My failure at fandom

I've been a fangirl for more than two thirds of my life. It started in 1985, when I first heard about a Norwegian pop group called a-ha, who I still follow today (and have tickets for their last-ever *sniff* UK concert in November this year). I bought all their albums in the 80s (replaced them on CD in the 90s, put them on my iPod in the 00s), read all the magazine articles and bought the merchandise. In my 20s, I collected X-Files episodes, memorabilia  and spinoff scientific books on the myths behind them. In a fortunate choice of jobs, I successfully stalked made contact with an actor whose work (and face) I had admired for years and inadvertently got myself invited to dinner at the family home. In my 30s, I followed a British pop band around the country (and even to Amsterdam), then nearly bankrupted myself following a related band after they broke up – this however, resulted in meeting my partner of five years (the drummer's best mate), so there was an upside to financial ruin.

I've hung out on forums and in chat rooms talking about songs, guitars, jeans and haircuts, I've made new friends at gigs (friendships that lasted longer than the bands themselves) and read (and written) all manner of good (but mostly bad) fan fiction, even before the internet existed. I've collected entire series of TV shows and books, I've written reviews (some of which resulted in the band seeking me out to say hi) and taken hundreds of (mostly blurry) photos. I've admired and sighed and swooned, I've cheered and danced and waved my hands in the air, I've gone back to gigs, movies and performances more than once, then tracked down rare footage (well before YouTube) to view at leisure in my home. I thought I had a pretty good understanding of the fan thing. Turns out I was doing it all wrong.

One of the things I was got wrong was that I never really wanted to MEET the object of my admiration. The few times I did meet them, reality was inevitably grounding and sometimes disappointing. How do you live up to a performance in real life? You can't. I think in the back of my mind I knew that, but for the most part, I didn't want their only impression of me to be labeled, with a gigantic neon sign above my head, as a FAN.

As a FAN, I knew the Famous Person in question would be on  their guard. Fans collect information, they collect it and share it, some to gloat over their ability to acquire it, others just to share and enjoy it with others they know would appreciate it. People in the public eye are aware of this and adjust their conversation appropriately. I wanted to have the kind of conversation I'd have if I was meeting someone through friends, or work, go to dinner, coffee or a pint and have a chat, not the one-sided kind where that someone was worried I was secretly taping the entire thing.

My other apparent mistake is that I don't approach fandom in the same way as a lot of the 'serious' fans out there, who don’t collect information or art, but experiences: conversations, photos with, signed objects, touched objects, waiting at stage door, attending multiple book signings, not to tell the actor/musician/author how much they enjoyed their work and have a conversation about process or other work, but just to say hi, shake hands and tally up another meeting. It's not to enjoy the object or the experience itself, for what it is, but to log another point in the grand scale of fandom.

I came to this realisation very recently – last weekend in fact. I went to my very first book signing. I've never gone to one because I figured while it's nice to have a book with the author's signature on it, I always wondered what the point of it was. The author isn’t my friend and speaking to him for 20 seconds that he isn’t going to remember in the thousands of 20 second meetings he'd have in his lifetime isn’t going to overly enrich either of our lives.

Fandom, I'd always thought, is about trying to make a connection. You see a film, a play, hear a song, read a book, you're impressed, moved, something about the work touches you. The person who created it is obviously someone you admire for their talent and creativity – and we always want to make a connection with someone we admire. In this age of interconnectivity, of Web 2.0, suddenly this becomes more possible. We follow a Famous Person on Twitter, and if we're lucky and clever enough, they'll see a tweet we send to them and reply to it. Receiving a response from someone you admire is heartening and I always harbour a microscopic (and therefore futile) hope that this could, might, just may be the start of an ongoing conversation… but it rarely is. Particularly if, like me, you back off immediately, in terror of being labeled as a FAN.

The book signing was for Joe Hill's new book Horns, and as I've outlined in a previous post, I had a fairly triumphant experience discovering this particular author.

So I went to the signing, queued up for an hour, had my book signed and chatted about jet lag – my 20 seconds with Joe Hill. All fine. But the odd part of the day was the other fans.

I already had my copy of Horns and had considered taking my copy of Heart-Shaped Box, but thought that was a bit presumptuous, as the signing was specifically for Horns. I shouldn't have worried. Some of the other people there had brought two, four, eight and ten copies EACH of the book to be signed. And sign he did, nice chap, knowing full well that these books were going straight onto eBay and he wouldn't see a penny of the mark up his signature would give them. He posed happily for photos and made jokes with everyone, some of whom had been to a few, if not all, of the signings he'd done throughout the UK that week, despite being weekdays and all times of the day.

Now I get the following-around thing. I've taken days off work to travel to the other end of the country to see a band play and meet with friends who are also fans. But that was an entire evening, sometimes a weekend including sight-seeing, four or five hours of music and dancing and drinking… not two minutes of small talk and watching someone sign a book.

A lot of the fans knew each other, obviously from attending signings, and were comparing notes about the next one they were going to (for another author) and past signings with other authors. One woman was joking about how she'd had to curb her book signings because her 'social life' was starting to encroach on the time she was spending with her children. But the most extraordinary thing were the lists. Lists of who'd been to what signing and how many books they'd managed to get signed, whether the author was happy to sign multiple copies and have their photo taken. These signings, it seems, were not a chance to connect with the person who'd enriched your life with their creativity, they were notches on the great bookmark of fandom. Your status as a fan increased with the number and variety of signatures you'd managed to acquire.

I’ve done some obsessive-compulsive things in my fan career, I own some rubbish merchandise and have spent way too much money on things non-fandom folks would see as irrelevant. But if this acquisition of two minute meet-and-greets is what it take to be considered a 'fan' in the age of the internet, I feel that my aversion to meeting the Famous Person, my contentment with a one-sided 'relationship' and my desire only to connect with them to tell them how much I enjoyed their work appears to make me a failure. But I do wonder if my experience of fandom isn’t richer as a result.

When Twitter goes bad…

Sometime this afternoon, some chap in Birmingham tapped off a random tweet to a chap named Jim and happened to mention @stephenfry in the tweet. He also happened to mention that although he respected and admired our 'National Treasure', his tweets were sometimes.. well.. a bit boring. He even apologised in the same tweet '(sorry Stephen)', possibly assuming that Stephen would not even read the random mention in his Twitter timeline, let alone bother to reply. He certainly could not have anticipated what happened next.

Evidently poor Stephen was having a bad day and, as so often happens when you are alone in your room with only the internet for company (and I speak from personal experience), the tweet struck a nerve. A big sharp one. Stephen retorted with a snippy comeback, then promptly decided he'd had enough of all the nastiness on Twitter, blocked the guy (thus preventing him from apologising in person) and left, slamming the virtual door behind him.

For those of you not in the know, Stephen Fry has over 920,000 followers on Twitter. Many of whom have not bothered to look for the original tweet (now deleted from the perpetrator's timeline) and, thinking that Stephen has abandoned Twitter on the basis of a single insult from a stranger, have launched frenzied attacks on this chap, who will no doubt have to close down his Twitter account and his blog and move to Manchester. Stephen has not been heard from in *gasp* over NINE HOURS, his business partner and webmaster, Andrew Sampson, has issued a stern warning to everyone that they are not to vilify @brumplum (the villain of the piece) and celebrity Fry-pals Jonathan Ross and Alan Davies, who were calmly enjoying their Saturday evenings in front of the tele, have been barraged by people wanting them to check that Stephen is okay.

Not only that, but the exchange, such as it is, has become the subject of blogs, news feeds and, would you believe - headlines on Sky News and the BBC. The word 'bully' has been hurled in @brumplum's direction, along with a vast assortment of other, nastier monikers. All because some chap said to some other chap that he thought some of Stephen's tweets were... well.. a bit boring.

Which brings me to my point (yes there was one) - just how significant is this Twitter thing anyway? I check Twitter nearly every day and follow just over 100 people (some of whom don't post much more than once a month when they remember, Noel Fielding I'm looking at you) but for me it's pure distraction. I don't expect to learn anything useful (although thanks to the QI Elves, I now know that anteaters are toothless), I hope to be entertained and more hopefully made to laugh. My contrary streak can't bear to conform too much to watercooler chat, so I don't follow Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher (although I do have Rumer Willis on my list) or either of the Hiltons (Paris or Perez).

To get my moral superiority fix, I follow several members of the Skeptic Society, including two Mythbusters, I also follow several comedians, a bunch of musicians, a couple of ex-Star Trek actors, two or three great horror writers and most of the cast of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. So no life-changing, credit-changing, job-changing potential there, but it's a laugh and the best tweets are the ones with photos - a voyeuristic taste of the public-private lives of folks I admire.

I hear that there are companies out there using Twitter as a marketing tool, but I have no idea who these companies are, because I don't follow them, so they are failing to sell me anything. I get enough junk mail in the post, why would I ask for more in my Twitter box? A friend of mine is using it for job-hunting - but she does work in media. A CNN column by the CEO of social media site Mashable intimated that those people who aren't on social networks in the future are going to struggle with jobs, socialising and.. well, pretty much existence as we know it unless they sign up. Rubbish. Most people I know aren't on Twitter and they're doing just fine. I have a day job in financial services, the primary industry for the United Kingdom and as my firm is regulated by the Financial Services Authority, on their recommendation (for security and data protection), access to Twitter in my office is banned. On that basis alone I have my doubts about Twitter's future success as a business tool, at least in the financial services industry. And really, if you're a serious investor (and I'm not talking about Mr & Mrs Smith with a £10k ISA), are you going to log onto Twitter to see what the marketing department at UBS are tweeting today or pick up the phone to speak to an industry professional for advice? It's one thing to follow Waterstones to get the latest 3 for 2 deals on chick-lit, it's quite another if you're thinking about investing your children's trust fund.

Then there's real life people. My partner, who is pretty darn internet savvy, follows a bunch of RSS feeds and delights in the Photoshop competitions on b3ta.com and he can't bear the thought of Twitter, for the sheer maintenance of the thing. And he's right, you do need to check it regularly to get any kind of sense of it. I do have a few real life friends on Twitter (pretty much my followers list!), but most people I know aren't. And aren't interested. They're too busy getting on with their lives to write about it in 140 characters or less. And for the most part, I'm grateful for that. Because while it's nice to know what your mates are up to, there's a limit to how many 'eating a sandwich' and 'doing the laundry' and 'I'm sooo tired' posts you can take before you start hitting your head on the keyboard. Twitter is supposed to relieve boredom, not cause it.

And all those promises of how Twitter can make money for you, Joe Bloggs, sitting in your living room, just by sending a few tweets? Yup, just like all those work-at-home jobs stuffing envelopes on your kitchen table. Millions to make. :S

The entire situation with Stephen Fry this evening has been a bit of an eye-opener for me, I'm amazed just how many people involved in Twitter take social networking so seriously, when everyone not involved is blissfully ignoring it and getting on with whatever they were doing before it was invented. I discovered today that you can follow people tweeting about a specific person in real time (or at least I can using TweetDeck), which is something I don't normally do because a) I'm not usually sitting at my computer for long enough to watch it unfold and b) I'm not usually interested in what people 'reckon' - everyone has an opinion, it's just now the internet has given anyone with a web connection the opportunity to reach potentially a worldwide audience. Even if they don't mean to. I look at Tweets from the people I follow because I've CHOSEN to read them, but I'm not interested what the man in the street is saying, because I hear it every day on the Tube, the train and in the office. And for the most part, when they're not discussing the weather, public transport or what they're having for lunch, they're just repeating what they read in the morning paper. Which is usually ill-informed and skewed toward being 'outraged'. Just like all these Twitterfolks are 'outraged' that someone could upset their beloved Stephen so. And now, hours after the event, most people are getting outraged without even knowing what it is that they should be outraged about. It also occurs to me that if Fry was serious about leaving Twitter, it takes three clicks to delete your account. Just three.

So how significant is this Twitter thing? For me, average Twit, not that bloody significant. I'd miss hearing from Wil Wheaton, but if it all fell over tomorrow, if Twitter's servers were shut down all that was left was the fail whale, I think we'd all survive. Heck, we survived The Spice Girls breaking up, we lived through Britney shaving her head and the Mariah Carey Christmas Album, I think we'd get over a Twitterpocalypse. In fact I think you'd find that most people wouldn't even notice.