For as long as I can remember, I have been a fan.
A fan of what isn't important. The issue is how. Most people enjoy
books, movies, music and so forth in the course of their lives. But I have made
the course of my life enjoying books, movies, music and so forth. I have paid
more than $100 for a single compact disk. I have stood outside movie theaters for
six hours in heavy rain and bitter cold. When I woke up at
I wasn't alone in that life, but I never knew it. If you liked
something so big that it had an organized fan base -- "Star Trek,"
say, or the Beatles -- there was a network of people to turn to. Otherwise,
there was simply no public venue for your enthusiasm. You couldn't go someplace
to check if anybody else shared your devotion to, say, the Little River Band or
Gerry Rafferty. Once in a great while, you might flip to the back pages of a
record-collector magazine and find a half-inch blurb for a convention at the
Sioux City Days Inn, or subscription information for a newsletter some guy ran
off on the mimeograph machine at his mother's office. Apart from that, you
found a couple of friends who would put up with your ranting about the infamous
"lost" Steely Dan song "Second Arrangement," and that was
that.
After a few years, that kind of life will bring on some serious
four-o'clock-in-the-morning questions. Why do you care so much? Why can't you
just read a book or listen to a record and let it go? Without the assurance
that somebody else is just as crazy as you are, you start to visualize the
years ahead with mounting horror: pawing through used-book stores; haunting
record shops on Tuesdays, waiting for the new releases; deconstructing
"The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" to the delight of none.
Then the Internet turned everything upside down. Or, rather,
inside out.
Simply put, the private world of the enthusiast -- which is to
say, nuts like me -- is now public. The Internet offered fans the forum they
never had, and they jumped at the chance to thrust their obsessions out into
the world. Ambitious heads set up newsgroups, mailing lists and Web sites to
create a central clearinghouse for information and to connect with other people
who share their passions. It's the ultimate validation of obsessive fandom: Go
online and you'll find that not only are you not alone, you're jammed cheek to
jowl with other people who know all the words to the "Land of the
Lost" theme song and won't rest until they can do a little Lacanian
analysis. Why do you care so much? Take a look out there -- who doesn't?
I have mixed feelings about this new state of affairs. On the one
hand, it's hard not to get excited about the sheer volume of stuff that's
finally available. But part of me is concerned about the long-term implications
of putting fandom on display. If you drag people's deep-seated passions into
the light of day, you're bound to pull up some pretty ugly stuff, too -- and I
think that's already begun to happen online.
First, though, the highlights -- because, for now, they do
outweigh the bad. While fan sites aren't going to save the world (only online
retailing can do that), they have made possible a big change in how we relate
to the stuff we love. The sites let us take a deeper look at work and people
that make life interesting -- scrutiny that simply wouldn't be possible
otherwise. In a sense, by putting years of research and introspection online,
the fans have turned the Internet into a kind of collective biography of
popular culture. And the importance of that can't be overstated.
Look at it this way. If the Internet went away tomorrow, you
wouldn't lose the ability to find out about the Treaty of Versailles. You could
walk into any bookstore or library and find all the information you need on the
major figures and events in world history, from
In other words, things only a die-hard would track down and only a
squirreler would save. For years, if you cared enough to do that, you had to
wonder about your relationship to reality. Now, by creating a Web site, you can
become an amateur scholar and historian, sharing years of research,
accumulation and introspection without vetting from official channels.
This is a remarkable situation, whether you're a die-hard or a
dabbler. Here's a simple example: the Byrds. A couple of years ago, I
decided I didn't know enough about the band. Maybe I heard a song on the radio;
maybe I saw a blurb in a magazine; maybe a friend mentioned them to me. Common
enough, right? Whatever sparked my interest, I decided to go online and do some
research. With a few seconds' surfing, I was at Byrdwatcher (http://ebni.com/byrds/),
which broke the band's history down by album and provided juicy miscellany in
the margins. A few clicks deeper into the site brought another trove of
information, ranging from discographies to lists of band members' solo projects
and artists influenced by the group. In about 10 minutes, I went from knowing
absolutely nothing about the band to having a solid background -- and wanting
to buy everything they'd ever recorded.
Now, let's go back to the beginning of that anecdote -- I'm
interested in the Byrds -- but remove the Internet. Where do I go? The
bibliography on Byrdwatcher consists of books and articles compiled over
decades. Some people (if they were somehow able to get the bibliography) would
be curious or obsessive enough to track down that information; maybe I
would've, too, back when I spent every free minute hanging out in record and
book stores avoiding honest work. Most people wouldn't go to those lengths,
though, and the interest would wither. The same holds true for most devoted
fans who want to know more about their object of adoration. Even if you've got
all the Byrds albums on lovingly preserved vinyl, no aficionado is sharp
enough to catch every article that comes out, or has enough cash to throw
around to buy the deluxe CD reissue series with exhaustive liner notes.
What's more, the Byrds represent the easy stuff, having
been relatively well documented over the years. Internet fandom's real value
lies in the history of things that have never been recorded, and never would be
recorded otherwise. The examples I'm going to give will, inevitably, look
ridiculous and esoteric. But that's precisely the point. Everybody's got crazy
interests they couldn't possibly explain to anybody else -- yes, even you --
and the Internet allows this cultural ephemera to be preserved when official
memory does not.
I stopped being shocked about what's out there when a friend told
me to type goldmonkey.com into my browser. I was rewarded with an exhaustive
guide to the short-lived and largely unlamented TV series "Tales of the
Gold Monkey." Another site, which appeared to be down for construction at
the time of this writing, contained one of the greatest labors of niche love
I've ever seen: an in-depth timeline of the "Planet of the Apes"
universe, spanning several thousand years and culling dates from not only the
movies but also such obscure sources as the "Apes" TV and comic-book
series. If those seem a little frivolous, consider the Compleat Bellairs site (http://www.compleatbellairs.com/), devoted to the works of the
late author John Bellairs, who wrote pioneering gothic-suspense novels targeted
to young-adult readers but followed cultishly by grown-ups, too.
But the fans aren't the only ones writing biography out there -- a
good number of writers, musicians, actors and athletes have set up outposts
online. Some offer little more than news, such as concert dates or future
releases. Other artists go further, however, and take advantage of the
commercial, and connective, powers of the medium. Many are selling their work
online, bypassing middlemen and appealing directly to the fan base -- which
allows them to release work that might not find a home at a major distributor.
And some artists are galvanizing their fan base even further by starting
mailing lists, offering online diaries and responding to e-mail from their
audience, a level of contact that simply wasn't possible in the past.
It's quite a picture. Not only can fans recognize each other, but
they also can be recognized by the people they admire (and sometimes rewarded
with tickets, Web-only releases and other exclusive deals). And maybe, in the
process, they've created a new way of looking at popular culture.
Yet, every so often, I find myself feeling concerned about the
future of the whole thing. It comes down to a very simple fact: There are bad
fans out there as well as good ones, and the bad ones are much louder and much
more visible.
Fandom, if you haven't guessed by now, has an unpleasant side:
excess. Fans spend too much money and too much thought on the things they love.
At best, aficionados take their passions, and themselves, with a grain of salt;
they don't love any less, they just try to do so with some brains and humor as
well as heart. At worst, though, all that fans offer the world is empty
fetishizing and inarticulate enthusiasm. Maybe the guy who wears a "Star
Trek" outfit in public, and argues about the show's made-up science with
the ferocity of a prosecuting attorney, is composing learned treatises in his
head. Maybe the gent who spends an entire concert screaming out the title of
His Favorite Song harbors a sensitive soul beneath his 30-year-old T-shirt. But
I doubt it.
All fans have that monomaniacal obsessive lurking inside them. If
they didn't, let's face it, they wouldn't be fans. But the unreasonable ones
show the world nothing but that obsessive -- which poisons the well for fans
who know how to modulate their passions. Seeing the guys in the "Star
Trek" suits, or the screaming loners at concerts, makes the world at large
suspect that all fans are nuts, making it hard for any aficionado to come out
of the closet. Even worse, those guys make fans think that all fans are nuts.
So, reasonable enthusiasts back away from their passion, or subject themselves
to intense self-scrutiny, before they end up like that guy in the corner who
wants to be called "Scotty."
What does this all have to do with cyberspace? I'm afraid that the
same dynamic that takes place in the real world, with loopy fans driving out
sane ones, will happen online.
For every site that is a reasoned, comprehensive attempt to
articulate a passion, there's another that is little more than a billboard
announcing an obsession -- "I'm Teddy, and here's some stuff I dig!"
-- with no content, no research, no insight, no attempt to reach out to the
world or even other fans. Then there's the level of dialogue. I've been a part
of lots of focused, enthusiastic and polite discussions in forums and mailing
lists. But in some spots the conversation is so debased that it makes the very
impulse to enthusiasm feel tawdry. I've seen personal attacks on the artist
being discussed, as well as other contributors to the discussion; idiot debates
over minutiae; and an overall lack of reasonable thought, clear expression and
self-awareness. If the good sites are a living answer to Why do you care so
much?, the bad ones aren't even dimly aware of the question.
Doing this kind of stuff in cyberspace hurts fandom just as much
as it does in real life. Every asinine site and dopey debate damages the
credibility of the reasonable ones, both with the world at large and with fans
themselves. Creating and maintaining a worthy site takes a lot of work. Why
reach out across cyberspace if the rest of the online crowd is reaching back
with, "I'm Teddy, and here's some stuff I dig!"
Maybe I'm being a worrywart; maybe I'm being a snob. But I can't
help but think that all of the good stuff we've got might go away as quickly as
it came -- and as unlamented as the art it celebrates. I can easily see a time
when the current generation of Web-site creators decides it's just not worth
the effort to continue and packs its virtual bags. Maybe they won't even be
disgusted with the environment; maybe they'll just have more pressing concerns,
like families or work. And who'll take their place? Teddy? I'd be as happy as
anyone if the idiots swarming onto the Web mature into responsible custodians.
I just don't have high hopes it'll happen.
I'll make a deal with you, all you good fans out there. If it
falls apart, we'll meet once a week at my place and shoot the breeze about
Roger McGuinn, "Second Arrangement" and "Life,
Just ring the bell. If I'm not home, I'll be in the bookstore down
the street.