Every few weeks, I run across something (usually a blog entry) that talks about how nasty fandom has gotten lately, and boy, it didn't used to be like this.
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| Title: | Every few weeks, I run across something (usually a blog entry) that talks about how nasty fandom has gotten lately, and boy, it didn't used to be like this. |
| Creator: | cereta |
| Date(s): | December 2, 2002 |
| Medium: | Livejournal |
| Fandom: | |
| Topic: | |
| External Links: | Every few weeks, I run across something (usually a blog entry) that talks about how nasty fandom has gotten lately, and boy, it didn't used to be like this.., Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Every few weeks, I run across something (usually a blog entry) that talks about how nasty fandom has gotten lately, and boy, it didn't used to be like this. is a 2002 essay by cereta.
Some Topics Discussed
- differing platforms and differing communication expectations
- secret lists, taking discussion "off-list," the changes that personal blogs and online journals have made in fandom
- hostility, both perceived and real
- repeated cycles of some fan discussions
- online journals have made avoiding conflict and what people are saying about you and your fanworks much, much harder
From the Essay
Every few weeks, I run across something (usually a blog entry) that talks about how nasty fandom has gotten lately, and boy, it didn't used to be like this. And I have to shake my head, because I remember having these exact same conversations in almost every long-running community I've ever been in, fannish or not. In fact, I have a post from FCA-L that addresses that very issue. It talks specifically about Senad, and how every few months, someone would post bemoaning the state of the list, and didn't everyone remember a few months ago, when we were a united fandom? Except that a few months before that post, someone had been bemoaning the state of the list, and didn't everyone remember a few months ago when we'd been a united fandom?
That post is, I believe, from late 1999.
I was going to go into a long list of the things I remember from my early days in fandom, but I don't think I have to. You can all think back on your own, probably to things I don't know about. But my overall point is that fandom has, at least as long as I've known it, been a fairly turbulent place.
Having said that, I think a couple of things have changed in fandom recently.
One harks back to what Sanj said about "take it off list." In the world of blogs and LJ's, there is no "take it off list." Everyone controls her own little corner, and no one else can control what she says in it. She can be inhibited through social pressure, but the bottom line is that everyone has a simple, easy venue for making views known, for responding to other views, etc, and we do often use these venues for bitching about things we can't bitch about on lists. And there is no authority who can put a stop to it.
Now, do I think that this has actually changed anyone's views? Or even what gets said? No. I think, however, that what it has done is drag out into the light a lot of what used to happen on IRC and AIM and super sekrit lists and other private or semi-private venues. Now, it's much more public. It's perhaps toned down for public consumption, although there's a certain "it's my journal and I'll say what I want" pride in not toning it down at work, too.
As a side editorial, I think part of the problem is that some of what’s been made public plays a lot less well in public than it does in private. The people we share private venues with tend to know us. They know when we’re speaking out of frustration, they know our sense of humor, and more importantly, they usually know us for the basically decent people most of us are. Unfortunately, the public audience doesn’t necessarily know these things, and a lot of discussions are coming across as far more mean-spirited than they’re probably intended as being.
Moreover, LJ in particular makes it difficult to avoid knowing what's being said. Even if you don't actively seek out a particular discussion, odds are good that someone on your friends list (or friends of friends, or the other people's friends lists that you read to catch up on this or that fandom) will comment on it. In any venue, there's a balance between risking missing things you want to see and risking seeing things you don't. However, most people use their LJ/blog for multiple topics, and reading a person because you like what she has to say about a particular show means you also see her discussions of another fandom that you're not interested in, or more to the point, her posts about kerfuffles or other discussions.
Of course, the real problem is that so few of us have the strength to let that one post go – we often seek out more info on the issue/discussion/kerfuffle. But even when we don't, avoiding it is hard – heck, half the time, we can't even avoid knowing what happened on a friends-locked post we don't have access to, much less a public discussion. There’s been a lot of talk about the fracturing of fandom, that lists exist for every possible sub-sub-sub interest, but that fracturing was begun for the very real purpose of allowing people to carve out a space for their interests where the people who didn’t share those interests (or actively disliked it) didn’t have to deal with them. This was always the response to those who objected to crit lists: that if you don’t want to know what’s being said about your story on FCA-L (or Prospect-L or Critical Edge), you can avoid it very easily by not joining. LJ has made that avoidance at least somewhat more difficult.
The other thing that I think has changed is the level of meta-discussion, in the classic sense of "discussion about discussion," about the ways in which we discuss things, what we do (or should) discuss, how we do (or should) discuss them. Again, it's something that's always been there, but I think it's reached new levels. There are a variety of reasons for this, not the least of which is the lack of linking/contextualizing I've so frequently bitched about. For all that kerfuffles are hard to avoid, most of us come into them from the fringes, from one person commenting in her LJ about "that X debate." And without a link to follow, we tend to accept that person's characterization of what's happening, which may or may not be accurate. Things spread from there, and then net result is that we often spend far more time talking about a particular debate than we do debating the issue itself.
(And yes, that’s exactly what I’m doing here. Guilty.)
This tends to take the form of endless discussions about how mean/nasty/aggressive/vitriolic a particular discussion was, often way out of proportion to the actual discussion. Take the recent plagiarism/SV discussion: there were a lot more posts about how the writer got savaged than there were actual savaging posts. Most of the vitriol was in a sub-thread that wasn't even about her or her work. But a whole heckuva lot of people commented in other people's LJs and blogs about what a shame it was that people felt the need to savage writers, etc, people who had never read the original post or subsequent discussion – they simply assumed that they way they has seen the situation characterized in someone else's post was, in fact, what happened.
Again, meta-discussion has always existed. I just have the sense that there’s a lot more of it now. I could be wrong about that, of course, but it is my sense. I suspect that even on lists where it is not expressly forbidden, it tends to get stopped pretty quickly, if only because it tends to move into personal attacks. But again, on LJ, no moderator, no stoppage. And with no central topic, and thus no one to tell you it's off-topic, LJ becomes a prime outlet for all those things we want to say on-list and can't.
I feel funny complaining about the amount of meta-discussion, because, hello: rhetoric degree, and rhetoric is basically talking about how we talk about things. But I’m not convinced that the increased levels of meta-discussion are all that good for fandom. In part, I think this because, like with so many things, we focus a lot on the negative. Let's face it: when the last time you saw a post on "List Behaviors I Really Love?" And you can only read/write/talk so much about how bad something is before it really does become bad, before we forget how much we actually enjoy fandom. I also firmly believe that the more people talk about how hostile a list/community/discussion is, the more hostile it becomes, if only because such discussions tend to put people on the defensive.
We all have our times when fandom (or any activity) is not working for us. And sometimes it is because of some form of hostility – a list that's turned sour, a discussion that hit us at just the wrong time or on just the wrong topic. But I think it would be a mistake to confuse individual disenchantment with some sort of change in fandom itself. Because while fandom can and does change, inasmuch as it's a human endeavor, there are some ways in which it really doesn't.
Comments at the Post
[elynross]: Now, do I think that this has actually changed anyone's views? Or even what gets said?
So, having read the finished version, and because you made me, I have another thought. I think perhaps it has changed some minds, or at least given some more opportunity for it, because it used to be you didn't get to see all the arguments *because* they were off topic or squelched. And perhaps, even while ramping the frustration level up in some, maybe it's leveled it off for others who are able to have their say in ways they couldn't have as easily before?
Mostly I think "the more things change, the more they stay the same." Also, I heard somewhere that people are stupid.
I agree about how things drift, the further removed they are from the original conversation. If you know the original, then read comments on it, then read responses to those comments, it's like a fannish game of telephone, with the responses sometimes drifting, unknowingly, further and further from the (admittedly subjective) reality I saw in the original.
I also firmly believe that the more people talk about how hostile a list/community/discussion is, the more hostile it becomes, if only because such discussions tend to put people on the defensive.
God, absolutely. If nothing else, when someone says this, others grab onto it and pass it on, just as in the fannish telephone I mentioned above, and suddenly it becomes Truth.
[ratcreature]: But my overall point is that fandom has, at least as long as I've known it, been a fairly turbulent place.
You know, actually each time I see posts about how bad a list or any other forum is or has become, or how nasty some "flame war" was (and more often than not I've heard people referring to stuff as "flame war" that I would have never classified as such, had I not heard so many others perceive it as such), I think that some people never dealt with self-organized groups that got truly nasty, like, for example, some left political projects I know and still do volunteer work in. So far I've found fandom disagreements and arguments sometimes annoying, sometimes pointless or frustrating, a very few times even offensive, but never so awful, hostile, demoralizing and vicious as conflicts I know and endure elsewhere (also in environments where I stay voluntarily, in my free time, because I still think overall it worth it, though recently I've been wondering about that...) Especially since in online interaction you can filter and tune out a controversy or an annoying person fairly well, and retreat even better when you can't stand it at all without loosing the fun parts that attracted you to fandom completely. I'm always amazed what harmless and still rather fluffy things are perceived as an already unpleasant level of hostility. I always thought fandom was a fairly fun and civil place overall.
[jalfred]:
See, you're probably right. I started reading this book (a long time ago. maybe I can finish it after finals) about women in early science fiction fandom. We're talking the people who read prozines and wrote letters that were published in the columns. Isaac Asimov? Totally a troll. He would say the most inflammatory things to get published. Apparently, that's how you got famous in fandom and could eventually make the jump from fen or amateur to ProWriter.
[raincitygirl]: This tends to take the form of endless discussions about how mean/nasty/aggressive/vitriolic a particular discussion was, often way out of proportion to the actual discussion. Take the recent plagiarism/SV discussion: there were a lot more posts about how the writer got savaged than there were actual savaging posts. Most of the vitriol was in a sub-thread that wasn't even about her or her work. But a whole heckuva lot of people commented in other people's LJs and blogs about what a shame it was that people felt the need to savage writers, etc, people who had never read the original post or subsequent discussion – they simply assumed that they way they has seen the situation characterized in someone else's post was, in fact, what happened.
Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Speaking as somebody who was peripherally involved in that debate (though no savaging was done by me, I'll have you know) it was extremely frustrating afterwards to read the perceptions of people who hadn't been involved, and who seemed not to have read it, but who seemed to think they knew what had happened anyway. I mean, OK, 120-post thread, but still, if you're going to comment, read at least half the thread before so doing.