Poasting here because too lol pretentious for the actual meme, and will probably end up being tl;dr as well.
The meme essay is lolzy and awesome (and educational; I miss a lot of shifts so I'm sort of a permanent n00b /o\) but what really strikes me about it is that the author is herself an example of her subject matter. You can tell the essay was written by a memer. It's mostly academic language, but there are terms and phrases used without context, and things that could have been worded better (I know it's just "meme" there, but for something like this "the meme" or "lol_meme" might have flowed more smoothly). It's another instance of something that's been on my mind lately - the divide between "in" and "out" of internet fandom.
The same principles essay!memer was writing about apply to online fandom, or hell, the internet community as a whole. You can always tell when an article about the internet was written by an outsider. It's in the language and the phrasing. When all the Project Chanology stuff was going on, it was pretty clear that nobody reporting on it in the mainstream media had any idea what they were talking about. By contrast, there have been plenty of times when I've been watching The Colbert Report and gone "yep, Stephen is totally on the internet." It's all in the language. Without faces or clothes or property, all we have to tell us who's in or out is a person's choice of words.
But this is a sword that cuts both ways. It can be as hard for the online and offline worlds to communicate with each other as it is for a jock to befriend a nerd, to use a stupid stereotypical simile (with bonus alliteration! :D? :D?). We lol at the fail of outsiders dabbling in things they don't understand, but the same thing happens on our end when we try to explain our world to people. I'm sure essay!memer tried hard to write about meme using language non-memers would understand (no easy task! trying to explain meme to people is one of my least favorite things to attempt D:), but some memespeak still slipped in, probably without her realizing it. She's not alone - this kind of thing is becoming a noticeable hurdle in fiction as more fan writers try to make the leap to pro. I'm sure everyone's heard that phrase that's growing much more common lately: "This reads like fanfic."
And that's the meat of it, really, on my end. Fanfic has a different feel to it than traditional fiction, and for the most part, nobody seems to have nailed down exactly what it is. I did find one article that explored the topic in relation to Cassandra Clare's City of Bones. The main example I remember offhand is that fanfic tends to have lengthy, beautifully described vignette-style scenes that serve no concrete purpose whatsoever. Fandom loves those, but they don't belong in books, and when fanfic writers attempt original fiction they tend to slip in anyway. You can't communicate with outsiders using insider language.
What I worry about most is doing it unconsciously. Fanfic writers develop their writing style under a set of rules that doesn't necessarily apply to the outside world, and it's hard to be aware of what those differences are until you start getting bad reviews. I've been told I'd write good books because I write good fanfic. That's BS. It's not at all the same, and I'm sure my attempts at original fiction are full of fanfic tropes I'm not even aware I'm using. And on top of it all, my hope is to write a novel about fandom, which gives me essay!memer's dilemma. How do you give normal people a peek into the crazy without hopelessly confusing them, or skewing things? It's best for fans to write about fandom; no one understands a world as well as the people living in it, but that doesn't automatically make them capable of explaining it in a way outsiders can understand.
Yeah, that's definitely tl;dr. lol gonna get ignored or dogpiled /o\
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dejana at 10:51am on 30/05/2009
lazy
thoughtful
bored