This Is Not A Pipe: Fandom as Virtual Concourse Or, Why Livejournal is a Prototypical Ideal Learning Environment
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| Title: | This Is Not A Pipe: Fandom as Virtual Concourse Or, Why Livejournal is a Prototypical Ideal Learning Environment |
| Creator: | shaychana |
| Date(s): | 2005-01-25 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom: | |
| Topic: | |
| External Links: | skyehawke :: archives :: :: Story :: This Is Not A Pipe: Fandom as Virtual Concourse, Archived version |
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This Is Not A Pipe: Fandom as Virtual Concourse Or, Why Livejournal is a Prototypical Ideal Learning Environment by shaychana.
It is posted at the essay section of skyehawke.
The Essay
Rene Magritte titled his painting of a pipe 'This Is Not A Pipe.' This particular piece of art, though simple, is one of the most discussed in history. What did Magritte mean by 'this is not a pipe?' The painting obviously shows a pipe! But no, the painting of the pipe is a representation of a pipe, and the representation of a thing is not the thing itself. The man who points to the painting and says "but that's a pipe!" is simply confusing the signifier for the signified.
I read Leon van Schaik's paper 'Virtual Concourse' this week as part of my research into new trends in education. Though van Schaik wrote in reference to universities and their online curriculum, I couldn't help but keep thinking about fandom on Livejournal (LJ) when reading his paper. Relating his abstracted points to a concrete system like LJ made it a lot easier to understand what he was trying to describe, and I don't think I was being unnecessarily fandom-obsessed by reformulating van Schaik's ideas into a fandom translation. There are, I think, significant similarities.
Summarizing van Schaik's concept of the virtual concourse, these are the main ideas he highlights:
Peer society [snipped]
Display booths [snipped]
Information display [snipped]
Feedback [snipped]
I think van Schaik's idea of the virtual concourse helps to explain the popularity and success of LJ as the hub of fandom. For me at least, his theory resonated as an explanation for why I've been fannishly inclined for at least a decade. Because in the guise of community fun, fandom is a vehicle of learning - of formal and informal communication skills (writing/analyzing and the negotiation of social relations), and of self-discovery and growth. The systemic architecture of LJ, I think, facilitates this learning process admirably well.
We have our journals, where we can put our personas on display. We have our userinfos (with the interests lists) and our usericons as our advertisements for seeking potential friends. We have communities and our flists to keep up with others. We have the most user-friendly comment boards (with their conversation-style branching system instead of the linear system of most message boards) where we can leave feedback publicly. The posting codes allow for easy linking offsite or to other places onsite.
Van Schaik describes seven layers of user engagement, which I believe have their fandom mirrors:
L1: Tentacles into the world: Van Schaik describes this as visiting organizational websites, exhibitions and Open Houses. In fandom terms, this is when the potential fan gets excited by the source material and goes googling.
L2: Hot pursuit: The place-to-be effect is established. This would be when LJ is discovered by our innocent fan.
L3: Sampling: Concourses are bounded and related to actual places and are populated with user-personas. The fan lurks around, reading journals and community posts, link-hopping.
L4: Enrolment [sic]: The fan is sucked into the vortex and gets hirself a journal.
L5: Interactive engagement: In van Schaik's model, this is where the learner becomes a fully-active member of the concourse. Systems that link e-mail, sms and the web disseminate incident news to relevant groups. In fandom, the fan becomes part of the fen, becoming comfortable with posting fic/art/meta/comments in personal journals and communities, learning fanspeak and cultivating hir flist. Reccers and fandom newsletters ease the navigation of fandom beyond hir personal flist.
L6: Monitoring: Although LJ has privacy screening options with flocks and filters, the fact remains that it is a very public and open system, where others can quite easily know what others are up to.
L7: Observation and continuous improvement: User evaluation and feedback is an integral part of the positive ritualisation of the concourse. The (constructive) comments the fan gets on hir posts, if taken in good faith, can ultimately only help the fan to learn and grow.
I've seen fandomers in LJ talk about feeling a pressure to produce, most notably in Jetis's journal, about feeling a need to keep running to catch up. This, I think, both proves the validity of van Schaik's theory and shows its primary failure. Van Schaik assumes that learners can proceed at their own pace comfortably in a virtual concourse, seemingly independent of the progress of others, but when the desire to learn is created, the impression of falling behind can lead to performance anxiety. Van Schaik's utopian vision transfers power from the teacher to the learner, but still fails to meet the angst-free criterion.
But what has fandom and LJ got to do with Magritte's pipe? I think that folk on LJ can sometimes forget that the symptom is not the illness. The site may crash, and my journal may go down for maintenance, but the LJ system is wonderfully conducive for fannish activity. I love LJ. Let's not toss out the bathwater with the baby.* Now let's see if I can sucker someone into writing Babe/Nemo. What? They're both talking animals, right?
* Not pointing any grubby fingers here, just trying to spread the LJ-love. And yes, I know I mangled the idiom. I did that on purpose, because I honestly dislike babies.