Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good For You and fandom: preliminary thoughts
It’s always a little suspicious when someone asks you to believe something really attractive. I mean sure, Mr. Johnson, I’d love to believe that “popular culture has, on average, grown more complex and intellectually challenging over the past thirty years.” What partaker of that culture wouldn’t? But Johnson gets down to what he’s talking about on
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My son had a part-time job this summer testing videogames developed for the hardware my husband's working on right now
That sounds fantastic. Yeah, I guess if you're in the right place at the right time, you can get paid for nearly anything. Did he enjoy it, or did it become "work"?
Fandom to me is very basic - it's the group of Paleolithic people around the campfire at night telling stories to each other.
Precisely. That's a fantastic formulation for it, and in line with Henry Jenkins' bit about fanfiction being the folktales for a culture whose heros are owned by corporations. But my post-modern brain loves that that model can be true at the same time that this "video game" one holds true; I love these different ways of looking at the phenomenon to find hidden aspects.
You can watch it in action, a laboratory for changing and spreading memes.We've probably talked about this before, but I confess in many cases I'm marginally more interested in the fandom/fic ( ... )
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Most books which deal with pop culture in any remotely serious way--at least, the ones I have found--are WAY worse than this. This is frickin' poetry.
This is also why I didn't go back to school.
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