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fangasmicI know a guy whose doctor prescribed him medication for extreme sun deprivation because he couldn't manage to break away from his desk for 20 minutes a day or something similarly ridiculous and go outside. It's not really funny, except where it's hilarious, and then it turns sad, because I remembered that in many ways, we in fandom are -- in many ways -- similarly tethered to their computers.
As a professional geek and a highly trained hermit, I've wasted more daylight hours than I care to discuss sitting inside during a beautiful spring day torn between running outside and sitting under a tree to read a book, or scrolling down a page containing some serious good reading in any number of fandoms. During the Dark Ages -- before everybody and their sister had an iPhone, anyway -- we as a collective of fannish consumers were cloistered by necessity, for access, and although I can already hear a couple of the old guard in the back of the room asking, "Well, what about zines?" I think we can all agree that somewhere in the last 20 years, fandom went irreversibly digital, and unless you wanted to mow down a forest and print your own fanfiction, you were shit out of luck. That's not even addressing the issues of the newest fannish products: kink memes, constantly updating with new entries; vids, which really lose something in translation when you print them out frame by frame; images, which suffer somewhat less, but suffer nonetheless.
Fandom is a living, moving, dynamic thing, and growing more so by the minute. Ultimately, the fannish experience, either by cultural construction or actual utility, is one of community experienced individually and in a stationary manner.
When the veil is lifted and the so-called norms take a peek into the fannish underworld, I'm pretty sure the mental image they construct is something like the lair occupied by Kevin Smith's character in Die Hard 4: Seriously, Isn't Bruce Willis Like 136 Years-Old At This Point Or Something?:
Plus the mother in What's Eating Gilbert Grape:
Plus a hoveround scooter:
Plus like, 800 cats.
In a perfect world, however, we wouldn't be as tied to our desktop set-ups as we are; fandom -- comprised of cutting edge geeks and resourceful perverts -- should be thoroughly mobile, or at least more mobile than the assholes who populate shit like Foursquare. Come on, guys, we need to get on this so that interested parties can read Kirk/Spock ear-fetish porn as it updates live, watch the latest, greatest crossover Sherlock Holmes/Iron Man/The Talented Mister Ripley vid (does that exist, by the way? It should, in case it doesn't already) all while outdoors, getting a tan, breathing in fresh air.
So in the interest of preventing innocent fangirls from befalling the same terrible fate as Guy Who Has to Take Pills Because He's So See Through and with the advent and potential mobile promise of the iPad, some suggestions:
Make Archive of Our Own (more) mobile friendly.
The archive is well-liked and heavily trafficked by about 75% of the Fanspastic staff. As a fandomwide archive, and as it grows, AO3 is a perfect fandom property to take mobile. In a perfect world with limitless funding, there'd be an app for that, for which I would happily shell out $5 or $10 for that could make finding stories either by tag, pairing, fandom, or length easy, with a simple built-in commenting system that would be iPod touch, iPhone, or any number of
smartphones, friendly. As it is, AO3 doesn't have a mobile-optimized version, and quoth some people solicited on the subject, "I would never go to AO3 on my own (via a smartphone) unless I was linked there" and "the text is like, one mm high." Neither make for comfortable reading -- especially not for long stories.
"If AO3 capitalized on creating a mobile-optimized fandom experience, they would do a lot to bolster themselves in the long term," saidwhyareyoulikethis. "But designing a Ipad version of AO3 would be even more of a stretch than a mobile-optimized version in terms of resources and speed to market. Unless they get an anonymous benefactor who wants to shell out the development money." She added, "I don't know what their priorities are now, but I think they would definitely do well to focus on creating a mobile strategy for themselves, because lord knows we aren't going to get that from livejournal. (Maybe dreamwidth? Who knows.)"
I argue we're not going to get it from either of those; my best hopes still rest with AO3, andthatneedslube points out sites like http://mobify.me, which creates mobile versions of sites based off of a style sheet that recognizes browsers and modifies them automatically. AO3 would only have to add an extra line of code to their header. She adds, "It's not even expensive," which I translate into, "It's pretty expensive, but COME ON."
Make livejournal/dreamwidth more mobile friendly.
These are pretty self-explanatory, and major undertakings, too. The two journaling services straddle that nebulous line between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, where it's social networking but not quite. Is it a journal? Is it your social networking? Who knows, the end user is a strange and fickle thing -- but one thing is for sure, making a more mobile-friendly version of either or both of them might have an enormous impact on the ultimate consumption at either -- it's great
that the iPhone allows for you to view these sites and your friends lists/reading lists through Safari, but why doesn't lj/dw default to a mobile site when you do -- or hell, why not default to "?style=light"? It could speed up load times and make the process of consuming their products infinitely more friendly -- and not just to fandom.
(I askedwhyareyoulikethis and thatneedslube about this, and it turns out both of them do this shit for a living, which is obviously why I wrote this article, because that makes sense. Then they both started busting out big words.)
More use of del.icio.us; more standardized tagging; why the fuck isn't there a good del.icio.us smartphone app?
Delicious is probably one of the most powerful tools that fandom doesn't leverage as much as it should. (A lot of the internet's metadata geeks argue that once del.icio.us was sold to Yahoo! and turned into Delicious, the service's promise was utterly squandered -- perhaps on a wider scale, but insofar as fandom goes, it's still top notch in terms of ease of use and utility in general.) Depending on your level of involvement in fandom, it cuts out the necessity of building a friends or reading list on either livejournal or dreamwidth entirely. Do you really like CSI: NY fanfiction about Danny and Flack? Just go to delicious and type in "csi:ny danny/flack" and dollars to donuts you get a good handful of hits. But you're in no way going to be getting a full cross-section of what's available because people tag stories in arcane and batshit ways. A lot of people don't really tag at all, just bookmark via delicious, and while obviously individuals can use their accounts howsoever they desire, having some sort of standardized fandom tagging system would make the process even easier, and flicking through stories using a delicious iPhone app is infinitely less obnoxious than scrolling through a friends list on that same phone.
Or is would be, if the del.icio.us apps for smartphones were any good at all.
What about you? This is just what I was thinking when I was trying to rub the grooves out of my ass after a marathon reading session -- what would make your fannish life on the go more easy, mobile and enjoyable?
As a professional geek and a highly trained hermit, I've wasted more daylight hours than I care to discuss sitting inside during a beautiful spring day torn between running outside and sitting under a tree to read a book, or scrolling down a page containing some serious good reading in any number of fandoms. During the Dark Ages -- before everybody and their sister had an iPhone, anyway -- we as a collective of fannish consumers were cloistered by necessity, for access, and although I can already hear a couple of the old guard in the back of the room asking, "Well, what about zines?" I think we can all agree that somewhere in the last 20 years, fandom went irreversibly digital, and unless you wanted to mow down a forest and print your own fanfiction, you were shit out of luck. That's not even addressing the issues of the newest fannish products: kink memes, constantly updating with new entries; vids, which really lose something in translation when you print them out frame by frame; images, which suffer somewhat less, but suffer nonetheless.
Fandom is a living, moving, dynamic thing, and growing more so by the minute. Ultimately, the fannish experience, either by cultural construction or actual utility, is one of community experienced individually and in a stationary manner.
When the veil is lifted and the so-called norms take a peek into the fannish underworld, I'm pretty sure the mental image they construct is something like the lair occupied by Kevin Smith's character in Die Hard 4: Seriously, Isn't Bruce Willis Like 136 Years-Old At This Point Or Something?:
Plus the mother in What's Eating Gilbert Grape:
Plus a hoveround scooter:
Plus like, 800 cats.
In a perfect world, however, we wouldn't be as tied to our desktop set-ups as we are; fandom -- comprised of cutting edge geeks and resourceful perverts -- should be thoroughly mobile, or at least more mobile than the assholes who populate shit like Foursquare. Come on, guys, we need to get on this so that interested parties can read Kirk/Spock ear-fetish porn as it updates live, watch the latest, greatest crossover Sherlock Holmes/Iron Man/The Talented Mister Ripley vid (does that exist, by the way? It should, in case it doesn't already) all while outdoors, getting a tan, breathing in fresh air.
So in the interest of preventing innocent fangirls from befalling the same terrible fate as Guy Who Has to Take Pills Because He's So See Through and with the advent and potential mobile promise of the iPad, some suggestions:
Make Archive of Our Own (more) mobile friendly.
The archive is well-liked and heavily trafficked by about 75% of the Fanspastic staff. As a fandomwide archive, and as it grows, AO3 is a perfect fandom property to take mobile. In a perfect world with limitless funding, there'd be an app for that, for which I would happily shell out $5 or $10 for that could make finding stories either by tag, pairing, fandom, or length easy, with a simple built-in commenting system that would be iPod touch, iPhone, or any number of
smartphones, friendly. As it is, AO3 doesn't have a mobile-optimized version, and quoth some people solicited on the subject, "I would never go to AO3 on my own (via a smartphone) unless I was linked there" and "the text is like, one mm high." Neither make for comfortable reading -- especially not for long stories.
"If AO3 capitalized on creating a mobile-optimized fandom experience, they would do a lot to bolster themselves in the long term," said
whyareyoulikethis. "But designing a Ipad version of AO3 would be even more of a stretch than a mobile-optimized version in terms of resources and speed to market. Unless they get an anonymous benefactor who wants to shell out the development money." She added, "I don't know what their priorities are now, but I think they would definitely do well to focus on creating a mobile strategy for themselves, because lord knows we aren't going to get that from livejournal. (Maybe dreamwidth? Who knows.)"I argue we're not going to get it from either of those; my best hopes still rest with AO3, and
thatneedslube points out sites like http://mobify.me, which creates mobile versions of sites based off of a style sheet that recognizes browsers and modifies them automatically. AO3 would only have to add an extra line of code to their header. She adds, "It's not even expensive," which I translate into, "It's pretty expensive, but COME ON."Make livejournal/dreamwidth more mobile friendly.
These are pretty self-explanatory, and major undertakings, too. The two journaling services straddle that nebulous line between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, where it's social networking but not quite. Is it a journal? Is it your social networking? Who knows, the end user is a strange and fickle thing -- but one thing is for sure, making a more mobile-friendly version of either or both of them might have an enormous impact on the ultimate consumption at either -- it's great
that the iPhone allows for you to view these sites and your friends lists/reading lists through Safari, but why doesn't lj/dw default to a mobile site when you do -- or hell, why not default to "?style=light"? It could speed up load times and make the process of consuming their products infinitely more friendly -- and not just to fandom.
(I asked
whyareyoulikethis and thatneedslube about this, and it turns out both of them do this shit for a living, which is obviously why I wrote this article, because that makes sense. Then they both started busting out big words.)
More use of del.icio.us; more standardized tagging; why the fuck isn't there a good del.icio.us smartphone app?
Delicious is probably one of the most powerful tools that fandom doesn't leverage as much as it should. (A lot of the internet's metadata geeks argue that once del.icio.us was sold to Yahoo! and turned into Delicious, the service's promise was utterly squandered -- perhaps on a wider scale, but insofar as fandom goes, it's still top notch in terms of ease of use and utility in general.) Depending on your level of involvement in fandom, it cuts out the necessity of building a friends or reading list on either livejournal or dreamwidth entirely. Do you really like CSI: NY fanfiction about Danny and Flack? Just go to delicious and type in "csi:ny danny/flack" and dollars to donuts you get a good handful of hits. But you're in no way going to be getting a full cross-section of what's available because people tag stories in arcane and batshit ways. A lot of people don't really tag at all, just bookmark via delicious, and while obviously individuals can use their accounts howsoever they desire, having some sort of standardized fandom tagging system would make the process even easier, and flicking through stories using a delicious iPhone app is infinitely less obnoxious than scrolling through a friends list on that same phone.
Or is would be, if the del.icio.us apps for smartphones were any good at all.
What about you? This is just what I was thinking when I was trying to rub the grooves out of my ass after a marathon reading session -- what would make your fannish life on the go more easy, mobile and enjoyable?