I want to follow up on my post about how I missed Geek Evangelism. I had stated that I frankly missed the passionate outreach, even when it was annoying, as it had been replaced with stark territoriality. What, I wondered, had happened?
My conclusion was basically too many geeks had gone into the internet echo chamber, where even more marketing echoed, and sealed themselves off. Some of us, many of us didn’t end up in echo chambers (or ended up in larger ones that were well-aired), and those echo-chambers confused the hell out of us.
Yet I had noted that the internet also let people re-invent fandoms and themselves. Harry Potter fandom seemed to spring to life on the internet, cultivated not from any origin in earlier fandom, but by fans itself. Many that followed seemed the same way, springing up everywhere, diverse, wide, and often crazy.
Yet these too would end up in fan wars and conflicts and battling echo chambers.