fan participation
My lj time has gotten so low that lately I'm not sure if I'm checking my user info to see if I was friended or defriended, or which I would prefer. I don't defriend if someone doesn't drop me first, but I feel guilty when I can't check things. *shrugs* If you've been meaning to drop me, now would be a good time to do it.
It's funny, everyone was saying that fandom was slowing down, everyone was losing interest in things. I used to think no way, nuh uh, just your circle. Well, now, I'm starting to not only buy into that thinking but come up with my own theories as to why. And it really doesn't have much to do with real level of interest, though that's sort of part of it.
We all got involved in fandom cause there was something to spark interest, but on a more fundamental level, cause we had the time for it. As time passes, responsibilities and time commitments change, and it can make a big difference. Kids who had time in middle school are finding that high school eats their time, same with the high school to college shift, and of course, the college to real world shift. Not to mention, new projects show up at work, a new kid joins the family, people go back to school, new boyfriends and husbands enter the picture, divorces happen, life just throws a loophole that decides to eat all your time.
Add to that the interest factor. New things steal our interest with our time, or we're juggling so much new stuff that any downtime we just want to go back to our old standbys, or spend time on other things. At the end of a long day, debating a canon point or reading a bad fic might not be first on someones list of relaxing things.
What about replacements newbies? They're in fandom, but in different places. Now they're on myspace or facebook or mugglenet. They're in two or three fandoms, but sort of lurking, sort of participating in all three, or in one but reading fics in countless ones. Yes, people have been doing all of this for ages, but the flexibility to be able to read ten fandoms and never feel lost has increased exponentially with the growth of fansites and wikipedia. I don't need to catch every episode to jump into a fic.
The standard places to hang out are getting shifted, moved, or thrown out the window all together. Some newbies have no idea what ff.net is, and that's where a hell of a lot of fandom started. There's just been so much press and publishing on fandom in the past 10 years or so that newbies can come in by a backdoor, or get straight where they want. More people means more word of mouth, but it also means rec's to specific communities and forums. Fandom's growth also means division into ever smaller niche. So there could be a red hot Snape/Squid community, but anyone who isn't part of it, or friends with someone in it, just wouldn't know.
There is also the lack of any new releases. The last book was a year ago, last movie even longer. So really, there isn't much incentive to even google HP, much less get involved in a fan community, for the average HP fan. So people likely to stumble on fandom are those familiar enough with fan communities to be involved in other ones. These are likely to be readers and art viewers, but not active participants in the fan community.
So? *shrugs* I don't know. I'd actually love some hard data on fandom participation, age distributions, multi-fandom distributions. And I need it large scale, which is actually an issue in itself. It's almost impossible to really sample fandom and get a great read on numbers because people drop in and out all the time, and cause anyone could lie. Yeah, sampling reduces that error, but you've got to take the correct samples. Cause fandom is so niche oriented, you'd have to sample every subgroup to get great numbers, and that's sort of impossible.
Leave it to me to get bored in data structures and type out some random meta. *shrugs* I haven't written anything remotely fandom related in a while, so this was probably past due anyway.