Not signing in by my screen name here, as in my fandom days I was a known partisan on certain issues (though not a big-time debater), and identifying myself would make this seem more "targeted" than I mean it to be. (Maybe some people will guess who I am anyway, but hopefully this will at least blunt the edge of it a bit.)
I agree strongly that fandom size matters. I encountered the online HP fandom in the fall of 1999, a few months after the release of Prisoner of Azkaban, which was the point at which Rowling said that "it just exploded." I was then a participant at a fairly small and tightly-regulated board, and things were quite civil. The same seems to have been true in general of other sites at that time. There was some early-teen immaturity going on, but a well-run site could hold it in check. Also, I recall that it took me (and at least a few other adult HP fans) some careful thought before deciding which side of the R/H vs. H/H question we preferred-- it wasn't the volatile political issue that it later became.
Over the following years-- starting perhaps at the run-up to the GoF release in July 2000, and steadily increasing from there-- things became increasingly unmanageable. With the increase of ship debating, some people enjoyed all-comers, no-holds-barred debates, while others preferred smaller discussions that allowed the assumption of a shared view on the matter. (The ship preferences and debate attitudes also seem to have served as proxies for a host of other issues, including postmodernism and multiculturalism-- which, I think, took the debates to a level beyond the merely literary, and made the discussions all the more sensitive.) Also, as sites became larger, it became more and more difficult to find havens for rational and intelligent discourse.
The group-size issue is discussed quite a bit in Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point. He uses 150 as the standard group size beyond which the community's character changes, and things have to be organized much differently. (Apparently some companies-- I believe GoreTex is one-- have even set a policy of spinning off a new division any time one reaches 150 employees.) What I think is going on there is that beyond that point, the group can't function on an everybody-knows-everybody basis anymore, and the leaders have to organize things more strictly or else watch it all collapse into chaos. The group becomes "public" in a sense in which it had been "private" before.
(I have spent most of my life in a church of 50-100 people, but in college attended a church of almost 500. The difference was immense. In my small church, we can make decisions on an ad-hoc basis, based on what seems to be best for the people we have; but in the larger church, more things have to be standardized, and the elders end up saying, "we'd like all our ministry leaders to do things this way." Again, the leaders of the larger group have become "public figures," and are forced to conduct themselves as such.)
In the fall of 1999, no one would have spoken of being a "big name" in the HP fandom. By the middle of 2000, a few uberfics had begun to earn that status for their authors, and in the course of time people even started to organize "BNF Deathmatches." Again, people were becoming public figures, with people that they didn't know reading what they wrote and paying attention to it, and sometimes arguing against it.
Some of the best fandom friends I had were "successful" beyond their expectations, and became BNF's somewhat against their will. I know some who struggled between enjoying the fame and regretting its consequences for them; I also know some who attempted to reject it outright, with varying degrees of consistency (the only way to really do it, of course, is to abandon one's online life entirely). There do seem to be some people who relish the feelings of fame and importance; although those for whom I suspect that to be the case, I don't really know personally, and so I can't comment on their motivations with great certainty.
no subject
I agree strongly that fandom size matters. I encountered the online HP fandom in the fall of 1999, a few months after the release of Prisoner of Azkaban, which was the point at which Rowling said that "it just exploded." I was then a participant at a fairly small and tightly-regulated board, and things were quite civil. The same seems to have been true in general of other sites at that time. There was some early-teen immaturity going on, but a well-run site could hold it in check. Also, I recall that it took me (and at least a few other adult HP fans) some careful thought before deciding which side of the R/H vs. H/H question we preferred-- it wasn't the volatile political issue that it later became.
Over the following years-- starting perhaps at the run-up to the GoF release in July 2000, and steadily increasing from there-- things became increasingly unmanageable. With the increase of ship debating, some people enjoyed all-comers, no-holds-barred debates, while others preferred smaller discussions that allowed the assumption of a shared view on the matter. (The ship preferences and debate attitudes also seem to have served as proxies for a host of other issues, including postmodernism and multiculturalism-- which, I think, took the debates to a level beyond the merely literary, and made the discussions all the more sensitive.) Also, as sites became larger, it became more and more difficult to find havens for rational and intelligent discourse.
The group-size issue is discussed quite a bit in Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point. He uses 150 as the standard group size beyond which the community's character changes, and things have to be organized much differently. (Apparently some companies-- I believe GoreTex is one-- have even set a policy of spinning off a new division any time one reaches 150 employees.) What I think is going on there is that beyond that point, the group can't function on an everybody-knows-everybody basis anymore, and the leaders have to organize things more strictly or else watch it all collapse into chaos. The group becomes "public" in a sense in which it had been "private" before.
(I have spent most of my life in a church of 50-100 people, but in college attended a church of almost 500. The difference was immense. In my small church, we can make decisions on an ad-hoc basis, based on what seems to be best for the people we have; but in the larger church, more things have to be standardized, and the elders end up saying, "we'd like all our ministry leaders to do things this way." Again, the leaders of the larger group have become "public figures," and are forced to conduct themselves as such.)
In the fall of 1999, no one would have spoken of being a "big name" in the HP fandom. By the middle of 2000, a few uberfics had begun to earn that status for their authors, and in the course of time people even started to organize "BNF Deathmatches." Again, people were becoming public figures, with people that they didn't know reading what they wrote and paying attention to it, and sometimes arguing against it.
Some of the best fandom friends I had were "successful" beyond their expectations, and became BNF's somewhat against their will. I know some who struggled between enjoying the fame and regretting its consequences for them; I also know some who attempted to reject it outright, with varying degrees of consistency (the only way to really do it, of course, is to abandon one's online life entirely). There do seem to be some people who relish the feelings of fame and importance; although those for whom I suspect that to be the case, I don't really know personally, and so I can't comment on their motivations with great certainty.
(to be continued, due to post length limit)