Friday Tchotchke #11: Platform grief

A fangirl doppelganger from 1913

I hope everyone’s Pesach is coming to an enjoyable close. Here in New York City they seem to have invented a new month called Aprigust, which I’m showing my appreciation of by Wearing Outfits, as I am wont to do.

As my master’s degree approaches its endgame after five highly enjoyable semesters, there’s a bit of a Groundhog Day moment happening in my life. The same emotions, the same physical symptoms of anxiety, the same general sense of overwork and fear of the future that suffused me precisely five years ago at the conclusion of my undergrad has returned.

Just like they did then, people are cheerfully asking me “so what are you going to do?” and just like I did then, I’m cheerfully (but like a rictus-grin sort of cheer) responding, “I have no idea!!!!!!!”

And, just like then, I’ll probably figure it out. My goal is to have a Weird Summer. I signed a lease for a weird sublet, I’m taking some weird shows to the Edinburgh Fringe, and I’m planting the seeds of some very cool and weird and fun projects, one or some of which may one day see the light of day.

This week in fandom

My corner of Twitter has lately been suffused with general melancholy at the regrettable platform’s slow and excruciating descent into total unusability.

Like similarly Twitter-dependent communities like publishing and academia, fandom has been expressing a group emotion which I like to call “platform grief”: a modern, novel sensation which comes about when commercial pressures and demonic capitalist whimsy begin to dismantle a digital space, displaying all at once how fragile it has been all along, as well as how precious.

Fandom is earnest by default but there is a stark sincerity to the outpouring of worry that illuminates individual concerns: how will I talk to my friends, how will I find new fanworks, how will I keep up with news from/support my favorite creators and celebrities? Twitter as a fandom platform has never been perfect, of course, but it has allowed for a great deal of innovation in terms of contemporary fandom practices, and fans have gotten used to what it has let them do.

This is not the first time that fandom’s platform of choice has been slowly deprecated, forcing an evacuation: LiveJournal and Tumblr suffered similar fates. But unlike in those cases, there was no clear sense of continuity, no guideposts to direct large affinity groups onto newer platforms where they could reassert their community bonds. (For more on fandom’s past migrations, see Casey Fiesler and Brianna Dym’s landmark research.)

TikTok has a large fandom presence, but its algorithmic, content-based one-to-many approach more or less prevents the kind of social connections which fandom depends on from forming: one-to-one or small-group, frequently text- or discussion-based, pseudonymous by default. It is not a social network, it’s a content delivery service. Of course, Discord ticks all those boxes, and has been increasingly central to fandom for many years now, but again it is not a social network, it’s a chat service.

Twitter combined the three major pillars of modern digital community—content, social, and chat—in a way which is going to be difficult to replace on a large scale, and its devolution and potential absence is going to deal an irrecoverable blow to the fandom cultures it has played host to. Which is, yes, sad: hence the collective grief.

This week in polar exploration

A fun research hole to drop down in the witching hours is past polar auctions on websites like Christies and Sotheby’s. Most of their auction records from the past 25 years are available online, so typing in keywords and browsing themed sales can turn up some really interesting stuff.

Late last night I was incredibly thrilled to come across a Bonhams listing titled: A scrapbook assembled in the years after 1912 by Miss Joyce Collins, which sold for a mere £1,250 in 2012 during the Scott & Amundsen centenary sale.

I have a longstanding interest in scrapbooks, albums, commonplace books, and any other artifacts of cultural reception, especially those created by young women, and this one fit the bill precisely. In fact, I’ve been on the lookout for something like it for a long time.

Joyce Collins was a school girl who became obsessed with polar exploration after Captain Scott’s death in 1913 and spent years collecting autographs, pictures, and artifacts from men associated with his expeditions and Shackleton’s. She even followed Scott’s charismatic lieutenant Teddy Evans around on tour, collecting in her scrapbook multiple tickets from his lecture stops, as well as a letter from him thanking her for a hat she made for him.

Everything about this is perfect, basically. A past polar fangirl, armed with “indefatigable zeal” and determined to get close to the objects of her affection! How did her parents feel about her obsession? Were the men she wrote to flattered or alarmed by the attention? Who was she, and what happened to her? How long did her enthusiasm with these latter-day rockstars last?

I emailed Bonhams to see if they had any more information about the scrapbook, and they kindly forwarded my inquiry onto the anonymous buyer, so I am crossing my fingers I get to learn more!!!

Banger of the week