described as "hackers" - even before the word was synonymous with "computer criminal" - because to THEM, the word connoted amateurishness. These people took pride in themselves as professionals. A friend wrote a very short script to solve a computer problem that had been bugging me for months - turned out the solution was downright trivial. I congratulated him on coming up with a "clever hack" and couldn't figure out why he was affronted by what I intended to be enthusiastic praise.

Something that you discover when you hang around with writers is that your liking for the person doesn't have much correlation at all with your liking of their writing.

I don't care much for big fat high fantasy. I didn't like "Lord of the Rings," and I don't much care for the genre of literature derived from it, big novels and series of novels set in lands derived from medieval Europe. Even the ones I enjoy, I find I want to CUT, CUT, CUT most of the words and tighten up the story incredibly.

And yet some of my favorite people in fandom are writers and fans of precisely these sorts of high fantasy stories. I think they know about my opinions, but we don't talk about it.

One of my thumb rules in How To Be Friends With Fiction Writers: never tell them you plan to buy one of their books, or that you're about to read it, or you're reading it. They may ask your opinion about it afterwards. You should only speak to them about their books after you've read the book, and if you've liked it. (Unless, of course, your opinion is solicited - one of my other rules in life is that if you ask me for my opinion about your writing, I'll give it to you.)

I just watched "That Thing You Do" again the other day, and I'm remembering the scene where the coming-of-age hero, a jazz fanatic, encounters his favorite musician in a bar.

I don't think Alan wants to "turn back the clock." In his imaginary example, he was just talking about how the change in usage makes him feel a certain kind of loss.

I certainly wasn't trying to disrespect media fandom (not that Patrick necessarily thought I was), and perhaps the people of whom he speaks aren't either. They're just saying it's different, and it's not theirs, much as Timothy Burke's image is not his. And, in the process, perhaps they're using "book" and "media" as metonyms for styles of fandom with which those forms are roughly associated, at least in those people's minds? I don't know - just a guess.

World-class geniuses generally don't mind well-mannered, easily-digested praise. Indeed not, but I first have to draft such things in my mind, and then get them out so they don't sound like babbling. This can be difficult. (The Book of the New Sun ... hmm, I read that. It was ... interesting.)

" And, in the process, perhaps they're using "book" and "media" as metonyms for styles of fandom with which those forms are roughly associated, at least in those people's minds?"

Something like that probably describes a lot of misunderstanding.

Mitch Wagner wrote,

But the people who want to turn back the clock on the word "hacker" are people who, I think, don't entirely understand the derivation themselves.

I am reminded of a dispute on Usenet that I was told about, over the word "spam" - as I understand it, this at one time meant mass off-topic cross-posts, and persons who'd coined that usage were annoyed when it mutated into meaning junk e-mail. They began pontificating on the "original" meaning of the word "spam" until someone pointed out that the original meaning of the word "spam" was "a Hormel processed meat product."

First off, the original hackers were pretty much doing the same thing the modern crop is doing: breaking into systems, trying to crash computers, etc. etc. etc.

The impression I get from The Hacker's Dictionary, a book I read long before the current meaning of "hacker" achieved prominence, was that "hacker" had nothing to do with breaking into systems, though hackers might do that. "Hacking" meant grinding out computer code product, testing the result, etc etc. I presumed this was a jocular self-deprecating reference to writers of cheap popular fiction, who are or were known as "hacks" - but perhaps this is all wrong?

Something that you discover when you hang around with writers is that your liking for the person doesn't have much correlation at all with your liking of their writing.

Also very true, in both directions.

I don't care much for big fat high fantasy. ... Even the ones I enjoy, I find I want to CUT, CUT, CUT most of the words and tighten up the story incredibly.

Possibly this is a cultural difference between readers who just want to get the story, ma'am, and those who want to visit and inhabit the world in which it's set?

Perhaps also there's a correlation with a cultural distinction between science fiction and fantasy? My vague long-ago impression of some 1930s-40s writers of science fiction is that their writing was almost indecently hasty. Build the spaceship with a couple wrenches, hop into it, and get the heck out into the next galaxy, all before the end of page 3.

Wow, what a bunch of intellectuals!

Me too.

But right now, I don't want to split hairs, make definitions, or argue points.

I want to recognize that Patrick is sad, and he has something to be sad about. I happen to be sad about the same thing.

But even if I wasn't, I'd like to make some room for sadness without endless analysis. When your friends die, do you feel the need to endlessly pick apart what they meant by dying?

Some things are just sad.

What the heck. This thread is already too long, I'm going to throw in my two cents, as well.

I'm thinking that I may now have a new functional definition for fan: someone who understands what I mean when I explain fandom.

It's very, very odd, reading Timothy Burke. All of the words make sense, the paragraphs are fine, the things he's talking about are all real and reasonable, but the things I know about don't even exist as spaces in his writing, much less as presences. I don't mean to be snarky, here, though it could be read that way. I'm trying to describe a very strange experience where my world and his world have a huge discontinuity, one so large that it looks to me as if he can't even see it. I've thought about trying to explain, again, but I can't find any common language which would allow me to begin.

This doesn't mean that Timothy Burke Just Doesn't Get It. All it means is that when he goes to write about it, he doesn't write about it in a way that is recognizable to me. I'm familiar with the problem from this side. If I may be so rude as to guess, my guess is that he does understand some of what I and several of my friends have been trying to explain, but that it doesn't manage to get itself out onto pixels because it's not something that he's spent a lot of time with, nor something that occupies the top, verbal levels of his mind. Or not. I'm not a mind reader, I'm guessing.

Here's a thing, though: The way that Timothy Burke writes about fandom fits into many people's worldviews of what my community is like. They think they know what's going on. That's fine. There's a lot of that going on, and I think that everyone here is more than willing to grant the point. However, it seems that many people are reluctant to grant, in return, that there is this other thing, which is also called fandom, which has some things in common, which still isn't this more common model. Because the other model is more prevalent, and because people seem to like to argue that it's all the same thing anyway, it seems likely that someday soon, my subculture will be remembered as if it were something it is not. That feels like a loss to me, too.

I'm suddenly reminded of the Diggers, the hippies, the Yippies, the flower children, the Weathermen, Leary, the Deadheads, the Peace Movement, and Hell's Angels, and how it got wrapped up into a package called The Counter-Culture, and dressed in bellbottoms and headbands. A lot of people, when learning about, or even remembering the Sixties, see it through this filter where all of those shards and opposing factions are melted together, and assumed to have had common philosophies, common goals. Not surprisingly, because of that, much of what is left is the lowest common denominator. The various groups or individuals with highly nuanced, complicated views or practices are lost in the noise. Every video-collage of the Sixties, I swear, shows a flower-child, the 1968 riot, and a peace sign. Usually something from Woodstock, too.

Some of the more difficult, challenging pieces tend to get ignored or forgotten. We all know about Timothy Leary getting kids stoned, but do you know why? He wasn't a drugged out nutter, you know, he was a Harvard professor in Psychiatry. (He may have become a drugged out nutter, that's a different argument.) The anti-capitalist movement tends to get rolled into the pro-Communist, pro-Vietnamese groups, who get rolled into the Peace Movement, and they couldn't have had more opposing goals if they tried. But the Peace movement is easy to understand. The Diggers are not. By "easy to understand" all I mean is "easily recognizable." I don't mean to imply that there's some level of higher and lower intelligence, here.

Mitch Wagner: But the people who want to turn back the clock on the word "hacker" are people who, I think, don't entirely understand the derivation themselves. First off, the original hackers were pretty much doing the same thing the modern crop is doing: breaking into systems, trying to crash computers, etc. etc. etc. It's just that THEN these activities were okay, now they're not.

BZZZT! Thank you for playing.

The original hackers were model railroad enthusiasts.

I have found, for what it's worth, that even world-class geniuses generally don't mind well-mannered, easily-digested praise. "Gene, The Book of the New Sun just about blew my head off. Say, nice tie!"

I onced asked Gordy Dickson if he ever got tired of people gushing about how much they loved his books. He looked at me like I was nuts and said, "No!"

MKK

Patrick - I did not think Alan was trying to turn back the clock; I was making a related point.

I do still occasionally get protest mail when I use the word "hacker" as synonymous with "computer attacker," although extremely rarely.

Simon - I remember the dispute about the word "spam," as a tech journalist then, I got protest mail when I used the word in a way that the letter-writer thought was incorrect.

My standard response to reader mail is most often a simple, one-sentence: "Thank you for your feedback." If I responded to all my reader mail, I wouldn't be able to get any other work done. But sometimes I want to respond, "Thank you for your feedback, dickhead."

The impression I get from The Hacker's Dictionary, a book I read long before the current meaning of "hacker" achieved prominence, was that "hacker" had nothing to do with breaking into systems, though hackers might do that. "Hacking" meant grinding out computer code product, testing the result, etc etc. I presumed this was a jocular self-deprecating reference to writers of cheap popular fiction, who are or were known as "hacks" - but perhaps this is all wrong?

Actually you are indeed mistaken here: the meaning of the word "hacker" that I'm referring to is someone who loves computers and knows a lot about them and is constantly exploring computer systems and technology to learn and to improve themselves and the technology.

And FROM THE EARLIEST days, this included breaking into systems and crashing them. If you want to learn how the alarm clock works, you have to take it apart, and sometimes you can't put it back together again. Sometimes you just smash the thing and look at all the pieces.

The earliest hackers at MIT (as reported in Steven Levy's book "Hackers") also used to do things like pick locks, break into buildings, do elaborate practical jokes which the Humor Impaired might view as simple vandalism. The difference between hacking (in the good sense of the word) and computer crime is simply a matter of context.

I wrote: I don't care much for big fat high fantasy. ... Even the ones I enjoy, I find I want to CUT, CUT, CUT most of the words and tighten up the story incredibly.

You responded: Possibly this is a cultural difference between readers who just want to get the story, ma'am, and those who want to visit and inhabit the world in which it's set?

I don't think that's the case - I certainly do love character-driven mainstream fiction where some might say nothing much happens at all. I love to visit and inhabit strange worlds, even in my mainstream fiction where the worlds are supposed to be real.

It might be the case that I feel like all medieval fantasy is set in the SAME WORLD, and I've been there. It doesn't have indoor plumbing or cable television; I don't want to go back. However, just because that's how medieval fantasy appears to me doesn't mean that it's worthless - can I state these opinions without starting the Medieval Fantasy Flamewar?

Alan Bostick - Yes, I know about the MIT Tech Model Railroad Club and have a little bit of familiarity in its history. These were the same people who started messing around with computers about 50 years ago. Does the word "hacker" predate computers?

I have a feeling this may be one of those computer industry words that nobody knows PRECISELY where it came from, like the word "bug."

Here's what the Jargon File says about the word hacker:

http://info.astrian.net/jargon/terms/h.html#hacker

I simply disagree with the author's definition #8: "[deprecated] A malicious meddler who tries to discover sensitive information by poking around. Hence `password hacker', `network hacker'. The correct term for this sense is cracker." I say that's simply wrong, wrong, wrong, #8 is on its way to becoming the preferred definition of the word (if not already there). But a dictionary has a right to be prescriptive instead of descriptive.

The definition also states: "This term seems to have been first adopted as a badge in the 1960s by the hacker culture surrounding TMRC and the MIT AI Lab. We have a report that it was used in a sense close to this entry's by teenage radio hams and electronics tinkerers in the mid-1950s."

Alan Bostick writes:

"Would it then make sense for me to respond along the lines of 'The firewall went up pretty hastily at boingboing'? Would it be appropriate for someone else 97 I dunno, maybe Scott Marley? 97 to slam Cory because he's upset that 'someone wants to talk about hackers who isn't one of us'?

"Bill Higgins already said this, above. I get the distinct impression that this point has been missed, over and over again."

Actually, I didn't. I uttered only one word.

I was attempting, apparently successfully, to get you to recall lengthy screeds you have encountered about the word "hacker" and its various meanings.

For readers who had never been through that particular battle, I knew this strategy would fail. But you and Mitch have elaborated for their benefit.

Mitch says:

Actually you are indeed mistaken here: the meaning of the word "hacker" that I'm referring to is someone who loves computers and knows a lot about them and is constantly exploring computer systems and technology to learn and to improve themselves and the technology.

And FROM THE EARLIEST days, this included breaking into systems and crashing them. If you want to learn how the alarm clock works, you have to take it apart, and sometimes you can't put it back together again. Sometimes you just smash the thing and look at all the pieces.

This, of course, is still radically removed from cracking; it's more like learning anatomy by dissecting. And even so it points more toward destruction than accounts I've read of the computer hacker culture in its early days; I would have said that you often learn very little from crashing a computer (except, if you're lucky, what you did wrong).

I suppose "hacker" may have varied from place to place, but when I was hanging around MIT in the 70's the point of a hack was not to be destructive; the points of hacking were to gain access where it was barred (not to foul the barred area, simply to be there - MIT was also known for "tunnel hacking") and to make other people go "wow!". (MIT had a long tradition of sometimes-damaging pranks (although the worst one, welding a streetcar to its tracks with thermite, is usually held to be an urban legend), but these predate that sense of "hack".) A good hack was specifically not destructive or even vandalous - except perhaps to the pretentious; I've never seen the connection made in print, but if you remember Khedron the Jester from The City and the Stars you know the outer bounds of what was considered acceptable by other hackers. (Consider "No Knife"(?), which was snuck into an exhibit on modern art and treated seriously by people who didn't realize that "James Tetazoo" was the MIT equivalent of "Simon Jester".)

Going closer to the origin of this discussion: I work with people who from my viewpoint are mundane. (As far as I can see; except for the one who does road rallying, I have no idea what that collection of mostly-Russians does in their off-hours.) On the rare occasions that I try to explain conventions or fandom to them, the first thing I have to say is a polite form of "everything you know is wrong" - because the audience conventions and the audience fandoms are the ones that need mass doses of publicity to make their economics work, so they're what most people think of on hearing those terms. If Burke's blog is not directed solely to the choir, I'm inclined to excuse his use of a term for which we vocalists have a very different meaning.

I'm also reminded, looking at the splatter of terms and interests, of a Holmes essay (IIRC from The Autocrat at the Breakfast Table) about the difficulty of even two people conversing because in such a small group there are actually six people; the ]real[ two ("known only to [their] Maker"), and each person's image of himself and of the other person. "Fandom" has a degree of commonality and a substantial degree of divisiveness - don't get me started on Ted White's definition of fandom. (But do read Mike Glyer's "The Men who Corflued Mohammed.) And fans talking about fandom are all too likely to talk to each other's images, which can raise the noise factor close to infinity when more than a few are gathered together - it's almost an inherent part of being the sort of conversational, participatory oddball who winds up in fandom.

Patrick: Ah yes, Minicon. While Teresa was moderating the Whither panel, I was listening to the technoid in the back rant and wondering where he learned arithmetic (or biology). I won't get into ]costuming[ ]paranoia[; I think there's too much already said.

Just add a little fuel here, here's the TMRC's Dictionary, from 1959, with an early definition of "hack": "Hack -- 1) an article or project without constructive end; 2) work undertaken on bad self-advice; 3) an entropy booster; 4) to produce, or attempt to produce, a hack (3)."

What's odd is that the story I'd heard about early MIT hacks is railroad related. And probably apocryphal.

Seems the lads broke in to the Kenmore Square "T" station one night. Wherein they greased the rails thoroughly.

Morning comes. As does the first train of the day. Many of the lads are standing on the platform of the station...

...to see the train slide through, braking, but unable to stop.

This would've been funny enough, and a triumph.

But the engineer decided to throw the subway train in reverse, to try to make his appointed stop after all.

Which led to everyone getting to see the train slide through the station, in reverse...

...smack into the second train of the day.

Held up the subway all day, untangling that.

As I say, I have no idea how accurate this is, or even where I heard it first. But it is my stock story about the spirit of original-sense "hacking" at MIT.

And, to give credit to the other coast -- I point out that CalTech also has a long history of similarly playful pranks. Re-draping the "Hollywood" sign, and getting the Rose Bowl scoreboard to display their own messages, are among the most public, but it goes back to at least the 1930's where one fellow came back to his dorm room to find his Model T Ford not only assembled in his room, but idling.

Mentioning this to Ulrika, she pointed out that in an alternate universe, where Tech'er slang came to be the more widely known term than MIT's, the perps of such events would be "stackers".

Actually, Kevin, the word fan comes from the British word "fancier." Not "fanatic.

-l.

From everything I have read, that is not the case. The etymology of "fan" is from "fanatic". The American Heritage, at least, agrees with me.

Unfortunately, I don't have an OED to check. Maybe someday...

Timothy Burke said
. . . many fandoms, whether the kind you're describing, or the kind I'm squicked by, intermingle and intertwine with the texts, performances and practices to which they are devoted . . . . Science fiction is an especially good example of that: the fecundity of fandoms (both the Klingon costume stalking-James-Doohan wearing your Starfleet uniform to a jury selection process kind, and the "bohemian network of affinity groups" kind, clearly has had an enormous, mostly positive, effect on science fiction.

I'll try to make this as simple and clear as I can:

Words can have more than one meaning.
Words can accumulate meanings through drift and misunderstanding.
Several current usages of the word "fan" derive, eventually, from the way Patrick and I and most of the posters here use it.
The people using the word in these several other ways probably significantly outnumber us.

Timothy Burke appears to be using the word in some of those other senses, without quite grasping that he isn't talking abbout us (ot that we were here first, which is a bot off the point).

Timothy Burke said
. . . is fandom necessarily and intrinsically social, a "network"?

Yes!
I am acquainted with almost every Big Name Writer who's been named in the conversation (as are several other people, whjich is the point), and on a first name relation with most. When I check in with Robert Anton Wilson, I want to bring news about a neurology article I just saw, or another thought on Orson Welles. He's got all the conspiracies he needs.

Timothy Burke said
You're at a barbecue fishing through the trash can full of ice and soft drink cans, looking to see if there's any Diet Coke left, when all of a sudden you look and say, "Oh, my God, is that JOHN TRAVOLTA over there?! Holy crap, it is!"

An odd choice of illustration: I have several anecdotes about raiding the Bridge parties at LA Worldcons, but if I'm namedropping I talk about how Marvin Minsky complimented me on the jellybeans at my party, and passed on remarkable gossip about Somtow.

Timothy Burke said
I thought that was one of the points of the wonderful movie "Almost Famous." The groupies in that movie had a rich and vibrant little community. The bands they worshipped had become almost incidental and unimportant - they were no longer the REASON for the community's existence, they were an EXCUSE for the community to exist.

I was a Grateful Dead fan for over twenty-five years, and I watched exactly that suck the atmosphere clean away.
Don't go there.

David, I checked my OED, and it agrees with you.

I once read an essay done by someone who purported to have traced the word's origin -- and its first appearance in print -- in connection with the usage of "fanciers" to describe British horse racing circles in, I think, the 1800's. But I can't find that article or essay now, so I have no authority for it.

-l.

make that "i.e., its first appearance in print." Sheesh.

-l.

Laura--

It may be a case of convergent truncation. Being a fancier and being a fanatic are not mutually exclusive, and having them both bobbed would give you the same word. Which has intimations of both.

I realize this is drifting afield, but:

Mitch, you said: Also, I've known people who never wanted to be described as "hackers"--even before the word was synonymous with "computer criminal"--because to THEM, the word connoted amateurishness. These people took pride in themselves as professionals. A friend wrote a very short script to solve a computer problem that had been bugging me for months--turned out the solution was downright trivial. I congratulated him on coming up with a "clever hack" and couldn't figure out why he was affronted by what I intended to be enthusiastic praise.

The most likely reason that the person was affronted was that "hack" carries a sense of crudity and cheating. If you have a program which keeps returning a value one higher than what it should, figuring out what is causing the problem is a "solution". Subtracting one from the result before reporting it is a "hack".

Since I can't know the precise nature of the problem or the solution from your description, I can't know how appropriate the term "hack" was to your situation--but it's very likely that the other person in the conversation thought that he was producting a solution, not a hack.

"Hack" is a judgement. Every etymological reference I've ever encountered agrees on that. ("Hacker: one who makes furniture with an axe" has been in my mind for at least twenty years.) Not everyone wants to have their cleverness labelled "hacks".

I should point out that in the hacker culture as I've intersected with it, the deprication has mostly leeched out the term "hacker". But the term "hack" used alone still has strong senses of "quick, sloppy, functional work" or "work done for frobnicatory reasons rather than serious work".

CHip - Virus-writers and crackers during the 90s said they had the exact same motivation you describe for the early hackers: a desire to learn about systems and impress their peers. Crackers often spoke about "doing a favor" for the owners of the systems they broke into - the next guy (they said) wouldn't just break in, they'd steal something.

My point is that, as computer technology has matured, acts that could be seen as boys-will-be-boys playful learning or legitimate exploration come to be seen as criminal behavior instead.

Hal O'Brien - In the case of greasing the tracks at the Kenmore Square T stop: I can see a case for laughing that off as yet another prank by those lads at MIT. And you can also make a case of it being criminal vandalism. How much did that little prank (assuming it actually happened) cost the taxpayers of the Boston metropolitan area? How much danger were the people at the station in? If the students had been arrested and faced criminal charges, would that have been wrong?

In a very real sense, the kind of long-term "science fiction fandom" I've been involved with for decades is a loose international network of people all of whom were devoted to written science fiction at some point in their lives. (Or who knew, were sleeping with, or -- because they were the only ones who had a car -- had at some point in their lives somehow been persuaded to offer a ride to people who were devoted to written SF, and found they just liked conventions.)

I think of SF Fandom as horizontal. An author who buys his round at the bar is generally liked, an author who has something to say is listened to. The boors are tolerated or not. Fans likewise. There's no Them and Us, not so you'd notice.

SF fans are less likely than anyone else to mind, or even not to notice if, due to circumstances beyond anyone's control, no authors or guests show up, and all the art in the art show was sent to the wrong city.

Media fandom tends to be more vertical. (It can actually be more fun as a guest -- you get fussed over more, and you may never get to buy a round at the bar as someone's always making sure that you as a guest, and anyone you're talking to, has a drink, or whatever you want.)

Comics fandom varies, but the emphasis on signing and the enormous number of things that can be signed, and the way a lot of the people there are there to sell as well as to socialise, tends to result in conventions where the fans go home at 6.00pm and the artists and writers and journalists go off to the bar and try and find an editor to buy them all drinks.

And none of those generalisations are true, and at a large convention these days you'll encounter all sorts of cons going on inside the con and all sorts of fandoms with their own agendas and histories and the membership of the fandoms isn't exclusive either. There are media fans who are literary SF fans who are comics fans... And the rules change from country to country and from genre to genre and from medium to medium...

I had a point I was trying to make, but I'm damned if I know what it was. Good night.

Huh. Eighty-odd posts, and someone finally said something worthwhile.

"And none of those generalisations are true, and at a large convention these days you'll encounter all sorts of cons going on inside the con and all sorts of fandoms with their own agendas and histories and the membership of the fandoms isn't exclusive either. There are media fans who are literary SF fans who are comics fans... And the rules change from country to country and from genre to genre and from medium to medium..."

Way to sum it all up.

Just remember that there will always be a consensus decision upon what "fandom" means, and there will always be an insider decision upon what "fandom" means, and odds are they'll never match up. So be it.

You mean it doesn't go back to golf? Never mind what I was going to say. How about "a hack is one who lives in a stack" instead, and see who raises their hand?

Just to expand on the OED's information on the word 'fan':

The first definition does indeed begin with "a fanatic", but then goes on to say:

"in mod E. (orig U.S.): a keen a regular spectator of a (professional) sport, orig. of baseball; a regular supporter of a (professional) sports team; hence, a keen follower of a specified hobby or amusement, and gen. an enthusiast for a particular person or thing."

The derivation may have been from 'fanatic' but the common usage for at least one hundred years (first usage 1901) has been somewhat less... intense.

Or, to put it another way: The word's been in common usage for a century as something less fervent than its originating form, therefore, pointing out its derivation seems somewhat fatuous.

What's more, when someone talks about "baseball fans" or "football fans", or "action movie fans", not only do they rarely point out the equivalent of drooling fanboys (and they exist in those fan sets as well, after all), they don't expect the rest of the group to swallow the idea that obviously people are going to have the idea that most fen are fanboys because the word 'fan' is derived from fanatic. Why does it work that way for SFF fandom again?

(In which paragraph I use the word 'fen' as the plural of 'fan' and 'fanboy' as the shorthand for 'all the worst qualities that occasionally crop up in SFF fandom personified'.)

Whoever first brought up the fandom/hacker parallel was definitely onto something. "Let's take the worst example we can find in this subset and hold it up as the typical."

For my next trick, I will rant about people who ask writers "When are you going to get a real job?", or better still, people who ask genre writers when they're going to write "something serious".

Tina:

What's more, when someone talks about "baseball fans" or "football fans", or "action movie fans", not only do they rarely point out the equivalent of drooling fanboys (and they exist in those fan sets as well, after all), they don't expect the rest of the group to swallow the idea that obviously people are going to have the idea that most fen are fanboys because the word 'fan' is derived from fanatic. Why does it work that way for SFF fandom again?

Because of a strong anti-intellectual streak in American culture.

A standard argument against Al Gore was that he was too smart, too intelligent, and knew too much about government and foreign affairs to make a good President.

To which I responded: yeah, absolutely right, and this applies to other areas in life as well. For example, the LAST THING I want when selecting a doctor is someone who knows a lot about medicine.

For my next trick, I will rant about people who ask writers "When are you going to get a real job?"

"Only when I absolutely HAVE to," seems like a reasonable response.

I mean, my job is to mess around on the Web all day. It's almost like being paid to blog. One day I figure my company will wise up and I'll have to go back to WORKING for a living.

Quick thing to Lydia:

The worlds you know aren't in my original piece because...I wasn't writing about you. I kind of get it coming and going in your post. I was writing about the human obligations that are involved when you meet a celebrity or object of devotion, and how some people fail of their obligations, not about social networks of fans. So if you don't see yourself in what I wrote, good. The only hobbyhorse I'm continuing to ride is an argument that SF fans, and comics fans, and many other fans, can be to my mind overly sensitive to perceived criticism or misrepresentation.

More complicated thing:

All communities, cultures, societies, feel misrepresented when someone who is Not One of Us writes about What We Think Might Be Us. It's one of the complications that comes with all ethnography. Cultures (and subcultures) often don't feel that what someone has to say about them captures the private, internal, lived experience of being in them. And of course it doesn't: how could it? That's really not the issue. Someone who is not of a culture or subculture can sometimes see something true in it that its adherents could never see (and vice-versa, can miss profound truths that only an adherent could see). Moreover, sometimes what makes a subculture matter in some profound way to the world as a whole is what others who are not part of it say about it, salvage from it, interpret is as. What Tony Horowitz had to say about Civil War re-enactors is, I know very well from my own research, not especially appreciated by some of them. But that's one part because he got at some uncomfortable truths and one part because he compressed the complexity of things into simpler translations for outsiders. I think in the end that for Civil War re-enactors to matter to anyone besides themselves--and maybe even to themselves--they needed a Horowitz to come along and look at them with a fresh eye. His book reconnects them to the culture from which they come, and makes them meaningful to others besides themselves. That's good, I think.

Much more complicated thing still:

I don't know if I'm Not One of You. Which I think is the subtle thing moving on a subterranean level in some of the discussions here. I have an encyclopedic knowledge of SF, fantasy, comic books and computer games. Much of my private mental life is invested in those genres. I'm engaged at the periphery of the social networks Patrick refers to. I'm often asked to "represent" SF and related genres to people who don't know them. I've dabbled in academic criticism of fantasy literature and computer games, and I might do more of that in the near-future. I'm not, however, an active fan in the sense that I think Lydia is thinking of, or at least, not in a dedicated, regular, committed fashion. So there is a question about whether I'm a fan. I think I am, or I think the term ought to be broad enough to encompass me. I suspect Lydia disagrees. Which is another thing that's pretty typical with subcultures, to which she is clearly referring: there are people at the heart or core of them who question the right of anyone at the periphery to claim membership; there are people at the periphery who have a vested interest in widenining the definition. And then there's people wholly outside the subculture for whom such distinctions are often wholly immaterial.

"So there is a question about whether I'm a fan."

Maybe for someone. It's not a question that's worried me, one way or another, at any stage in this conversation.

Generally speaking, I'm biased toward wider definitions. And while in saying so I'm drawing on personal knowledge from outside this conversation, I happen to know that Lydia Nickerson tends in that direction as well, and has taken significant crap from people she cares about as a result. So I think you're wrong in guessing that she's striving to keep the term from "encompassing" you.

Once again, what's happening is that some of us are trying to talk about our experience of change, and other people, you included, are jumping to the conclusion that we're taking a strident stand against that change. In fact I don't think anyone was really "question[ing] the right of anyone at the periphery to claim membership." When it comes down to it, I view Electrolite as the continuation of fanac by other means. Welcome to fandom, here's your accordion.

PNH: When it comes down to it, I view Electrolite as the continuation of fanac by other means.

I thought that this was Science Fiction Review or Beabohema.

A couple of random observations.

I usually see actor/playwright Sam Shepard about once a week. Over time, I've developed quite a nice rapport with Sam (where I can actually *call* him Sam). Not because he's 'famous', but because we have some tastes in common, from Frayn to Lorca to history texts. And while it is sometimes odd and surreal - for instance, when I watched THE PELICAN BRIEF one night, and spent half an hour talking to him the next day about READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN - it is never awkward.

What's awkward is watching *other* people approach him with drooling idiocy. But Sam is a nice guy, and treats them all with wonderful, kind patience. And I didn't get it, so I asked him once. "Why don't you get upset when these people stare at you while you drink your Americano?" I asked.

He shrugged, and said: "I chose this lifestyle. It comes with the territory."

And that was that.

So regarding the original essay by Tim Burke, I have to shake my head in wonder. The Wiggles travel around by choice, and have chosen to entertain children. Why should they get upset when they are approached by children? It's silly.

All of which has absolutely ZERO to do with fandom in any of its myriad shapes and forms. Being star-struck isn't being a fan. Being able to elbow Neil Gaiman aside at World Fantasy so you can talk to Pete Crowther? That's being a fan. (Yes, I admit to it! I did it! And I'm sorry, Neil!)

Mitch: the difference is that the claims of the 90's crackers are partly bull ("learning about systems" - that's what a lab is for, not the rest of the world) and partly connected only to their tiny ]peer[ group - the point of a good hack is that everyone can appreciate it (cf "MIT wins Harvard-Yale game"). Your observation about pranks later being considered crimes doesn't fit; none of the reports of hackers involve anything like the sheer destructiveness of crackers. (Which meant hackers didn't put on the crackers hypocrisy of "helping people learn about problems" that crackers did/do.)

Welcome to fandom, here's your accordion.

What? No toaster oven?

The Wiggles travel around by choice, and have chosen to entertain children. Why should they get upset when they are approached by children? It's silly.

Gabe, just going by the Timothy Burke essay (I have no idea who or what the Wigglies are, never having heard of them before) I suspect that they weren't so much getting upset by being approached by children as by parents with children. IME, child entertainers can usually deal with child fans politely and well: but obsessive parents determined to get a photo of their kid with SomeCelebrity for the family website can go beyond all bounds of politeness and reason.

No, Lois, lesbians get toaster ovens...

What? No toaster oven?

No, the toaster oven goes to Patrick when his recruitment numbers hit the goal threshold.

Yonmei gets it. It's not the kids, it's the parents with kids. Actually, the Wiggles were gracious, friendly and patient with everyone. It's just that flinch I saw on one of them, and the aggressiveness of the parents-with-kids. I think these guys genuinely enjoy the attention of children, but the 2-4 year olds who like them best actually generally wouldn't grab at them in a public setting. In fact, most of the kids I saw were either blithely unaware of the "real" presence of the Wiggles, or innocently excited by it, the same way my daughter gets exciting when she sees a guy dressed up as Chuck E. Cheese. The parents-with-kids ambushes were something else entirely, I felt.

I remember an interview with Maurice Sendak, author of Where the Wild Things Are. He was talking about being out on a book tour, and said that he felt so sorry for the little kids being forced into such strange circumstances. He remembered a four-year old in queue with his father. When they got to the front of the line, the father explained that Where the Wild Things Are was his son's absolutely most favorite book. His son had the book clutched to his chest.

Then the father tried to get the kid to give Sendak the book to autograph. No go. Nah-ah. Father explained that this was the man who had written the book. This information was treated as the irrelevancy it was. Finally, after what must have felt like an eternity to Sendak, the little kid surrendered his book, saying, "Well, ok, but don't you mess it up, mister."

Timothy: I was onced talked into donning costume, padding, and fake foam head to be Miss Piggy for a bunch of kids during a National Library Week program. There were no parents present and the little buggers could have used someone to keep them in line. I was poked, prodded, pinched, and generally made miserable by children trying to determine if I was real.

MKK

OOps. Oh, and Lydy, I bet Sendak was amused. I sure would be if I had written a book somebody loved that much.

MKK

I've continued to chew over this little flare-up because I keep on seeing invisible bits of the interface between "my" fandom and the rest of the world. What Timothy Burke has said isn't particularly unusual -- indeed, that was part of what Patrick said initially. What creates this cognitive dissonance? Where does the chasm of misunderstanding come from?

One part of it comes from the fact that the initial essay TB wrote was about something else entirely, and when he got responses from fans, they came in not just from left field, but from outside earth orbit. Just like I can't recognize my world in what he's written, I suspect he can't figure out how what he wrote has anything to do with the responses he's been getting. His best explanation has been that fans are too thin-skinned, which is a conclusion that the facts don't deny. I don't think it's what's going on, but I can certainly see why it looks that way. It's so easy to look like you're attacking when all you're doing is disagreeing.

The worlds you know aren't in my original piece because...I wasn't writing about you. I kind of get it coming and going in your post.

I'm sorry you feel that way about my post. I worked very hard to keep space open for your point of view, to acknowledge its reality and presence within the debate. You're not wrong. What I tried to say was that you missed something.

I was writing about the human obligations that are involved when you meet a celebrity or object of devotion, and how some people fail of their obligations, not about social networks of fans. So if you don't see yourself in what I wrote, good.

I agree with that point. I've seen some pretty shameful things done by people who were overwhelmed by the importance of someone else. I wish fandom was free of all grotesque hero-worship. It's not, of course.

I think that the thing that I stumbled over was how your first reference to science fiction fandom was in reference to a celebrity. Your initial essay uses the way people reacted to William Shatner in order to make your point. Now, if I'd been in the room, I'm quite sure I would have fled if he'd started singing, but the chances of me being in the room in the first place are pretty low. The chance of me being at a convention that Shatner would be at is vanishingly small. Not because I'm some sort of superior being, but because I'm not typically interested in conventions with paid celebrities. It's not the celebreties per se, it's because they're being paid. A guest who would be a huge reason for me to attend a volunteer-run convention would probably not entice me to go to a more commercially-oriented convention. The dynamics of the conventions are very different. Of course, it doesn't break down anywhere so neatly as "fan run" and "commercial." However, my fannish experiences don't mostly involve celebrities, and so I get cognitive dissonance when you connect fandom with celebrity worship.

Let me try, again, to say this thing: the way you talk about and describe science fiction fandom is completely normal, and that's why I bristle just a little bit. The word "fandom" is mutating in such a way that what I think of as fandom is being pushed aside. The default meaning of that word is coming to mean something different from what it used to. This is a little sad for people who don't want to give the word up, like me, but the real problem is that more and more people are assuming that there's just one fannish experience, and it's not like what I care about.

With due respect to all my friends who always insist on saying when this when the argument comes up, it drives me to distraction when they cheerfully say, "It's all just different types of fandom, after all."

Arghh. This really isn't going well. Sapir-Whassname aside, things can exist for which you have no names. However, if you strip a noun away from a thing, you make it harder to find, and make it more difficult to see. If you then mix it in with several other, like things and use the same noun for all, then the distinctions get badly blurred, and many things become invisible that used to be visible. That's what seems to be happening to me and mine. We're being invisible-ized. It's not a matter of thin skins, or rabid protection of the intellectual worthiness of the text, it's not an attempt to keep ourselves apart as better than other people. It's just that it feels like we're being written out of the histories.

You also said, My real, material connections to the networks Patrick describes are thinner and less social, more solitary, than many. I don?t think it makes me less a fan if my participation in fan networks is mediated through online message boards, email listservs, and so on, and are largely expressed through my own canonical knowledge of science fiction literature and media and through private acts of devotion like festooning my shelves with action figures.

I don't know where you got the idea that participation through online media makes you less of a fan, or that encyclopaedic knowlege of an area of sf literature or media isn't sufficiently fannish, or that decorating your office with Star Wars Memoribilia makes you among the lesser lights. That is so not the point that I'm back to those invisible chunks in the interface between how I see fandom and how you see fandom. I don't know if you're a fan or not. I don't get to decide, either. There isn't, obviously, a fixed definition, and there isn't an entry test or a diploma or anything like that. There's just these guys, you know? Fans do fannish things, like run a consuite for a local convention or memorize the entire script for Star Wars or build weird electronic toys that whizz and have cool lights (or blow up, of course). If I were you, I wouldn't worry about whether or not I was a fan, I'd just do the stuff I thought was fun, and follow my nose. This probably sounds like contradictory advice from me, but I don't think it is. I'm not trying to argue in favor of divisiveness or separation or merit, I'm just trying to argue in favor of precision, and explain why it's important to me.

Mary Kay, Sendak was clearly flattered, but his sympathies were with the child. What was his signature going to mean to this child who had been strictly enjoined not to spoil his books by writing in them? How can it make sense to be forced to let some strange man deface your absolutely favorite book? The story's funny, but I can hear the tone of desperation when the kid says, "You better not mess it up." Sendak can see what the child's issue is, and the father is completely oblvious. It's a sad story, in a way.

I thought the original meaning of 'hacker' had to do with "one who drives a (horse-drawn) cab". A hackney cab? A hack, anyway.

Hack: One who churns out words by the yard.

Crack: Someone who is trying to break into publishing.

Hack: a painful, wrenching cough.

Hack: a blow, as with a blade, esp. if poorly aimed.

The relationship of these two to cheapass writers (like the SF writer, here unnamed, who used roll paper in his typewriter and sent the result to his publisher in mailing tubes without reading it himself - "bad enough to write such stuff") should be obvious.

This whole thing started with Patrick mentioning his sadness. I recognize that sadness, and have some of it myself.

If anybody's still not sure why someone might feel that sadness, I commend unto them these useful sentences from Lydy:

Sapir-Whassname aside, things can exist for which you have no names. However, if you strip a noun away from a thing, you make it harder to find, and make it more difficult to see. If you then mix it in with several other, like things and use the same noun for all, then the distinctions get badly blurred, and many things become invisible that used to be visible. That's what seems to be happening to me and mine. We're being invisible-ized. It's not a matter of thin skins, or rabid protection of the intellectual worthiness of the text, it's not an attempt to keep ourselves apart as better than other people. It's just that it feels like we're being written out of the histories.

Hence, sadness and also ow. Because, you know, it really is/was a cool thing, and when nobody makes a noise about the accuracy of the words used any more (either because they are all dead/tired, or because making a noise on multiple prior occasions has not produced any sign of Getting It from the simplificationist-revisionist historians), then maybe it really will be gone. And it being gone is not something some of us can look at without wanting to mourn. And the revisionist-simplificationist historians are crafting a future in which someone will ask me why I am mourning a way of life in which I stalked James Doohan.

At which point I will probably start doing my mourning with an axe.