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Apr. 28th, 2008 08:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sebastienneUser. Generated. Content.
I love it.
It's what this whole great LiveJournal community is. It's Facebook and YouTube and all this "Web 2.0" stuff that gets talked about much more than it is ever understood.
It's the quotation from the![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
ou3fs profile: "Fanfiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by folk."
It's this incredible, mind-blowing article that fills me with so much hope for the future. If you read one piece of LJ linkspam this day, please let it be this one.
-----
New Year's Eve, 1998. My parents are drinking champagne. Perhaps if they hadn't been, I would be a very different person today.
When I ask to watch the film that's on BBC2 (the Radio Times describes it as "glam rock", like that Bowie chap I saw on Top of the Pops 2, like That Picture of Jonathan Rhys Meyers that I saw in J-17 magazine, oh I just need to see it in a way I can't explain), they seem uncertain, but acquiesce. I am twelve. The film is called "The Rocky Horror Picture Show". I am born.
56kbps dial-up internet. I am limited to 20 minutes a day, because it ties up the phone line and costs a premium rate. I read everything I can find about this film I have seen, the one that's moved me in ways I haven't words for, that's exhorted me, "don't dream it - be it". I read about the freaks and weirdos who dress up in costumes and go along at midnight and shout back at the screen. I know with unshakable conviction that, one day, that I will turn up and be met with open arms and be accepted completely, without question. (When my parents first take me to see the stage show, I am thirteen, and they refuse to let me go in costume. I wear 6-inch heels and fishnets under an ankle-length skirt in defiance.) Looking down from the balcony to the scantily-clad front row, it is the first time that I have ever felt a sense of belonging with people, rather than with books.
I record a Rocky Horror radio documentary, and play it at least once an evening for over six months. It has snippets of songs and interviews and nostalgia and it feels like coming home. Toyah Wilcox talks about being a punk in 1973 - before punk was a movement, when she was just a freak with dyed hair and ripped fishnets. Richard O'Brien talks about putting straight boys in stockings. These are people who are completely themselves, with no regard for what is told to them and what is sold to them. I have never met people like this. I love them.
Message boards and site guestbooks and email penpals. I read about the Red Dwarf crew meeting Frank & crew - it is my first ever fan fiction. Soon I will be swallowed whole by obsessions like Bowie and Wilde and Harry Potter fandom. But Rocky Horror got there first.
------
Rocky Horror callbacks were my first exposure to user generated content. Before FanFiction, before Web 2.0; here were people creating their own culture, because the one spoon-fed to them by capitalism was so bland and unappetising. I loved it then, and I love it now.
I love it.
It's what this whole great LiveJournal community is. It's Facebook and YouTube and all this "Web 2.0" stuff that gets talked about much more than it is ever understood.
It's the quotation from the
ou3fs profile: "Fanfiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by folk."It's this incredible, mind-blowing article that fills me with so much hope for the future. If you read one piece of LJ linkspam this day, please let it be this one.
-----
New Year's Eve, 1998. My parents are drinking champagne. Perhaps if they hadn't been, I would be a very different person today.
When I ask to watch the film that's on BBC2 (the Radio Times describes it as "glam rock", like that Bowie chap I saw on Top of the Pops 2, like That Picture of Jonathan Rhys Meyers that I saw in J-17 magazine, oh I just need to see it in a way I can't explain), they seem uncertain, but acquiesce. I am twelve. The film is called "The Rocky Horror Picture Show". I am born.
56kbps dial-up internet. I am limited to 20 minutes a day, because it ties up the phone line and costs a premium rate. I read everything I can find about this film I have seen, the one that's moved me in ways I haven't words for, that's exhorted me, "don't dream it - be it". I read about the freaks and weirdos who dress up in costumes and go along at midnight and shout back at the screen. I know with unshakable conviction that, one day, that I will turn up and be met with open arms and be accepted completely, without question. (When my parents first take me to see the stage show, I am thirteen, and they refuse to let me go in costume. I wear 6-inch heels and fishnets under an ankle-length skirt in defiance.) Looking down from the balcony to the scantily-clad front row, it is the first time that I have ever felt a sense of belonging with people, rather than with books.
I record a Rocky Horror radio documentary, and play it at least once an evening for over six months. It has snippets of songs and interviews and nostalgia and it feels like coming home. Toyah Wilcox talks about being a punk in 1973 - before punk was a movement, when she was just a freak with dyed hair and ripped fishnets. Richard O'Brien talks about putting straight boys in stockings. These are people who are completely themselves, with no regard for what is told to them and what is sold to them. I have never met people like this. I love them.
Message boards and site guestbooks and email penpals. I read about the Red Dwarf crew meeting Frank & crew - it is my first ever fan fiction. Soon I will be swallowed whole by obsessions like Bowie and Wilde and Harry Potter fandom. But Rocky Horror got there first.
------
Rocky Horror callbacks were my first exposure to user generated content. Before FanFiction, before Web 2.0; here were people creating their own culture, because the one spoon-fed to them by capitalism was so bland and unappetising. I loved it then, and I love it now.
