Tumlr and LJ:

[seraphcelene]

A fascinating article on Fandom Community, Fandom in/as Contact Zone, that I'm a little unsure what to do with. It's a great discussion about fandom community and I think the set-up is LJ vs Tumblr. Granted, by the time Tumblr really became a thing, I had disengaged from fandom due to time restraints. I visit LJ inconsistently these days and I see the activity is largely gone, transferred to some degree over to Tumblr. My challenge with Tumblr is the format. It's difficult to manage and follow conversation, so I use and visit Tumblr mostly for the purpose of perusing the pretty. Or I did, until suddenly, there's all of this fannish activity happening and I am unsure about how to engage because the format for meaningful engagement, for me, is intrinsically unfriendly. The format itself is difficult.

When I think of community and fandom, I think of the narrowness of a particular kind of contact. On LJ, people go in search of what they are looking for, but Tumblr leaves the barn doors open for people to wander in and out. Again, I'm challenged by the format so that my idea of what a fan community is struggles with the broader context that Tumblr invites for engagement and participation.

I don't know.

Comments

[a2zmom.livejournal.com]

This is exactly my problem with Tumblr.

There was recently a Buffy fandom challenge about writing meta. And I was very excited because I love reading and writing meta. And that's when I realized it was on Tumblr, so I backed away.

Fic on Tumblr is somewhat problematic, but 80% of the time the only reaction peeple give anyway is "I like You lose more reasoned feedback, but if the author is fine wuth that, not that awful.

But meta? The interesting thing about meta is the back and forth - I agree with this portion, did you think about this, what about this aspect of the text that contradicts it?

Meta on Tumblr is simply a pronouncement of look how clever I am and I refuse to read any of it.

[seraphcelene]

Yeah, that "Like"ing trend is difficult. As a writer, possibly spoiled by the wealth of commentary on LJ, I love the feedback. Hearts and likes and Kudos and Thumbs Up are ... good, but definitely not as fulfilling, calorie-wise, as actual feedback. But that is a hallmark of real world writing, I have learned. People don't comment. To me, that kind of participation with community is very negligent (or negligible). The conversation is missing and I'm not just looking for a pat on the back and automatic agreement.

There is interaction happening in the comments section, but because, as the article points out, there is no real editorial control over distribution of the text it becomes difficult and even problematic to engage on Tumblr. You can very easily have multiple discussions on the same text happening in multiple places at once because sharing or re-blogging a post creates a new point of contact for the audience. Because that function isn't part of LJ (or DW) the conversations remain hearty and thick within a given post and not dispersed over multiple locations.

But, again, there ARE discussions happening, so I definitely think that you should participate in the things that interest you on Tumblr. Try not to let the format scare you away. What I've done, in the past, is to just link to LJ from Tumblr (with possibly less success). With the OpenID function, I don't worry about linking someone to other locations for full content. Of course, readers are still so lazy about engaging these days that I still might just get a thumbs up or whatever on Tumblr.