From: "Ted White" <twhite8 at cox.net>
To: "WSFA members" <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Shocking News! Sci-fi conventions are luring fewerfans
Date: Thu, 4 Nov 2004 21:19:22 -0500
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Ernest Lilley" <elilley at mindspring.com>
To: "'WSFA members'" <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>
Sent: Thursday, November 04, 2004 6:10 PM
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Shocking News! Sci-fi conventions are luring fewerfans

> So fandom changes. Is that bad? Did we want our vision of the future to
> live forever?

Fandom hasn't really changed -- although its participants certainly have,
over the several generations it has existed.   No, what's changed is the
*definition* of "fandom," which now includes people who aren't fans and
never will be.

The Italian fashion retailer, Fiorucci, *trademarked* "fanzine" -- or tried
to -- in the mid-'80s.   The word is now used by non-fans to describe
non-fan publications (punk rock zines, etc.).   Similarly, money-driven
people noticed that SF conventions seemed to be money-makers (they were
observing mostly early Star Trek cons, which *were* put on by fans, using
expertise picked up from SF cons), and began putting on conventions which
appealed to *consumers* (not fans) of a variety of media.

The whole point of SF fandom is that it's a *community* populated by people
who know each other -- not an amorphous blob of anonymous people.   Back in
the day, people who were into SF were divided roughly into two groups:
readers and fans.  The readers were the majority -- over 100,000 people who
bought SF magazines ("prozines") every month, but felt no need to join the
SF community, attend conventions, write letters to prozines or each other,
or read (much less produce) fanzines.   The fans were the much smaller
group (less than a thousand in the '50s and '60s) who were active in fandom
and made up the SF community.   Somewhere along the line in the '70s the
readers began calling themselves fans, in the mistaken belief that this
alone *made* them fans -- even though they continued to avoid most or all
all fan activities and they never joined the community..

I've always felt that there's an easy way to tell them apart.  Readers call
it "sci-fi."  Fans do not.  (Some fans call SF "skiffy," mockingly, usually
in reference to Hollywood-type stuff, or media-SF.)   Fans recognize
"sci-fi" as a marketting term derived from "hi-fi."   Readers may or may
not recognize this, but don't care.

--Ted White