LiveJournal - Fanlore

LiveJournal

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Name: LiveJournal
Date(s): 1999 - present
Type: Social Networking Site, Blogging Platform
Fandom: Multifandom, Meta
URL: http://www.livejournal.com/
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Contents

Overview

LiveJournal is a social networking site and blogging platform where many fans post their fanfiction, meta, and other works, leave feedback, and have personal interaction. It was created by Brad Fitzpatrick in 1999, sold first to Six Apart in January 2005,[1] then to SUP in December 2007. [2] Both sales were unpopular among many fans using LiveJournal for their fan activities.

Other blog platforms arose around 1999-2001, but LiveJournal, with its threaded comments, friends list option, and self-expression in the form of icons and interests lists, became the home for the "new" fandom.

The Migration to LJ

By the late 1990s, newsgroups, message boards, IRC, AIM, and mailing lists like those hosted on YahooGroups had become more important than zines, cons, and informal in-person gatherings for fannish activity. Fans could now simply search for fiction on the Internet, rather than having to connect with someone who already knew about zines or stumble upon them at a convention or through an ad at the back of a science fiction magazine. (See also fannish mentoring.)

When blogging software started to became more available in 1999, some fans started up blogs, whether on services like Blogger or on Livejournal. Blogs on Blogger and similar services offered total control and could be integrated into a fan's personal webpage, for one-stop shopping. Livejournal was restricted to its own site and to specific layouts, but offered something new: the friends list, a site-specific form of RSS feed, and icons, to personalize posts. It also included threaded comments, such as those found on early message boards.

The appeal of being able to easily read other people's posts gathered into one place, and to take part in threaded conversations, began to win out, plus the strain on the OneList free mailing list service[3]) and by 2000-01, there was a steady shift to Livejournal from mailing lists, and from other blogging sites. (At the time, there was a lot of , which resulted in several blackouts. This continued despite Livejournal's implementation in late 2001 of an "invite code" policy, where new accounts were only permitted if they had an invite code from an existing user. (The policy was ended in 2003.)

The shift caused some tension (to put it mildly) in existing fannish venues such as mailing lists, with some fans polarizing over whether LJ was a good or bad thing for fandom, and over the next few years arguments sprang up about it. Some fans felt that fandom was already too "balkanized", and that LJ only increased that; there was little to no organization on LJ, and it was nearly impossible to find anyone or anything there unless you already knew what --and who -- to look for. Others felt that LJ was invaluable as it gave them the freedom to say whatever they wanted and to mix'n'match their fannish interests in single posts without breaking someone else's rules, and also that LJ removed the intimidation factor of posting to a list of potentially hundreds or thousands of people. (needs cites, will dig through email if no one else has anything handy; also I barely scratched the surface of the culture-clash fights about all of this, wasn't sure if or how much it should be gone into at all)

Even as some fans on mailing lists were decrying the lack of organization on LJ, other fans on LJ were working to fix that. LJ had begun offering a community function, and as LJ-based fandom grew, it began using communities. In mid-2002, dsreporter was created to track due South fandom across Livejournal, blogs, and archives. Other communities being formed included fic communities for people to post to a central location, "noticeboard" communities where fans in a given fandom could announce posts made to their personal LJs to make them easier to find, challenge communities to encourage more fiction, etc. The new infrastructure, echoing centralized mailing list structure in many ways, made Livejournal easier to adapt to, and even more fans switched. (dsreporter is the first "keep track of the fandom overall" community I remember hearing about; ds_noticeboard came a few years later and was the first "post links to your own work here in this centralized place" comm I remember hearing about. Were communities used a lot before 2002? Anyone know what the first fic community was?)

By the mid-'00s, LJ was a thriving center for fandom, as large groups of fandom had moved to LiveJournal and new fans were starting out there without ever having been on mailing lists or newsgroups. Those who consider LJ their fandom home generally conduct all or most of their fandom activity there.

There have been many occasions (see Strikethrough and Boldthrough as examples) when a large group of fans spread across many fandoms has threatened to jump ship to other journalling services, such as DeadJournal, InsaneJournal, Journalfen, and others. Some communities, especially those whose members were directly affected by the content restrictions, e.g. Snape/Harry communities allowing chan fanart, had large number of fans move to other services or switch to a crossposting model, where the content itself is not on LJ, but an announcement is still made. Currently some fandoms are splintered across several journalling services, while others, especially those not affected by the bans because their content wasn't problematic, just remained on LJ.

Fan Activity

LiveJournal's casual, unmoderated approach to self-publishing changed the way fan writers shared their work. Most mailing lists had strict rules about what could and could not be sent to the list; for example, some lists didn't allow WIPs, some lists didn't allow stories with more than a PG rating, and some lists were slash-only, or no-slash allowed. Mailing lists were also restricted by their text-only format. LiveJournal allows writers to post whatever they want, regardless if it's rated, titled, or even finished. This gave writers the freedom to experiment with form and length, posting multimedia pieces or stories that were under 500 words. It also meant that a lot of the formality had been taken out of publishing a piece of fic. Writers on LiveJournal habitually post snippets of works-in-progress, deleted scenes, and chatroom fics, things that would have been rare or unlikely in the days of centralized archives and mailing lists.

A major facet of LJ community is participation in memes. Out of fandom memes include things like quizzes and surveys (What Color Are You? or the iPod Tarot), and once they catch on they tend to spread very quickly across a user's friendlist. Fannish memes have a similarly rapid growth. Whether a format (like 5 Things) or a challenge (like the first kiss drabble challenge), it is easy for one idea to propagate rapidly across fandom. This usually sparks a backlash after a certain point, with users complaining that the bulk of the posts on their friendslist are just duplications of the meme. Format memes are considered part of the lemon-garlic hummus syndrome.

The friends list replaced the mailing list, which immediately broadened the scope of a fan's participation because she might have friends who wrote in different fandoms than the ones she participated in off-LJ. As more and more fans migrated to LiveJournal, people were commonly "getting into" new fandoms, as well as becoming multifannish and writing and participating in multiple fandoms at one time.

LiveJournal's "memories" option, and later its "tag" option, allowed people to archive their stories on their Livejournal, without worrying about additional domain space, and because of that, many writers started "fic LJs," journals or communities that existed simply as archives for their fiction, tagged by category, fandom, etc., at the author's choosing (and not necessarily that of some central archivist's.) Many fan artists, vidders, and more LJ specific fan participants like icon-makers, and fanmix creators created similar journals for their fanworks.

Communities and Fannish Organization

Fans who disliked the individualized sites--or otherwise complained, "I can't find anything!"--soon strove to create centers of fannish organization, mainly using the community function of LJ. Newsletters, noticeboards, flashfiction communities, and fandom specific, multifannish, kink specific, and other rec LJs were all formed to create fannish order out of disorder. In addition to being, typically, fandom specific, these communities are easy to friend and defriend at well, while individual people are not. Savvy fen also use the community's membership lists as reading lists; this provides a quick and easy way to read people who are likely to have an interest in the same shows as you.

Disadvantages of LJ as a fannish home

  • On mailing lists, you could usually count on people talking about stuff you found interesting, since you were all there to talk about whatever the ML was made for. On LJ, people talk about a variety of topics, not all of which every person who has them friended will find interesting. So if you want to friend someone because of their posts on A, but they also talk about B, C, and D, which bore you to tears, you're kind of stuck. This problem remains even when all the journals are fannish -- the LJ multifannish culture means that you can have fourteen Supernatural fans friended and all of them will talk all week about American Idol RPF. In Arduinna's essay LJ and Me, she summed it up this way:
    So when you post in your LJ about something that happened in your life -- do I owe you a story of my own? Even if I don't know you, and don't particularly want to invite you into my life? I mean, I was reading your LJ hoping to see your reaction to last night's SGA, not to hear you talk about your life.
    ...If I make a filter for NUMB3RS, I want everything that appears in that filter to be about NUMB3RS, and I would really like it if the posts were related to each other, part of a single ongoing conversation with many voices, full of tangents and offshoots but all connected. I don't want a dozen posts on a dozen subjects written by people who happen to be interested in NUMB3RS.
    This issue has been alleviated somewhat by the introduction of tags and tracking, allowing someone to follow a fan's posts about a given topic without having them friended. Nevertheless, the diffusion of the culture and the voyeurism inherent in the system remain.
  • Livejournal is not optimal for archiving fiction (or any kind of fanwork), as many people don't tag properly (or at all) or keep a master list of their fics. Fanworks can also disappear whenever someone temporarily deletes their journal to gafiate, or when someone migrates to an LJ clone.
  • The unfortunate "friends" terminology. Because of the (real or perceived) connection when calling someone a "friend" on LJ -- which elsewhere would simply be considered someone whose blog you enjoyed reading, or someone who read yours -- blurs the line between social connections and simply culling fannish information. Therefore "friending" or "de-friending" someone comes with unfortunate emotional connotations and can cause anger and resentment and sadness and woe. As an additional negative side-effect, you can end up with huge, unwieldy flists out of fear of hurting someone's feelings by not friending them back or by culling them.
  • It is difficult to find the right balance between public and private on an easily searchable blog site. If you friends-lock an entry, sure, your dad won't find it, but then neither will a fan not on your flist who might be looking for fic in that fandom.
  • On Livejournal, there's no neutral ground; everyone feels qualified to comment on everything else, because they're making posts in their own journals. Fights skip here and there like wildfire, making wank harder to control.

Instances of Fannish Backlash

Common LJ Terms

  • icon - A small graphic that displays next to a user's posts and comments. (The official term used by the site is "userpic.")
  • GIP - Gratuitous Icon Post. A post or comment whose entire purpose is to show off an icon the user likes, is proud of, or finds relevant to the conversation.
  • Flocked - Friends locked. A post that can only be read by other LiveJournal users on one's friends list.
  • Flist - Friends list.
  • Commentfic - A short fic posted in a comment to a friend's LJ post, or in your own with another person. (See also tigging.)
  • Comm - Short for community, an LJ discussion forum.
  • Friend - To add someone to a friends list.
  • Defriend - To remove someone from a friends list.

See Also

  • LJ Clones - a list of Livejournal clones and their fannish relevance (if any)

References

  1. ↑ Young Web whiz blogs his way to a bundle, from The Oregonian and posted to LiveJournal (Posted January 7, 2005. Last accessed November 16, 2008.)
  2. ↑ LiveJournal FAQ: How did LiveJournal get started? Who runs it now? (Accessed 1 October 2008.)
  3. ↑ Several posts on a private list mention blackouts through June 2001 -rache
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