I really cannot emphasize how the lack of comments and nested comments impacted fandom. It turned fandom into a series of one-way relationships. Social media is extremely uninteractive compared to mediums like journals and forums.
Even âTumblr conversationsâ, where you reblog each otherâs posts back and forth and it turns into a dialogue, extremely limited. You can generally only do this a few times.
But thereâs another, insidious layer to this, which is how reblogs work: itâs easy to create new ârealitiesâ or versions of postâŚwithout people realizing that other versions exist. If two differnent people reblog from the same person to add a comment, then other people reblog from them adding further comments, youâll get something like this:
That is 14 different versions of the same post someone could see. Fourteen separate realities right there!
You might be seeing this:
While someone else will see this:
Now repeat things over several years and hundreds, if not thousands, of posts, and you can see how this can quickly lead to separate realities.
Even if people know each other, or are in the same fandom!
Something to note about how and why this happens. See those gray lines connecting the various dots? Those are profitable to the social media companies. That nebulous gray blog encompassing the two stars/fans, or the invisible hypothetical line connecting those two stars? That is not profitable. So companies are not only disincentivized to facilitate that connection in the first place, but actively try to prevent it too!
Compare this to how journals, forums, listservs, and other older fandom platforms operated:
Now, this is a very vague visual representation of multiple different platforms, but there are three main things I was trying to indicate.
Social media removed reciprocation, communication, and agency in content consumption. Fans resort to either passive consumption because thatâs the only way to stay sane in such an overwhelming platform, or to extremism because thatâs the only form of agency they can truly have in their fandom experience. Fandom isnât something you participate in, itâs something that happens to you.
And if this sounds familiar to any social science majors out there, you mightâve taken a course about group dynamics, ideological persistence, and/or had to study about the proliferation of social and/or political movements. Nicky Case has a lovely interactive webapp that lets you play around with these concepts and experience this in just half an hour of playing around:
The Wisdom and/or Madness of Crowds
Those three things in detail (put under a cut due to length):
snowghoul
theartofmadeline
