Today’s question comes from RogerBW, who writes:
Reading an article elsewhere, it occurred to me that SF and fantasy fans of our sort of age generally started reading/watching more or less solo; certainly by the time I discovered that other people liked this stuff and that I could meet them, I had already developed some fairly firm opinions and tastes.
Now that a nascent genre reader is quite likely to meet the fandom before the book/film, and certainly isn’t likely to read in isolation unless he/she actually wants to… how does that change the way people feel about the media?
One upshot of this appears to be something I mentioned back in May: that people are considering themselves “fans” of a movie they haven’t yet seen. But there are surely many other changes to fandom that those of us who grew up before the Internet would find odd, or interesting, or simply different.
How is the Internet changing fans’ approach to media?
Does it make a difference to know from the start that you’re not alone in your obsessive love of [insert media property]? Do you think you’d be a different sort of fan today if you’d had the support of an online community?
(Image from Qwertee, once available on a T-shirt.)
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