Where does one go for ideas on the Internet?

[koganbot]

On his own lj, Lex asked about Tumblr and Twitter, wanted to be persuaded or dissuaded. I don't have a Tumblr blog and I've been ignoring Twitter, and I spend too much time on the Internet as is, but, instead of asking about a particular format or application, I'll just ask:

(1) Where does one go for ORGAFUN these days?

(2) Where does one go for ideas and smart arguments?

(3) Where does one go for people taking stock of themselves and their world?

Reminiscences:

CATEGORY ONE: In the 1980s fanzine days, I first created Readers' Poll, which, as the name more than suggests, involved my asking questions and printing the answers, except the questions were along the lines of "Why are dinosaurs so popular?" and "What would you do if your employer asked you to take a urine test?" and "Do you care where the money comes from?" and "What was Genghis Khan's concept of 'weekend'?" Answers would veer unpredictably into seriousness and frivolity, lots of passion and many ongoing gags and occasional actual arguments. One could categorize this as ORGAFUN, though as on poptimists, the fun provoked interesting ideas. Why Music Sucks was a spinoff from Readers' Poll; my original plan was for WMS to occupy the back pages of Readers' Poll, but there was so much response to the music question that it created its own zine. But I'd say the actual music ORGAFUN wasn't WMS but Phil Dellio's Radio On, which came along in the early Nineties. Phil would send us a list of fifty or so singles and tell us to rate them and write about whichever ones we wanted and about any other musical thing we felt like; responses would be anything from one-liners to essays. (That barely describes it.) In any event, Readers' Poll and Radio On both foreshadowed poptimists on its poll or contest days. And Sarah Riegel's Kitschener spun off from there, with nonmusic questions (so ended up something like Readers' Poll, which she'd never seen).

CATEGORY TWO: Why Music Sucks developed into a melange of ideas/theories/arguments/brawls, basically like a good day on the old ilX - but also with the frustrating aspects of ilX, people talking without speaking, people hearing without listening, neglected words of prophets blah blah blah, so I eventually killed it (fortunately Radio On emerged a few months after WMS died). Meanwhile, Jack Thompson's Swellsville became more and more like WMS as its letters pages swelled.

CATEGORY THREE: When I restarted Why Music Sucks in the mid '90s the equivalent of ORGAFUN was the blindfold test I'd put in the back, but most of the zine was my attempt to start social explorations, questions being what was the first record you bought and what was going on in your life when you bought it, draw a social map of your old high school or your work place, start a religious war, describe weird things you did as a child - the result from most people being less sociological and more personal than I'd expected (though given the questions that's not surprising), so it was people taking stock of their past. I'd say that ILE and lj have aspects similar to the second incarnation of WMS. This version of WMS was overall a better zine than the original, since most people are better at telling their truths than at dicking around with "ideas," but my own heart was more with the original WMS, the pie fight over ideas rather than the personal essay.

So, where are the good ideas, the good conversations, the ORGAFUN? What happened to ORGAFUN on lj? Link me something. Is there much interesting music criticism these days? Is there anything of the quality of early ilX or the poptimists' Pop World Cup/Now and P&J rehashes etc.? Or Rolling Teenpop 2006? And will I have time to look? I'm two weeks behind on The Vids Are Alright, for instance; I have time to read Tom's Popular entries but not the comment threads; I sleep but I don't rest; etc.

By the way, the blogs I visit every day are by Paul Krugman and Brad Delong, both economists, both articulate, both wrestling with the emergency issue of the moment.

Comments

[petronia.livejournal.com]

People's attention always shifts with time, so to create a long-term self-sustaining community you need to replenish with newcomers. There are barriers to entry, though: once a close-knit discussion community gets going it's hard to make yourself part of it, particularly if you're already a member in good standing of several other communities and don't have the time/energy to devote. I read ILM on and off for several years (starting I think '04? but I read a lot of old threads) and it's formed a lot of my ideas on music, but I've never posted there once. ^^; I've also never made a post on poptimists, though I'm okay commenting there. Just cos everyone seems to be "real" friends with some shared history, one feels like one needs to know people personally in order to involve oneself in the discussion. Which I guess goes back to the hallway/classroom thing in some sense... in Fandom as I've experienced it, anyway, the line between the two is q. blurry.

Personal LJs are definitely not a good platform for message board discussions, particularly not "rolling" topics. They're a good platform for archiving essays, though.

My own attention rarely stays focussed. XD Right now I'm spending time on various specific band-related message boards and LJ comms, and on douban, which I'd recommend heartily as a platform for music-based discussion if there were an English version (the whole social network is designed around logging/rating/reviewing/discussing what you've read/watched/heard lately, what your friends have, etc.).

[koganbot]

Oh, we desperately could have used you on Rolling Teenpop; even as early as late '06 we were in need of new blood. And for what it's worth, none of the long-term Rolling Teenpop regulars except Tim Finney and Chuck Eddy were people who had been in regular ilX contact with me (though a lot of them had been on ilX). Tim Ellison I'd been a bit in touch with over the years but he didn't really stick with Rolling Teenpop, nor did Scott Woods or Matt Cibula or Anthony Easton or Anthony Miccio. And actually, most of my contact with Chuck wasn't through ilX (we'd been writing letters to each other since 1986). Before Rolling Teenpop I'd barely had any interchanges with Mike Bartel or William Bloody Swygart or Lex Macpherson (though Lex has mainly been through poptimists, since like most Brits he didn't post consistently on Rolling Teenpop), and hadn't previously known who Dave Moore or Edward Oculicz or Mordy Shinefield or Greg Fanoe or Nia or Ian Grey or Ross Hoffmann even were.

(We had trouble retaining our women: Jessica Popper, Abby MacDonald, Hazel Robinson, Jeanne Fury, Hillary Brown. Maybe 'cause most of them weren't North American.)

So it isn't like you'd have been crashing a long-settled circle.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

You're probably overestimating how much I knew / would have been able to add to a Teenpop conversation in '06-'07. XD; I was pretty much all dance, all the time (Switch will probably never know my gratitude re: what he did for my mp3 collection).

In truth I didn't participate on ILX because a very large proportion of my fandom energy was going elsewhere to music, with music taking up more space over time.