Casual Fanatics

I've been thinking about this for awhile. I realize that by posting this that I've pretty much crossed over into being a verified kook. But instead of passing out crayon scrawled fliers at the bus stop or mailing letters to the editor I'll just quietly work this out here where you can't see me foaming at the mouth and screaming at invisible tormentors.

I was thinking about why I do OtakuHELL.

And I realized it was because I like to share these weird little video treasures with other people. And I thought about that for some time. And then the other week I was talking to somebody about sharing books. And I made the connection. About the act of sharing these things. It's like this:

You read a book. Maybe you like it or maybe you don't. Or maybe that book strikes a cord in you. You really REALLY like that book. You want to tell everybody about this book. You want to share this book with everybody. But what you're really doing is you want to share your experience.

It's not just books of course. The same thing happens with music and movies and TV shows. We have all at one time tried to share the experience of a song or a band or a movie. (And it just occurred to me that I need to expand this idea to cover things like sports and experiencing the simple pleasures of activities, like gardening, etc.)

Now the thing of it is that this compulsion to share our experiences seems to me to be a pretty universal thing. And It seems to me that what is being shared is more about emotions then ideas. It's not like Memetics, the idea that ideas are like viruses that transmit themselves from person to person. It's about being compelled to share a common pleasurable experience. It's not about sharing an idea. And that's important.

These experiences are not dependent on the merit of the subject. Maybe it's the worst movie ever made but you are compelled to share the experience because there is something that made it pleasurable. And maybe it's our ability to find that pleasurable experience even in the most flawed and worthless things that is the most noble thing about us.

Because sometimes the experience touches a person in a profound way. The experience becomes an obsession. And that's where Fans come from. The stronger the experience the stronger Fans are compelled to share that experience. Maybe it's more like a spiritual experience? I need to think about this.

So the thing I'm thinking about now is, Why are we compelled to share these experiences?

I'm sure this idea isn't new. There's probably a book or two written about it somewhere that I don't know about or a branch of Psychology that covers this. I'm just trying to explain this the way it came to me. And if anybody can add to this or point me to one of those books (compelled to share your experience) I'd like to hear about it. I'm not trying to develop a theory to explain the world, I'm just trying to understand why I do OtakuHELL.