The Graying of Fandom

If you follow such matters you may have heard these past few years of the "graying" of fandom--an appraisal literally based on the proportion of gray heads to be seen at science fiction conventions. This is most often remarked in relation to the tables at the conventions devoted to print science fiction—such that it is easy enough to see this "graying" as a matter of people reading less generally, with this especially the case with their reading for pleasure, and perhaps especially their reading science fiction for pleasure. This is partly because those who enjoy the genre have so many, many other options for enjoying what has been its popular draw--less science fiction as a genre of ideas than a genre of adventure stories of the kind that the literature-enviers sneer at. (Why read a space opera when you can play any number of them on your home console or desktop computer or cell phone?)

Still, it may be that not just the tables where authors are sitting have gray heads in front of them, but that gray heads generally are more present throughout the convention, with this having some obvious possible explanations as well. One is that in the age of the Internet conventions are less central to fandom than they used to be, online life having its spaces--its publications, its fora--which are a year-round convention for everything, as compared with the old days when getting to hang with like-minded fans was something one had to do in person. (If anything, the fact that young people are more cash-strapped and less mobile than they used to be may reinforce this--they just don't have the disposable income, and maybe not disposable time, required for a habit such as convention-going, all as that generation is increasingly accustomed to, and maybe more comfortable, socializing through its screens anyway. At the expense of indulging in a stereotype it may not be irrelevant that such traits as introversion, neuroatypicality and social awkwardness may be more present in fandom than in the population at large.)

Another is that people are less likely to become hardcore fans in the first place because in the existing, options-saturated, pop cultural milieu they have so much material in front of them that they tend to sample many pleasures rather than becoming connoisseurs of any one of them--anything like the old "Trekkie" scene unlikely to happen ever again. That the objects of their pleasure are available to them all the time in the age of smart phones and streaming may add to this, contrasting with how a show they only got to see once a week, which they knew all the other fans like themselves were watching at that same moment, which was thus "appointment TV" and a mass experience and an event, helped foster their enthusiasm. (So did the fact that if the media industry had always been crassly sequel and spin-off-minded, it was a long way from today's unhinged running of every franchise into the ground as standard operating procedure, as exemplified by the far past-their-prime Star Wars and Marvel machines, as if determined to burn out rather than sustain any interest it manages to raise in its products.) The older fan was formed in that earlier world--but the younger fan is likely to know only the world we have now.

Still another explanation is that the possibility of deep immersion is the possibility that deep immersion itself is becoming less possible for them as a cohort of young people becomes oriented instead to the "relatable." Consider how this has colored their tastes with regard to film. In contrast with earlier generations of filmgoers who delighted in movies whisking them off to another time and place, they want the drama, the adventure, to come to them, in a way that has made the period piece a tough sell--all as, one might add, the superheroes who seem most consistently successful with them are those who lives are closest to their own, like their friendly neighborhood Spider-Man with "everyday college student problems," as compared with outer space adventuring figures like Thor, Star-Lord and the Green Lantern. This is the very opposite of that enjoyment of absorption in another world that makes for the kind of fan who takes a great interest in the minutiae of the objects of their pleasure ("That Boba Fett guy, what's his deal?"), such that they write fan fiction about it, dress up as characters from it and are eager to share their passion with others like themselves. And if it was always the case that the more "relatable" figures probably always had the bigger fan bases, it seems likely that where popular taste is concerned the balance has shifted very far in favor of relatability among younger people--and in the process, away from the chances of winning the kind of deep affection among them that made fandom what it was in its heyday.