Late Spring of My Discontent

[akirlu]

No, that's not fair. I'm quite content with late spring. Scotch broom is flowering everywhere, looking rather like forsythia, only more fragrant. My variegated tulips are finally blooming, as is the dogwood around town, and something that has blossoms that look like small, very pink dogwood blossoms, which may well also be dogwood, but then may be something else utterly. I am no botantist.

The long bank of lavender down by the Sciences smells of lavender even now -- it's not my imagination -- even though there are no flowers yet, only the old, dry seed heads from last fall. But lilac and wisteria are doing their best to fill in the possible shades of blooming purple.

Apropos of purple, I was walking back up the hill from MOHAI, fresh from a presentation on records disaster management, when I noticed how many of the flowers around the Engineering buildings were in purples and yellows. "Funny," says I, "Someone has marykaykare's taste in color schemes." Beat. Beat. Oh. UW. Huskies. School friggin' colors. Oh. I am so not plugged into the Dawgs mentality.

But I am feeling a bit grumpy and discontented about LJ. It has been striking me lately that some of my best little bits of business are going into late-thread comments in the LJs of people most of my friends haven't friended. Where my little gems will be lost to posterity and most everyone who knows me. And that this may well also be true of many or most of the comments of people whose writing I enjoy. I really, really miss the one-room transparency of RASFF in the old days, where most of the folks I wanted to chat with were in one place, and everyone had access to all the same conversations, and with a decent newsreader you could track all the posts and comments of the folks you were most interested in reading. Here and now it's hit and miss, and mostly miss, taking part in the conversations of my friends, unless they happen to originate in a place that I go back to and check regularly. I feel boxed in and compartmentalized and excluded by the structure of this place. Foo.

Comments

[davidlevine]

LJ is not trying to do the job that RASSF did. The problem is that there is as yet no tool that can do what RASSF did, which was to serve as a single forum for all the computer-enabled fans in the world. The number of such fans has grown too large to be managed; RASSF itself became unusable many, many years ago.

LJ is the best replacement I've found so far for RASSF-that-was, after more than ten years away. What LJ-now and RASSF-then have in common is a population of reasonable size (no more than one order of magnitude bigger than the monkeyshpere). If LJ had RASSF's population it would be as unusable, and I suspect that time is coming, and when it does I will leave LJ as I left RASSF, reluctantly and with great sadness.

But... given that LJ is a different tool, it demands a different interaction style. One that seems to work is, as eleanor suggested, posting a new article to your own LJ that riffs off of ideas in other LJs. This is harder than either posting a news article or posting an LJ comment, but it lets you selectively include text (by copy and paste, not automatically, which encourages thoughtful inclusion rather than the dreaded point-by-point replies) and link directly to the entries that prompted your thought (unlike RASSF's "as someone said somewhere upthread" or having to quote the whole damn thing). It's less spontaneous, but rewards the thoughtful. In some ways it's more like the network of zines and LoCs that existed before Usenet than it is like Usenet.

Which reminds me of an idea I had some time ago and haven't yet posted anywhere: every fan on LJ is a faned, and your FList is your perzine. It includes articles from those you have invited to contribute, but you publish whatever they send (similar to some paper zines, actually) and in the order they send it. It also includes LoCs. Other people can read your zine if they wish, but most people are too busy pubbing their own zines...

[spacecrab.livejournal.com]

LJ actually has a population that's many times larger than the number of active participants in latter-day rasff. You don't see them, because of LJ's "opt-in" (rather than of "opt-out") subscription mechanism, mentioned above.

The flavor of electronic (as well as paper and audio) communication venues is influenced, to a certain extent, by the physical structure of the venue: threaded vs. non-threaded, moderated vs. non-moderated, edited vs. aggregated.

Setting physical format aside, for a minute, I think a good case might be made for rasff being enjoyable, at its best, because it was populated by smart participants with broader interests and wider backgrounds of knowledge on display than you might find in fannish e-lists (or fanzine letter columns). I think rasff and Livejournal have that in common. "Hardcore" science fiction fans are just one demographic in the population.

FWIW, the online forum that I regret not having, anymore, is the GEnie Science Fiction Roundtable.

The attraction, for me, of the GEnie SFRT was the binding glue of its pre-constructed forums and topics: specifically created by science fiction fans for science fiction fans. The spinoffs of the SFRT (SFFnet and Dueling Modems) attempted to maintain this structure, but they never developed the centrality that SFRT had as *the* place for science fiction fans to go to write to other science fiction fans.

You might argue that all of these venues (including fanzine letter columns) recruit their participants from anyone who's interested in "messaging" other people on a regular basis. But, for me, there's always been a certain amount of attraction in venues that deliberately recruit from a population who identify with science fiction as a shared political experience.

In the last five or six years, the Web has given birth to a large community of bloggers who subsume the passion for science fiction as a political channel into a larger political experience. (I hope the term "futurist political experience" can be understood, here, in a broader sense than "Michelism" (http://nielsenhayden.com/electrolite/archives/000398.html#1742)).

The Web has also spawned a bunch of other journaling communities where the "futurist political experience" is not the primary binding glue. Livejournal is one of them. I think many more of the members who are into s-f in these communities see it as a form of entertainment, not a political experience.

It's difficult to make statements about Livejournal, as a whole, because it's vastly bigger than any of us really sees. When we make statements about the flavor of Livejournal, we're mostly making statements about what we read in a much smaller network of interlocking friends lists.

Some LJers have addressed the "lack of centrality" issue by posting their comments to other people in their own journals. One of the most interesting LJ experiments I've seen is Patrick's friends list (http://www.livejournal.com/users/pnh/friends), which is very fanzine-like in its combination of personal pages, community subscriptions, and RSS feeds.

When you start talking about differences between rasff, LJ, and fannish mailing lists, I think relevant factors include the recruitment population and the "mission statement," as well as the physical format of the venue.

It's also true that rasff was an atypical Usenet forum, in its best days, because of the internal message and topic moderation practiced by the most active participants. I know there are other Usenet forums that manage this without officially being moderated, but they're the exceptions, rather than the rule. I don't know which came first: the flight of the active rasffans who practiced this principle, or the inundation of the group by too many people to deal with. But I do think one element of LJ's appeal is the ease with which unwanted noise can be filtered out.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

RASSF itself became unusable many, many years ago.

My mileage varies on "many, many". You had already long since found RASSF unmanageable at the time that I would have said it was in its heyday, for me. I did actually use to read the group back in 1988 or so, before it was first broken up into a small galaxy of related groups, and frankly, it wasn't as interesting or fun back then. For me, anyhow.

And yes, Ellie's idea would help get my stuff more visible to people who happen to read me, but that actually isn't the core of my complaint. I wouldn't get what I want unless the folks on my friends list did it too, and the folks on their friends' lists showed up on mine when they were being interesting and pertinent. And even so, it wouldn't really be a collective conversation in the same way. Yes, LJ is a different tool. I fully recognize that. I'm not saying it was ever intended *for* the same thing as RASSF-that-was, but that it's the closest thing I have any more, and at times this closest-thing-available is deeply unsatisfying for scratching an itch that I have. It's like wanting Princess torte and being given Linzer instead. Perfectly lovely for its aspirations, perhaps, but really not an adequate substitute.