There were two recurring themes some editor at Salon – around say ‘96 when it and Slate kind of were for-internet print media – was fixated on.
One was a child-liberationist one, like “parents can have people abduct their 'problem children’ to offshore reform camps like Tranquility Bay, and also often backwater areas of various states use 'Person In Need of Supervision’ structures to apply the state to control teens on parents’ behalf AND THAT’S FUCKED UP”
The other was “oh yeah remember how there was once a rich subculture of female Star Trek fans writing 'slash’ fanfiction?”
And it was honestly surprising to me it was the second one the culture ended up picking up as a major subplot.
Like, my post is entirely in reaction to the Facebook post included there as image that the new “hey here’s some stuff” feed showed me. (Not knocking, “hey here’s some stuff” has been the basis of mass media since newspapers)
I started checking out with DS9 and haven’t personally watched any since Voyager.
Oh, I realize it’s been a long time since this was in general circulation here, so for the newcomers: my media tag is #it’s media as a reference to this overannotated drawing:
in the next decade we are going to be seeing so many movies where characters have arcs about wanting to be accepted that are stretched out to vaguely resemble a metaphor about being trans with really no other narrative commitment to the concept. and all of them will read to me like this image.
The media is still grappling with what Jezebel’s creators helped unleash, for good and ill. The era opened opportunities for journalists and creative people who, by instinct or practice, could blend their identities with the stories they told. The new generation of millennial writers at the Gawker sites, BuzzFeed, Vice and other digital projects challenged stuffy, insular and occasionally deceitful institutions that deserved challenging, but it also lacked, in retrospect, a sense of the value of having trusted institutions at all.
And those of us who came up in the internet media may have missed the biggest story of all. We took it for granted that this was a progressive medium, populated by young people who loved Barack Obama and culminating in some way in his election in 2008. We didn’t expect the true apogee of the new media to come with the election of Donald Trump eight years later.
Taylor Lorenz pivoting to Covid hawkery in a ridiculous Taylor Lorenz fashion seems more likely to set up her haters to link that to everything else she represents in getting it all read out of the media mainstream than advance any of her own interests, but girl can’t help herself.
And it’s like she’s on a mission. “Insisting that people never breathe the same air again is just a natural extension of harm sensitivity norms in queer communities! You should apply your feelings re: one to the other!”
I will say though that yeah, maybe what we’re seeing now suggests that queer community norms around AIDS reflected that its harms were primarily to the small, embattled, and strongly distinct queer community itself, if having unprotected gay sex killed off random elderly people in 1987 you’d probably have seen bareback circuit parties for the purpose
Taylor Lorenz pivoting to Covid hawkery in a ridiculous Taylor Lorenz fashion seems more likely to set up her haters to link that to everything else she represents in getting it all read out of the media mainstream than advance any of her own interests, but girl can’t help herself.
