The More Things Change
Apr. 21st, 2007 09:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
penfold_xI'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80s (the book was published in 1991), so her description of how media fandom finds and mentors new members is well out of date, but her theories about how fans communicate with each other (especially social signaling and ordering) are interesting.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).
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).
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Date: 2007-04-22 02:08 pm (UTC)(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))