Jeri asked a two-part question:

1 – How do casual, but enthusiastic non-organized fans connect to organized fandom? What are the paths to entry – and given the pros and cons of organized fandom, which make most sense for a healthy relationship with fandom?

2 – This is one that you or others may have tackled, but how is the advent of online, interactive media changing the face of organized fandom? The mention of a virtual con caught my eye – is such a thing truly feasible? Are there other current and potential future capabilities that will support and perhaps grow the fan community?

Let’s start with part 1, because that’s the easier one. As far as I can see, there are three main ways in which you can get involved in “organized” fandom (and let’s for the moment pretend that we know what that means). They are as follows:

1. Attend a convention
2. Join a club
3. Participate in an online forum

Going to a con, assuming that you have one available nearby, is perhaps the easiest of these, because it is something that you can just do for one day to see if you like it, and because at least nominally the con is providing something fairly tangible in return. If it happens to have invited one of your favorite writers as a guest, for example, then you probably get your money’s worth even if it turns out that you can’t stand fans.

Having a local convention also provides a potential path through the fannish hierarchy. And here I do not mean that silly chart with the furries at the bottom being looked down upon by everyone. No, what I mean is that slippery slope down which one can slide from a mere attendee a con through the grades of enthusiastic volunteer, regular staffer, senior manager, board member and ultimately the total addiction state of being a Worldcon Chair. Some people, it seems, just can’t say “no”, no matter how often they are warned. The Government should Do Something to help them.

Joining a club is perhaps a bigger psychological step, because it requires you to self-identify as “one of them” before you actually take the plunge. As a con attendee you can pretend to yourself that you are just going to see what it is all about, but by joining a club you are making a statement about yourself.

That said, a club has certain advantages in that it presumably has regular meetings that enable you to interact with your fellow fans, face-to-face, on a regular basis. This sort of thing is, apparently, all too rare in our increasingly un-social society. 21st Century humans, as I understand it, prefer to live in isolation in their city apartments, interacting only with others of their species via the relatively safe medium of the Internet. If you join a club you might actually start going out with friends, having parties and so on. It might be good for you.

I am, of course, assuming that the club is a local one, and not some national organization that exists only to send out newsletters. I’ve done that for a reason: I suspect the days of such clubs are limited, because these days they have probably all mutated into online forums, which I have lumped into a different category. Nevertheless, you will find people who refer to things like Westeros as “clubs”, and indeed when I was running Emerald City I used to occasionally encounter a journalist who wanted to talk to me about “my club”, as if Emcit were merely the newsletter of an organization that I had created and was the leader of. They couldn’t conceive of anything to do with science fiction that didn’t involve membership of some geeky club.

Then again, joining a club is a pretty low-commitment activity in some ways. Clubs don’t take a lot of running. A handful of keen people is all it takes. So if the club that you join isn’t also involved in some other great fannish activity then you may find that your options for further involvement are limited to being the club treasurer or something similar.

The final option – getting involved in an online community – is in many ways a very low risk option. After all, you don’t actually have to start making posts in forums. You can just surf along and watch the others rip each other to shreds. Alternatively you can choose to ramp up your level of participation until such time as you spend 6 hours every evening in front of your computer fulminating about how Someone is WRONG on the Internet.

As with a club, an online forum may have no ambitions beyond being an online forum, and if you wish to move beyond that then again a convention may be a better bet. But both clubs and forums are liable to attract the occasional Big Name Fan who can corrupt you lead you on to bigger and better things.

Going online is a wonderful way to find social interaction if, like me, you are often stuck in parts of the world where intelligent discussion of science fiction is not just hard to find, but liable to get you beaten up if you were to try indulging in it in a pub. On the other hand, I still find face-to-face interaction preferable if you can get it. More of this later.

I probably haven’t answer that bit about a “healthy relationship”. Can one have a healthy relationship with fandom? Yes, I’m sure you can. But one man’s health is another man’s terminal addiction. You have to find your own level, and stick to it. In addition, toxic relationships are possible in all forms of fandom, as indeed they are in all walks of line. Online you may encounter trolls who persist in baiting you because they see that you care about something. At clubs you may find socially inept people who cling to anyone kind enough to show an interest in them. In con running you may find people who take advantage of your energy and enthusiasm to get out of doing work themselves but somehow take the credit for what you have done. That’s life, and what you need to do is learn to recognize such situations (or many similar ones) as they arise and walk away from them. The important thing to remember is that while fandom may be a way of life, it is not the be all and end all of life. If you find yourself being hounded out of a forum, a club or a convention committee, well you probably didn’t want to be there anyway.

So what about part 2: Online Fandom, Threat or Menace? Well, that’s the way that it is normally framed in convention panels. What I want to know is, back in the 19th Century when the postage stamp was first invented, did science fiction conventions have panels entitled “Postal Fandom, Threat or Menace?” Did concerned fans wring their hands in terror at the thought that Fandom As We Know It might disappear entirely because in the future fans would only ever interact by letter, not face-to-face? I suspect that they did.

The important things about online fandom are as follows:

1. It is there and it won’t go away, no matter how much hand-wringing is done
2. It is a huge boon for people who live in places where there are no large local fan communities, or who for various reasons can’t get out much
3. It enables fans to do some things more quickly and easily than ever before
4. That includes getting into feuds (fans had flame wars before, but they were harder to start and keep going then they took place in letter columns)
5. It enables fans to do some things that were very difficult, expensive or impossible before
6. It isn’t the same as meeting face-to-face, and probably never will be (although we may all end up as software routines in a Charlie Stross novel in which case we won’t care)

So yes, virtual cons are possible. I’m sure that they have such things in Second Life. Live online chats are certainly possible, and ConFlux in Canberra is one of the pioneers of such things (see here). Live audio and video streaming of convention events is possible now. The main stumbling blocks are the cost and complexity of the technology, and the amount of volunteer labor involved. Kevin and I seriously considered doing live webcasts of the masquerade and Hugo Award ceremony from Glasgow in 2005. We had a company lined up to do it, but we were unable to raise the $10k or so that we would have needed to finance the operation.

As to how fast all of this develops, as with many things in fandom it depends on people having the energy and enthusiasm (and in some cases the technical know-how) to make it happen. I was very happy with the live blogging of the Hugos from Denver. The technology worked flawlessly, and I hope to repeat the service at other award ceremonies in the future. Two things would have made it a lot better. I needed a production assistant who could process and upload the photos and video I took at the pre-Hugo party so that I could get it online as part of the live show. And I could have done with somewhere better to work. Staring at the small screen on the Asus in a dark auditorium for two hours did my eyes no good at all.

Eventually, however, it will become standard for Worldcon to webcast the ceremony, and then no one will want to follow my antiquated live blogging.

Another driver is going to be economics. If, for example, it becomes prohibitively expensive to fly long distances, or if Worldcon starts to be held in expensive vacation resorts on a regular basis, people will be more interested in developing online access to the convention.

The important thing to remember, however, is that the Internet is merely a means of communication. So is paper mail, so is the telephone. Communication is What Fans Do, because if they didn’t communicate then there would be no fandom. It is entirely possible that some fans will be shut out of some aspects of fandom because they cannot get to grips with the currently fashionable communications technologies. This does not mean that fandom is dying, it just means that it is changing. The only thing that will cause fandom to die is if it refuses to change.