The More Things Change

[penfold_x]

I've been reading ethnographer Camille Bacon-Smith's book on media fandom, "Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth." She did her research in the mid-late 80s (the book was published in 1991), so her description of how media fandom finds and mentors new members is well out of date, but her theories about how fans communicate with each other (especially social signaling and ordering) are interesting. For example, her passage on buttons:

As in the SF community, the two-inch buttons caligraphed with densely coded aphorisms and arcane words and phrases constitute the most widespread form of word play in the media fanzine community. Unlike the science fiction buttons, however, a majority of the slogan buttons refering specifically to media fandom make use of direct or deliberately distorted quotations from the source products themselves, or range from the generally well known, like "Beam me up, Scotty, there's no intelligent life down here," to the most arcane, such as "Weekend in the Gutter." Most media fans have many buttons, and no fan I have has none.
Slogan buttons signal competance in the manipulation of the codes of the community and act as cues by which participants with equal levels of competence may recognize each other in the public sphere of the convention.

It seems to me that, for media fandom as it exists on LJ, icons are the new buttons. They signal interest (fandoms, subgenres, even cliques within a fandom's subgenres), as well as levels of competency within the community, to the point where outsiders would find the most coded icons unintelligible. That would also explain why we have so many icons, and why it's important to most users that we be able to display them (especially our own creations).

Comments

[gramarye1971]

In a way, the use of icons almost goes beyond the signalling of interest and competence levels in a fan community. They're also used to signal emotions by linking certain memorable scenes, images, and ideas to the fandom in question, and using that fandom as a means of expressing a current state of mind.

Take the icon above, for instance. The text on it conveys emotion quite plainly, but if you know the particular scene that the image comes from, the quip is all the more meaningful (and funnier). I only tend to use it when my day is going really poorly, so for me it both reinforces my link to the fandom and uses that fandom to express and summarise a particularly strong emotion.

[penfold-x.livejournal.com]

IMO, the emotional input is part of the coding. The great thing about your icon is that, as a YM fan, I know the context and that makes what you're trying to convey about your emotional state that much stronger (as well as establishing our mutual interest).

[chevronsha.livejournal.com]

interesting insight and neat to see the evolution of fandom AND the way we communicate over the last decade or so
(sheepishly taking down and boxing up all my fannish pins and conbadges from behind my front door where they have been geekishly on display for ages *evil grin* - now, what to do with the Mr. Work cut-out that has resided behind my basement door since i moved in (security measure..i kid you not))