Years ago before the internet, people used to drink in local pubs. In every town or district there were always a few people you learned to avoid. Like the nutjobs who thought Hitler/Stalin basically had a fair point, even if their methods “went a bit too far”. Or the obsessives who turned every conversation round to how brilliant Level 42 were. The aggressive, tedious, and terminally socially maladjusted.
But their numbers were relatively small and sparse geographic distribution made it hard for them to coalesce into a coherent group. In a big city they might come together as members of some niche or fringe interest group, like Class War, but even so could relatively easily be avoided by simply walking down the road to the next pub.
Then the internet arrived and all of a sudden these people weren’t socially isolated. They might still be small in number relative to their specific location, but when you add them all up across the world suddenly you had a more-or-less coherent mass of connected oddballs boosting each other.
But it didn’t stop there. Very quickly people learned that being one of these hyper-connected oddballs was easier than maintaining IRL relationships with all their uncertainties and compromises. You got to belong and feel validated essentially cost-free and, if you were so minded, experience the thrill of dispensing mob justice to transgressors without even the expense of buying a pitchfork.
Being a tedious monomaniac nutjob used to get you shunned in pubs. Now it gets you clicks and likes and validation. Its become aspirational and a horrible feedback loop has emerged which rewards such behaviour and therefore encourages more and more people to indulge in it.
I don’t think there is any cure for it because social media isn’t going anywhere and it will always reward extreme behaviour with attention. I think we just have to live with it. Like death and taxes.
I suppose one can work to save him or herself and The Children from at least a portion of it.
You make a series of good and robustly expressed points about the newness of this metastasized phenomenon, but there have always been a few monomaniacal whack-jobs that found a major, eager audience. Think dictators, demagogues, and wellness gurus. Sure, many were just cynical imposters, but they tapped into a similar validation loop, and some of the worst were true believers in their own brand of snake oil.
Good point. I think this also applies to adolescents who have strong opinions about television shows like Twilight. Before social media, they would just be considered nerds. They might join a fan club and get posters to put up in their rooms. As they grew older they would learn to keep quiet about nerdy topics if they wanted to get laid or promoted and, in the process, develop a range of conventional social skills. But that development has been shortcircuited by social media, not only for Hitler/Stalin apologists but also for run-of-the-mill basics.
It’s too early to say whether the pattern will persist. Look at cocaine/crack: very popular for quite a while, then people noticed that it ruined your life. Could happen with social media too.
Matt Hindman
5 months ago
I was part of team Making Fun of Sparkly Vampire Books at the time.
Me too, and I’m actually, often enough, a sucker for the romantic vampire trope…when it’s good (even campy good, like Buffy). I found the whole sparkly thing just too stupid, it repelled me almost immediately.
Right-Wing Hippie
5 months ago
Look at that picture. Best love story of our time, I’m telling you.
Anyone who has been terminally online for the last 15 years knows for themselves the damage Tumblr’s userbase has caused to wider cultural and political discourse.
N Satori
5 months ago
For people coming of age on social media, Twilight offered the first inkling of how good being part of a mob could feel. How wonderful to just pick a side and root for it: fiercely, loyally, unconditionally and absolutely.
Maybe… but it does sound like the kind of thing football supporters have been doing for generations. That too has a parallel in energetic yet dim-witted political activism.
And let’s not forget those besotted pop music fans who pay large sums to attend concerts, not to listen to music but in order to be part of an adoring uncritical mob.
Last edited 5 months ago by N Satori
Benjamin Greco
5 months ago
I’m not buying this. You could plug in any teen fad here, Harry Potter, Hunger Games or Hula hoops, and make the same weak argument. Some people are sure the sixties sexual revolution was caused by Hula hoops.
Our tribal politics and culture have no one cause and YA fiction isn’t on the list. I had the feeling while reading this that the author was stuck for a column at deadline and discovered some old notes from her MTV days,
Max Price
5 months ago
Everyone (should be) team Edward. Nobody likes wet dog smell.
Rosenfield’s turns of phrase are hilarious: “you say immortal teenage dreamboat; I say creepy 108-year-old man”.
I didn’t read these books or watch these movies and I don’t enjoy what I see as the related, ongoing cultural fixation with vampires, zombies, and various monsters and superpowered badasses. I also thought the argument about the central or pivotal place of Twilight was a bit much. But then again, I was in my thirties when this stuff came out, and I’ve never been a teenage girl (at least in this incarnation). The part about the coincidental rise of social media and “magnified problematics”–the word was stripped of any clear meaning and the shorter list became what isn’t problematic–was of interest. And the writing saved me from nodding off in a coffin before daybreak.
Who wrote the clickbait title to this piece? Do they think that sort of thing works? Oh wait–never mind.
0 0
5 months ago
We a least got Robert Pattinson out of all that nonsense, he shown himself to be very talented, and he rules as Batman.
This is a fascinating analysis of the ways in which Twilight fandom reflected broader cultural shifts. I was in my early 30s when I read the books and quickly got suckered in, even though I kept telling myself how dreadful they were. Notably, Twilight was prior to the popularisation of Kindle, so if you read the series, people knew about it. 50 Shades of Grey, which, of course, started as Twilight fan-fiction, came at just the right time to capitalise on the rise of Kindle. Interestingly, the love triangle isn’t featured there (as far as I know). Also, you have forgotten the core legacy of Twilight: the worse baby’s name of all time: Renesmee. You can read my ode to the name here: https://silentbutdeadly.substack.com/p/an-ode-to-renesmee.
Mike SampleName
5 months ago
Twilight was the starter.
MCU and Star Wars are the main course. Sides of pretty much anything else.
If you didn’t go watch The Marvels, you have declared yourself a Very Bad Person, apparently (considering the box office numbers, that makes 99.99% of the world a misogynistic white supremacist by my calculations). If you didn’t like The Last Jedi, you’re a Trump-voting MAGA-loon, whether you live in the USA or not. Your opinions on the new Little Mermaid and Snow White determine which social circles you are permitted to occupy.
All based around people playing dress up to tell childrens’ stories.
I have noticed a high volume of people withdrawing from fandoms altogether because they’re simply tired of the constant aggro from both sides (even if they tend to identify more with one). I used to be a huge star wars fan (watched the first one in the theatre in ’77), and don’t like the sequel trilogy. But I’m tired of constant “Disney has destroyed Star Wars! Kathleen Kennedy is the devil! Star Wars? More like Star Woke hahahaha” from “my” side or constantly being derided as an istaphobe by the other. I know people who quite liked “The Last Jedi” who’ve given up on the fandom because it’s become a statement of identity rather than just a movie.
As a result I’ve just withdrawn from it so much I haven’t watched any of the new stuff in years, and I stay away from fan spaces. I know many who have done the same for SW, DC and MCU.
The fan bases are more and more occupied, like everywhere else, entirely by extremists screaming at each other, whilst the “normal” fans just back out the door.
The creators of many of these properties have seemed to enjoy the controversies in cases (Rian Johnson: “Your Snoke Theory Sucks”, Taika Waititi: “I’ll destroy your mythos in a minute baby!” etc) – they would do well to remember that they are no longer loved like they were, and the opposite of love is not hate, it is apathy. And, as Darth Kreia famously said: “Apathy is death”. Especially for multi-billion IPs that nobody cares about any more.
C Horton
5 months ago
Everything must now be part of a social cause and splits must and will happen in every major fandom. I’ve majorly backed away from the Harry Potter fandom because it has become polarized with insanity due to Rowling’s beliefs about the trans community. Why can’t it just be fun and avoid politics? But no, not gonna happen, so I just read the books and wish the world wasn’t crazy and making a cause out of everything.
I read Twilight and 40 pages or so of the 2nd book and I was good. I never liked it enough to keep reading. I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t love it, so for me, that’s reason enough to just let it go.
If fans can’t recognize fatal flaws in their favorite stories then there really isn’t much hope for them. I love the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, but I’ve still got major issues with some changes made that deviated from the books. Loving something while still acknowledging it’s failings. It’s really not a hard concept to grasp.
But people can’t even do that with authors or actors anymore, so I think we’ve forgotten how.
Last edited 5 months ago by C Horton
Steve Murray
5 months ago
I’m a fan of twilight, but wouldn’t give these types of series the time of day.
Years ago before the internet, people used to drink in local pubs. In every town or district there were always a few people you learned to avoid. Like the nutjobs who thought Hitler/Stalin basically had a fair point, even if their methods “went a bit too far”. Or the obsessives who turned every conversation round to how brilliant Level 42 were. The aggressive, tedious, and terminally socially maladjusted.
But their numbers were relatively small and sparse geographic distribution made it hard for them to coalesce into a coherent group. In a big city they might come together as members of some niche or fringe interest group, like Class War, but even so could relatively easily be avoided by simply walking down the road to the next pub.
Then the internet arrived and all of a sudden these people weren’t socially isolated. They might still be small in number relative to their specific location, but when you add them all up across the world suddenly you had a more-or-less coherent mass of connected oddballs boosting each other.
But it didn’t stop there. Very quickly people learned that being one of these hyper-connected oddballs was easier than maintaining IRL relationships with all their uncertainties and compromises. You got to belong and feel validated essentially cost-free and, if you were so minded, experience the thrill of dispensing mob justice to transgressors without even the expense of buying a pitchfork.
Being a tedious monomaniac nutjob used to get you shunned in pubs. Now it gets you clicks and likes and validation. Its become aspirational and a horrible feedback loop has emerged which rewards such behaviour and therefore encourages more and more people to indulge in it.
I don’t think there is any cure for it because social media isn’t going anywhere and it will always reward extreme behaviour with attention. I think we just have to live with it. Like death and taxes.
I suppose one can work to save him or herself and The Children from at least a portion of it.
You make a series of good and robustly expressed points about the newness of this metastasized phenomenon, but there have always been a few monomaniacal whack-jobs that found a major, eager audience. Think dictators, demagogues, and wellness gurus. Sure, many were just cynical imposters, but they tapped into a similar validation loop, and some of the worst were true believers in their own brand of snake oil.
Good point. I think this also applies to adolescents who have strong opinions about television shows like Twilight. Before social media, they would just be considered nerds. They might join a fan club and get posters to put up in their rooms. As they grew older they would learn to keep quiet about nerdy topics if they wanted to get laid or promoted and, in the process, develop a range of conventional social skills. But that development has been shortcircuited by social media, not only for Hitler/Stalin apologists but also for run-of-the-mill basics.
It’s too early to say whether the pattern will persist. Look at cocaine/crack: very popular for quite a while, then people noticed that it ruined your life. Could happen with social media too.
I was part of team Making Fun of Sparkly Vampire Books at the time.
Me too, and I’m actually, often enough, a sucker for the romantic vampire trope…when it’s good (even campy good, like Buffy). I found the whole sparkly thing just too stupid, it repelled me almost immediately.
Look at that picture. Best love story of our time, I’m telling you.
Yeah, I try and fight it but I love it.
Anyone who has been terminally online for the last 15 years knows for themselves the damage Tumblr’s userbase has caused to wider cultural and political discourse.
Maybe… but it does sound like the kind of thing football supporters have been doing for generations. That too has a parallel in energetic yet dim-witted political activism.
And let’s not forget those besotted pop music fans who pay large sums to attend concerts, not to listen to music but in order to be part of an adoring uncritical mob.
I’m not buying this. You could plug in any teen fad here, Harry Potter, Hunger Games or Hula hoops, and make the same weak argument. Some people are sure the sixties sexual revolution was caused by Hula hoops.
Our tribal politics and culture have no one cause and YA fiction isn’t on the list. I had the feeling while reading this that the author was stuck for a column at deadline and discovered some old notes from her MTV days,
Everyone (should be) team Edward. Nobody likes wet dog smell.
Ever smelt bats?
I smell a team Jacob member, ewww.
I love the smell of dogs – wet or dry.
Rosenfield’s turns of phrase are hilarious: “you say immortal teenage dreamboat; I say creepy 108-year-old man”.
I didn’t read these books or watch these movies and I don’t enjoy what I see as the related, ongoing cultural fixation with vampires, zombies, and various monsters and superpowered badasses. I also thought the argument about the central or pivotal place of Twilight was a bit much. But then again, I was in my thirties when this stuff came out, and I’ve never been a teenage girl (at least in this incarnation). The part about the coincidental rise of social media and “magnified problematics”–the word was stripped of any clear meaning and the shorter list became what isn’t problematic–was of interest. And the writing saved me from nodding off in a coffin before daybreak.
Who wrote the clickbait title to this piece? Do they think that sort of thing works? Oh wait–never mind.
We a least got Robert Pattinson out of all that nonsense, he shown himself to be very talented, and he rules as Batman.
RP is that you?
This is a fascinating analysis of the ways in which Twilight fandom reflected broader cultural shifts. I was in my early 30s when I read the books and quickly got suckered in, even though I kept telling myself how dreadful they were. Notably, Twilight was prior to the popularisation of Kindle, so if you read the series, people knew about it. 50 Shades of Grey, which, of course, started as Twilight fan-fiction, came at just the right time to capitalise on the rise of Kindle. Interestingly, the love triangle isn’t featured there (as far as I know). Also, you have forgotten the core legacy of Twilight: the worse baby’s name of all time: Renesmee. You can read my ode to the name here: https://silentbutdeadly.substack.com/p/an-ode-to-renesmee.
Twilight was the starter.
MCU and Star Wars are the main course. Sides of pretty much anything else.
If you didn’t go watch The Marvels, you have declared yourself a Very Bad Person, apparently (considering the box office numbers, that makes 99.99% of the world a misogynistic white supremacist by my calculations). If you didn’t like The Last Jedi, you’re a Trump-voting MAGA-loon, whether you live in the USA or not. Your opinions on the new Little Mermaid and Snow White determine which social circles you are permitted to occupy.
All based around people playing dress up to tell childrens’ stories.
I have noticed a high volume of people withdrawing from fandoms altogether because they’re simply tired of the constant aggro from both sides (even if they tend to identify more with one). I used to be a huge star wars fan (watched the first one in the theatre in ’77), and don’t like the sequel trilogy. But I’m tired of constant “Disney has destroyed Star Wars! Kathleen Kennedy is the devil! Star Wars? More like Star Woke hahahaha” from “my” side or constantly being derided as an istaphobe by the other. I know people who quite liked “The Last Jedi” who’ve given up on the fandom because it’s become a statement of identity rather than just a movie.
As a result I’ve just withdrawn from it so much I haven’t watched any of the new stuff in years, and I stay away from fan spaces. I know many who have done the same for SW, DC and MCU.
The fan bases are more and more occupied, like everywhere else, entirely by extremists screaming at each other, whilst the “normal” fans just back out the door.
The creators of many of these properties have seemed to enjoy the controversies in cases (Rian Johnson: “Your Snoke Theory Sucks”, Taika Waititi: “I’ll destroy your mythos in a minute baby!” etc) – they would do well to remember that they are no longer loved like they were, and the opposite of love is not hate, it is apathy. And, as Darth Kreia famously said: “Apathy is death”. Especially for multi-billion IPs that nobody cares about any more.
Everything must now be part of a social cause and splits must and will happen in every major fandom. I’ve majorly backed away from the Harry Potter fandom because it has become polarized with insanity due to Rowling’s beliefs about the trans community. Why can’t it just be fun and avoid politics? But no, not gonna happen, so I just read the books and wish the world wasn’t crazy and making a cause out of everything.
I read Twilight and 40 pages or so of the 2nd book and I was good. I never liked it enough to keep reading. I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t love it, so for me, that’s reason enough to just let it go.
If fans can’t recognize fatal flaws in their favorite stories then there really isn’t much hope for them. I love the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, but I’ve still got major issues with some changes made that deviated from the books. Loving something while still acknowledging it’s failings. It’s really not a hard concept to grasp.
But people can’t even do that with authors or actors anymore, so I think we’ve forgotten how.
I’m a fan of twilight, but wouldn’t give these types of series the time of day.