Fans and fandom in 2007: fragments from a Parrot Knight's perspective

This isn't going to be a full essay but instead a few propositions for further discussion.

I have found that I seem to have a dialogue going on with one particular person on the occasions we meet, which concerns what fan knowledge is. I am surprised when someone who displays fannishness about a television series is in their turn surprised when I expect a fan audience to know information about writers and directors of episodes. I've pulled age in this situation, which was giving into backward-looking impulses perhaps, and declared that fifteen years ago my assumptions wouldn't have been controversial. Or would they?

One issue, which has been pointed out to me by a representative of the younger generation, is that I'm generalising from my experience as a Doctor Who fan of three decades' standing. I'd agree, but point out that much of what my critics see as symptomatic of Doctor Who fandom was learned from elsewhere. The interest in the writers of Doctor Who was in part inspired by debates in Star Trek fandom; after all, Terrance Dicks has admitted that the approach to writing about Doctor Who he adopted in The Making of Doctor Who back in 1972 was inspired by The Making of Star Trek, and early Who fans followed his lead. Somewhere I have Mike Ashley's Illustrated Book of Science Fiction Lists from 1982 (bought on one of the biannual holidays in Harrogate) and one of the lists I remember was one of Star Trek scripts divided into pro-Vietnam and anti-Vietnam. Most of the lists were presented as iterations of information with which the readers would be familiar, like a lot of reference works aimed at fans were. So, my idea of what fans do is inspired by this kind of simple attempt to relate creative works to real-world decisions and real-world issues.

Looking recently at metafandom for the first time, I came across more evidence of how internet fandom seems female-led and dominated by fanfic and slashfic writers; fandoms are concentrated on individual characters and groupings of characters and how they exist in the imaginations of the fans, without reference to Joss Whedon or Chris Carter or Ronald D. Moore or whomever. Another important shift came in the 1990s when the fandom of what I still think of as the 'new' fantasy series emerged, being The X Files and its successors; telefantasy fandom reorientated itself to concentrate on the immediate and shook off its antiquarianism. Perhaps, when creators were as high profile as Carter or Whedon, there was no need to go on a quest for them as in former years and older series. Additionally, in the mid-90s a new generation of Doctor Who fans was emerging drawn in by the books rather than the television series; their numbers were smaller but they had more in common with literary SF fans than I felt I had or the wider Who fandom of the 1980s had [but see, in contrast, mainstream Who fandom of the mid-1970s, and 1980s fanzine Queen Bat], and their conversation reflected this.

What I knew as fan writing seems to a large degree to have gone professional. Arguably a lot of the last two seasons of Doctor Who have been fan criticism fictionalized and thrust into the mainstream. Manchester University Press, as I've mentioned several times over the past three years, are publishing a book of what are essentially peer-reviewed fanzine articles on Doctor Who this year, except that they have grown out of a media studies conference. Media studies has evolved in such a way from its narrow origins in a particular strand of sociology that it has embraced much of what was initially non-professional fannish discourse.

All very rough and inconclusive, harping on an old tune, and personal on top of that. Comments nonetheless welcome.