Interview with Nikki White
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| Interviews by Fans | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Interview with Nikki White |
| Interviewer: | Susan P. Batho |
| Interviewee: | Nikki White |
| Date(s): | October 27, 2001 |
| Medium: | online as PDF |
| Fandom(s): | many |
| External Links: | effect of commercialisation and direct intervention by the owners of intellectual copyright : a case study : the Australian Star Trek fan community by Susan Bathos (2009) |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Nikki White was interviewed at Waniassa, ACT.
The interview was included in an academic paper by Susan P. Batho which addresses the effect of the Viacom Crackdown, TPTB, and Australian fandom.
Part of a Series
- Interview with Susan Batho
- Interview with Geoff Allshorn
- Interview with Julie Gormly
- Interview with Ruth Collerson and Joanne Kerr
- Interview with Shayne C. McCormack
- Interview with Ian McLean
- Interview with Tricia McKinlay
- Interview with Rose Mitchell
- Interview with Regina
- Interview with Jim Rondeau
- Interview with Derek and Sharon Screen
- Interview with Rachel Shave
- Interview with Nikki White
- Interview with Donna Hanson
- Interview with Bob Miller
- Interview with William Hupe
- Interview with Dr. Ann Hupe
- Interview with Fern Clarke and Jodi Williams
Excerpts
My actual Fannish activities, like fanzines that came with Star Trek I bought a fanzine called Babel not long after I got involved with Star Trek Fandom and I didn’t believe that people actually wrote stories and things and published them because I’d done that for years with different television programs. Paper fanzines were a lot underground and the exchange rate, plus the cost of bank drafts and so forth it was very easy to go and buy fanzines all through the 70’s and the 80’s. The differences, we’ll leave aside the internet for the minute. For my theory is the internet hasn’t really made a lot of difference in this country because I think they had gone tits up before the internet had come along. Anyway the main problem was that when the writing fell off with the fanzines in America, a lot got into slash, which is pretty narrow but also they became very pretentious. Somebody had been reading too many New Age Science Fictions, so you end up with things like Kraith or they got off into relationships. It wasn’t more, further adventures of Star Trek, the Star Trek crew, or the Enterprise crew. It was more let’s delve into the personal lives of Captain Kirk or Mr. Spock or their father or their cousin or their uncle or whatever and that kind of got boring. Then the British started, took up the torch and then that fell over.
So that was one problem, the writing fell off. Then, of course, you always had the problem that people didn’t always send you fanzines when you paid money for them, that didn’t really help. Basically that was one of the reasons I started to buy less of them as simply I didn’t think the quality of writing was there. It was so easy for people, with a minimal amount of talent to write something which was basically fairly sentimental or whatever like that, but it wasn’t really a lot of imagination. After a while, people kind of got in a rut and by now I’m talking about the mid 80’s: it wasn’t just Star Trek, it was Battlestar Galactica and some of the other science fiction shows which we knew the writing there [sic], even Star Wars was a bit like that, and that was a big problem. I had a lot of stories that I used to send to various fanzines overseas mainly Star Wars this was the late 70’s so I had a backlog of those and I decided this was getting more than I can place because they don’t come out that often over there so I thought right I’ll do my own. So I did my own fanzines, and this was interesting because I did originally about 100 copies and continued to do 100 copies and then reprint, reprint till about the mid 80’s and then it’s like somebody pulled the plug, I was selling mostly overseas but gradually there was a complete decline in buying fanzines altogether. It started really in about 1985 around about that period, because it pre-existed the internet. So that wasn’t really an issue. The real problem was I don’t know why but I tend to think it was a generational thing at least in Australia. That it was a certain group of people at a certain time in a certain place, that bought together a certain degree of creativity and had that sort of thing. The people that came in afterwards didn’t seem to have that. They expected to be spoon-fed a lot of the time. The first wave was buying the fanzines but not contributing, then the later wave after that, didn’t even buy fanzines so it kind of went right down. So that was the problem, and the difficulty there is that we seem to have more people in Fandom but less what I call real fans. Because to me a fan is somebody who will ask the next question; and will go beyond simply just watching every episode created. They will wonder about the background the science or the society or whatever it might be, they’ll ask the next question. They may express this in a number of ways, they might write a poem, they might draw, they might write a story, or make a costume or something like that. But they’ll do something they want to become involved actively. Too much now they just want to consume. I mean they sit and watch eight hours of Next Generation or something and five seconds later they can’t tell you a single thing about the episodes. They can’t hold a conversation about the television program in any meaningful fashion.