altivo: 'Tivo as a plush toy (Miktar's plushie)
[personal profile] altivo
Yeah, it's been a while since I've posted here. This is going to get longish, I suspect, so...

I awakened this morning an hour earlier than usual. That may not seem like a big deal except that I normally wake at 5:00 am, quite a lot earlier than many of you who may chance to read this. The reason? Well, on a purely physical level it may have been induced by the fact that I attended an Audubon lecture on the Passenger pigeon and the wider implications for human impact on ecology. The timing of the meeting meant that I ate much later than usual and went to bed at midnight instead of 10:30 pm. So all of this may be just "a bit of undigested cheese or a blob of mustard" (sorry Mr. Dickens.)

Anyway, I awakened feeling too warm and with a feeling of incipient acid indigestion, but also came from a complex and vivid dream-state that left me thinking too hard to go back to sleep.

The dream, summarized as briefly as possible, involved my participation in a group of five people, presumably graduate students, under the auspices of a Canadian university (I want to say it was McGill but I don't know why in particular) and we were compiling and interpreting statistics about various fandoms, including not only the nature of their participants but how they come into existence and why they fade after running through a course of stages. We were trying to identify those stages, and ultimately, to predict topics that were likely to engender large fandoms, and how long each fandom would last.

Mind, all of this may well have been done already. I'm not really a sociologist nor am I a statistician. I think I was included in the panel simply because I am older than the typical grad student and have a long and detailed memory of events covering my lifetime. The fandoms being examined included Science Fiction, Folk Music, and the peculiar merging of the two to form what is commonly called Filk Music, as well as Tolkien Fandom, C.S. Lewis Fandom, Star Trek, Animé, Furry Fandom, and a relative newcomer, MLP Fandom (the Bronies, as they are called.)

A lot of our discussions and investigations looked at the usual statistical elements, such as age, gender, educational background, cultural background, and so forth. It all was pretty dry stuff, and not too revealing except for certain patterns which I think are fairly obvious including the age distribution of participants. My observation was that fandoms, just like the people who make them up, do grow old. They change as they age, and the changes are partly a result of aging participants. Furry and MLP are presently "young" fandoms, both in terms of the number of years they have been active and visible and in the age distribution of their members. Science Fiction literature and Tolkien are now aging, though they do it gracefully for the most part.

This is an oddly academic dream setting for me. If I dream this stuff often, I don't usually wake up with any memory of it. Anyway, at the point of waking, the members of our little group had decided to nominate one of ourselves as the "Chief Fan" among us, the one with the most personal experience of involvement in fan movements. There were three women and two men in the group, myself included. I was by far the oldest, while the youngest was one of the women who was in her early twenties probably. As soon as the topic came up, I knew I'd be the "victim" in the end.

This youngest woman (none of the others were actual people I know in real life, fortunately) was the first to point to me as the obvious choice. She listed reasons including the fact that I openly admitted to having been an avid reader of science fiction, a follower of Star Trek, an active furry who wrote fiction and owned fursuits, and "worst of all" as she put it, one of "those devotees of The Hobbit and the girl who wrote and published it." (Guilty on all counts, I guess, as well as others, such as Dr Who, though only in its original incarnation in the days of Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker. I don't like the current revival productions at all. For some reason, Dr Who was not on the list of fandoms being examined in any case.)

My immediate reaction to the "charges" was to say "Now I do feel old." Then I went on to point out her sexist assumption that Tolkien must be a woman based on the nature of his subject matter. My criticism bounced right off her. She couldn't see the underlying error in her viewpoint on the matter, despite the fact that all the fandoms we were looking at contain elements of gender crossover and iconoclasm. Of course in the discussion it also came out that she had never actually read any Tolkien, and her awareness of his material was largely based on the fact that she had seen part one of the current film series based on The Hobbit.

This is where I woke up. I think now, looking at it in retrospect, the whole dream was inspired by the passenger pigeon lecture combined with recent urgings by a friend that I write about my perceptions of Furry Fandom.

My entire life has revolved around reading, writing, and literacy in general. I'm a librarian, a perpetual scholar, a bibliophile, a writer. Over the last century or two, the level of general literacy and daily reading of any sort may well have peaked and begun to decline in our world. Compared to past eons, and looking at all human cultures for which we have information, the skill and practice of reading came to an all time high during the 20th century. A number of long-running statistical collections at least suggest that this has begun to decline at least in English speaking countries, and it looks like the decline began after World War II and really gained impetus as technology increased. The growth of the internet, which is hailed by some as the salvation of literacy, seems to me to rather be a death knell. A late colleague of mine, who was an astute and very capable academic librarian, predicted this as early as 1994. She said that the internet, which had only just spawned the world-wide web and the web browser at that time, would inevitably become a commercial channel for the distribution of video entertainment and advertising. Furthermore, those particular modes would dominate and saturate the bandwidth, drowning out the literary and scholarly elements of the net's origin. Alas, Mary, I think you were right. And I'm sorry you aren't still around to laugh at me and say "I told you so." She called it the "movies on demand" future of the internet, and today that's what we have. The many burgeoning textual communication modes, such as blogging, online publishing, and social media of all sorts that were born in the internet's vast expansion to the public in those two decades are now contracting into relatively few active streams of content, and most of those are saturated with cute photos of cats and dogs and inane links to video clips (often presented without any comment at all, just an anonymous link.) Written communication is withering even though it had expanded into what appeared to be an endless fertile field, simply because it has been drowned out by the sheer volume of multimedia glitz. The signal to noise ratio is shrinking rapidly these days.

And what of fandoms and passenger pigeons? The "old" fandoms, including science fiction, Tolkien, and similar topics, are fading. Their participants are aging, and the material on which they have thrived is less prolific now. The "new" fandoms, including MLP and furry, are based not on the written word, but on film, video, and representational artwork. This alone might not be so bad, but for one thing. Content transmission in these visual modes is slower and less precise. It comes across more as broad generalities and sweeping strokes of a brush, where the written word can be intensely detailed and thought provoking.

Next year is the 100th anniversary of the extinction of the passenger pigeon. The last living individual of the species, a female called "Martha," died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. Just 50 years earlier, the skies of North America were regularly darkened by the passing of millions of these birds in huge flocks, but the activities of humans erased the entire species from existence in just five decades.

And I'm awake in the wee hours writing this because I feel the same pressure and fear the darkness closing in as human communication and interaction shifts away from the written word to the extravagance and imprecision of visual media.

And that's why I suddenly feel ancient, like that last passenger pigeon trapped in her octagonal cage, waiting for the return of her flock that never comes while children fling bits of gravel at her to make her move around and be less "boring."
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