Surfin'

Meta
Title:	Surfin'
Creator:	Teegar Taylor
Date(s):	1997
Medium:	print
Fandom:
Topic:	Fandom & and "the Net"
External Links:
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Surfin' is an essay by Teegar Taylor in Psst... Hey Kid, Wanna Buy a Fanzine? #6.

Its focus was on "the Net" and its pros and cons for the the future of fandom.

Excerpt

There are a lot of people who are worried about fandom going online. Will the Net change fandom? Yes, as surely as the printing press changed the way people regarded the written word. Is this going to be a change for the better? That has yet to be determined.

So what's out there?

Stuff. One of the most attractive aspects of the Internet for fandom right now is the variety of relatively useless things having to do with one's current passion that are immediately available. Synopses of episodes, sound bites, video clips, pictures, screen savers and interviews with the stars and producers of every show currently on television are just a click of the mouse away. You can collect more of these fannish "intimacy trophies" in one afternoon on the Net than you could if you haunted a dozen conventions.

The downside of this for fandom is that people reach saturation point quickly and without having to network with others. Fandom grew out of the failure of the media to satiate fannish desires. Fans wanted more and when there was no more, they banded together and produced their own. What sort of fandom will these "overfed" Net fans develop? Will they develop a fandom that is independently creative or just one that parasitically consumes studio byproducts?

E-Mail. E-mail is like regular mail but faster and more casual. I can correspond with friends in England and Canada every day instead of every month. You can send one- and two-line messages that you would never dream of wasting thirty-two cents on. "Still alive," a friend wrote me after a three-month silence. "Yeah, sure," I typed back. It's a great way to work on writing projects. You can get immediate feedback at the time you need it most—while you're still writing. Editing via e-mail is very comfortable. You and your writer can have rapid, relatively painless, back-and-forth dialogue on the son of picky little things that editors thrive on but writers always seem to develop persecution complexes about after the second time they get a marked-up manuscript back through regular mail.

Mailing lists also arrive via e-mail. These are discussion groups. They're sort of like APA's or round robins—only you don't have to participate if you don't feel like it. You can "lurk" (just read others' comments) if you wish. How good and useful a mailing list is depends on who does most of the writing for it. Which brings me to my next item....

Inhabitants. There are a lot of people on the Net right now. A mailing list for a popular show might have well over a thousand people who receive it and could conceivably comment on the topic being discussed. It is a diverse population that is growing more diverse each day...

Contemplation and reasoned dialogue are all too rare in fandom already. The current state of discourse on the Net seems to be a slide in the wrong direction. However, I feel the trend is not irreversible. There are islands of sanity and civilization. As we in fandom "go electronic," we must make every effort to be a presence for good, to make reasoned dialogue and collaborative creativity—rather than the glib gloss and the quick fix—the norm instead of the exception. As Norman Mailer once said in an interview, "Every moment of one's existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit."

Will the Net kill fandom? I think that's going to be determined as the health of fandom always has been, by the actions of the fans.