Oldschool Internet

[franzeska]

I'm working on the article on Fandom and the Internet, and I could really use some more perspectives. Previously, this article was a rehash of a lot of the Zines and the Internet content. This leads to, IMO, way too much focus on the differences between "print fans" and "net fans" and a tight focus on fanfic.

Here's the kind of reaction I'm thinking of. This one's from a post about the Crossing the Line panel at Escapade in 1998 that's quoted various places on Fanlore: "...I'm not thinking in terms of mail-order purchase, but in terms of opening a dialogue with someone else. *That* is something I don't get by hitting somebody's web page to see if anything new has been posted, no matter how much I may like her stories."

And, yes, yes, Fanlore is more about fanworks-producing fandom than about happen-to-like-stuff ways of being a fan, but I don't think you can divorce early online fic writing from early internet culture or from non-fic fan activities--just like you can't divorce anime fanworks in English from the fansubbing and pirating that let fans access the canon early on or media fandom zines from SF fandom convention culture that spawned media fandom in the first place.

Quotes like that one make me think a lot of people are probably unaware of how influential MUDs were (either as social spaces or as places for roleplaying) or that meaty canon discussion was often on Usenet (not the web or even mailing lists) or that anime fandom used to be heavily dependant on IRC. (As I've ranted in my own journal, of course the web didn't provide that in 1998. The web SUCKED for most of the 90's.)

My idea is that the article should give a good starting point for understanding what different types of infrastructure existed at different points and where/when major fandom migrations happened.

The timeline seen in the article is located here. (It's slightly trickier to edit than a regular page, but there are help files if you poke around.)

Thoughts, anyone?

Comments

[graycardinal]

Mmm. A couple of things.

"ISP" is really the wrong term for AOL and GEnie and CompuServe* and Prodigy. which predate the big genuine ISPs (Earthlink, MSN, et al). You didn't use AOL or GEnie as a gateway to the larger Internet; each one was its own more or less self-contained virtual universe, and their cyberspaces did not connect to one another -- though you could get from some of them to the Usenet newsgroup hierarchy, which was its own parallel virtual universe. I'm not quite sure what one calls them, but "ISP" just isn't the right term.

There were also private bulletin boards and bulletin board networks, which existed on computers in people's living rooms and basements and so forth. I am particularly thinking of WWIVNet, as a WWIVNet BBS was one of my earliest entry points to online culture in general, but FidoNet is also relevant here. At least as I recall, the private BBS communities and the first-gen online networks (CompuServe, etc.) existed in rough parallel with one another at least for awhile.



*I keep having to resist typing that as Compu$erve, because it was a running gag in some circles back in the day

[graycardinal]

Whoops, the footnote truncated itself. As I was saying, the running gag was that Compu$erve was noticeably expensive compared to most of the other online networks -- save possibly for GEnie, on which a "free flag" was worth several times its weight in quatloos.

[franzeska]

Yeah, I know. But I wasn't sure what to call them either. Wikipedia seems to use the term "online service".

Ooh, good call on the BBS stuff. I was never active on any of those (hence their sad absence from what I wrote), but I know they were a huge part of things.