Bakhtin vs. LJ: context in fannish discussion
I'm painfully aware as I type this that I haven't even answered all the comments on my last "fandom meta" post. Um, yeah.
Notes before I start this: I'm a rhetorician by training, and I sometimes sound like it. I'm a cybertheorist by research focus, and I sometimes sound like it. Also, I think topics like this are kind of fun, so I like to ramble about them. Consider yourselves warned ;).
I've been thinking a lot about context lately. It came up in the squee/Cheerio pissing discussion, it came up in the discussion of race in fanfic, and I'm sure it came up somewhere that I'm not aware of (see, context! That's a joke, son.)
Bakhtin, who is one of my personal gods, argues that all utterances (speech, writing, any act of communication) are inherently responsive. He's speaking primarily of response to other utterances, but I'd expand that to say: pretty much every time we open our mouths or put fingers to keyboard, we are responding to something. An episode of a TV show, a current event, something someone else said/wrote, heck, banging our shin against a coffee table.
The point here is that context, the situation that prompts someone to speak (I like the word "exigency," myself; it just sounds nifty), is key to shaping the utterance and thus key to decoding it. In other words, you have to know what prompted something to fully understand it.
Now, clearly, this is more or less true depending on the utterance itself. Some utterances, particularly of the artistic sort, can be experienced out of context and given a whole new meaning. I once wrote a paper about Comedy of Errors that, based on the historical context of certain references in the play, argued that it was in its time an anti-Catholic polemic. Now, I do believe that's how the play was shaped, but the play can certainly be watched and enjoyed (well, maybe - it's not a great play, really) without that information.
Argument, overt argument, is more vulnerable to context, in part because it is generally more immediately situated, and also because it relies on authorial intent in a way artistic texts do not. We can agree that an argumentative text does not always achieve its intent, but it's generally considered that if you're going to engage with an argument, you first have to decode what it's intending to argue, and very often, that means figuring out the context of the argument. What is it responding to? What prompted it?
(Side note: you can certainly spark off of the argument the text seemed to make that the author wasn't intending, but stubbornness aside - and I've seen people be plenty stubborn about this one - it's fairly futile to try to get a debate going when you insist on arguing against something the person wasn't arguing in the first place, because there’s no way for the person to respond except, "But I’m not arguing that." And man, have we all been there. Recently, even.)
Many moons ago, I looked at how hypertext can complicate context. I mean, the whole point of hypertext is that chunks of text can be read in varying order determined by the user. That's gotta complicate things, no? I drew these elaborate charts of mailing list and bulletin board discussions that number posts chronologically, then put them in a chart by response train. It was fun (for values of fun that equal "pain in the ass but it took up a page of my diss"). Part of the point was that a message that dropped 195th in your mailbox might actually be a second or third tier response, and that it would read very differently if read, say, second or third after the starting post verses being read after a long, involved discussion. And the tech at the time allowed a great deal of end-user control over how messages were read and in what order.
LJ is both better and worse at this context. On the micro-level, an immediate discussion is threaded such that pretty much every reader at least sees the comments in the same order, and each post is visually situated as a reply to whatever it, well, replied to. There's very little end-user control except in selection of which posts to read (not trivial, but not as powerful as being able to re-order posts with a click of the mouse), and there's also very little end-user control in situating your post. The once pervasive "response to thread" post is pretty much gone, or has mutated into posting in your own LJ, in which case you have little guarantee that the participants in the original discussion will read your post.
Which gets me to the larger point: on a macro-level, the context of any given utterance on LJ is tremendously more problematic and difficult to discern than a message on a mailing list. This is true for a number of reasons.
1. As a culture, we kinda sorta suck at being specific about what prompts a given post. We don't link back, we don't point to specific discussions. Instead, we tend to make vague statements and assume that everyone reading our post knows what we're talking about. (Yes, I did that above. Guilty.) This creates what I often call the "people who are saying X" phenom: someone rants about something "people are saying" without pointing to who's saying it. They may assume others know about and have read whatever prompted the post, they may just think, "well, I'm addressing a general issue," they may just not want to name names (which, admittedly, is its own kind of fraught). And this isn't always a problem.
But I'm sure we've all seen situations where "people" turned out to be one isolated loony, and we've all worked ourselves into a lather over one crazy post. Okay, so drama, but no real harm or foul. However, where harm and foul can occur is when "people saying X" turn out to be "people saying X-2," or even "people saying Y." In other words, people are responding to someone's interpretation of what's being said, and that may or may not match the intent of the original argument.
Why harm or foul? Well, let's say I respond to someone's "people who are saying X" post, never having read the post(s) that prompted is. Those who made, or even just read, the posts that prompted that post see my comment and think I am arguing against Y, when I'm really arguing against X, or even that I'm slamming them - not always a huge leap when it turns out the post I'm responding to is implicitly slamming them, even if I didn't know that. That can lead to all kinds of fun hurt feeling and misunderstandings.
2. Everyone, literally everyone has a different reading experience. Every has a different flist, which means every person reads a different set of posts on the subject, or reads them in a different order at different times. Never mind the different backgrounds with a topic we all bring to any conversation: the odds of any two people seeing the exact same set of posts on any given event/topic are incredibly slim.
This, too, can lead to fun with commenting. I may be bringing an entirely different set of immediate experiences with a given kerfuffle to my comment in someone's LJ than the person making the post had. I may read their post as problematic or even dismissive of something, when the truth is that they were entirely unaware of it. Or vice versa: I may read her post as overwrought and alarmist, when it's prompted by something I know nothing about.
Now, it may sound like thus far, I'm calling for people to provide greater context to their posts, and in some ways, I am, I suppose, but that's not the sum total of my argument, here. Because there's one more complicating factor.
3. Every LJ creates its own context. We can talk all we want about public posts being read by anyone, etc, and that's certainly true. But the truth is, most of us write most posts in our LJ as if we are writing to a particular audience of people who have at least a passing familiarity with us and our ways. There are exceptions (I'm kind of assuming this post will be read outside my flist - watch, metafandom will ignore it entirely ;), but an everyday post does tend to assume that people are familiar with the context of our LJs.
And I would argue that LJ by its nature encourages this. The whole point of a "friends list" (and isn't that a telling name) is that these are people you read regularly and become familiar with. That's kind of the point. Yes, people add you, but the idea is that you grow to know people, know their habits, their background, etc.
Now, the problem of course is that people can be pointed to your post, or even stumble across it, who aren't familiar with you and your ways. Let me say up front: I'm a fan of metafandom, and I'm a huge fan of newsletters. But they do by their very nature take posts out of the context of a person's LJ.
Now, sometimes, this can just be really funny. Other times, it can create real misunderstandings and problems, or even just the frustration of, saying, being accused of wanting to censor critical discussion when you've spent a chunk of your fannish career create spaces for people to have those discussions.
Um, yeah. Digression.
Anyway, back to what I was saying. The truth is, too, that short of locking everything down (and not always even then), we don’t have any real control over how and when a given post gets linked. And I’m not suggesting we should. Really, really not. What I’m suggesting, however, is that this sometimes leads to competing expectations, particularly because we frequently cannot anticipate which of our posts will be linked where. It’s one thing for me to type this expecting it to be metafandomed (again, watch, they’ll ignore me). But I can’t be the only person who’s been surprised at something being linked, either formally by a newsletter or informally by an individual, and been a bit blindsided by a response.
Let me offer an example that is perhaps more fitting than the one above. I have a type of post I do that I call grading hell theater. The sole function of these threads is to give me something entertaining to pop in on while grading papers. That’s it. All they’re for. That other people enjoy them is kind of nice, but I don’t consider any larger fannish contribution when I come up with them.
Now, every so often, they get linked to, and one in particular on favorite fanfic cliché made metafandom. And hey, it was great fun. However, I had mentioned in the post that I would follow it up with least favorite fanfic cliché. However, besides having fun with the favorite cliché thread, I was really not having fun with grading at that time, and I decided that a thread that focused on negatives would not be good for me (or, I suppose, for my students) right then. So I never did the second post. Someone who had participated in the first commented (in her own LJ) on this, attributing it to fandom’s reluctance to talk negatively about such things. I responded that no, really, these posts were entirely about me and what I wanted at that particular time.
The subsequent (very friendly) discussion came to two very fair points: one, that people coming from outside my LJ couldn’t know that context, and two, that I labeled and tagged these posts, and I didn’t think I had a responsibility to recreate that context every time on the off chance that something got linked. If nothing else, putting a "these threads are solely for my enjoyment and should not be taken as any larger fannish statement" would feel really…silly. I mean, I can’t think how to set the context in a way that would have avoided that particular misunderstanding, and frankly, it never would have occurred to me to.
And I would argue that both of these points are not only true, but sensible. However, they point to something that I’ve been thinking a lot about in the recent discussions of squee and Cheerio pissing. It is both fair and sensible to suggest that people make their expectations and preferences for response clear. However, that’s…just not as simple as it sounds. I was thinking for example, "Well, what if I created a tag, something like ‘squee/fluff,’ and even wrote out a post saying, ‘okay, this tag means I’d prefer you not make negative comments.’" Except that, of course, does not solve the problem of someone who does not read me regularly being linked to the post, or even just coming across it on friendsfriends or whatever.
So what am I arguing? That the burden here goes both ways. Yes, I think it’s in your own best interest if, when making an overtly argumentative post, particularly one that is likely to be read outside your flist, you make your context as clear as possible. That’s just good rhetoric. However, as I argued in the squee discussion, I think that readers, particularly when reading outside their flist, must also take a certain amount of responsibility for at least realizing that there might be a context they’re not aware of, and finding out. I’m not just talking about making the two clicks that would tell you that someone is not a sociologist with no real experience in fandom politics (no, that’s never going to stop being funny). Maybe we should get better at asking, "Hey, before I respond, are you talking about this thing?" (I say this having made exactly that kind of mistake recently, assuming a response to one thing when it was really a response to something else.) And if doing so prompts a clarification of the post itself, so much the better.
It’s been argued that it’s naïve to expect readers always to know what response you want, and that’s fair enough. But I think it’s equally, if not naïve, then perhaps not thinking about the nature of LJ, to assume that every post is going to be accessible to every reader on the same level, and that particularly when you follow a link, that the person making the post will have thought to, or is even obligated to, provide context for those who do not regularly read her LJ.
Okay, I think 2500 words is enough, don’t you? I mentioned I thought this stuff was fun. You were warned.
Notes before I start this: I'm a rhetorician by training, and I sometimes sound like it. I'm a cybertheorist by research focus, and I sometimes sound like it. Also, I think topics like this are kind of fun, so I like to ramble about them. Consider yourselves warned ;).
I've been thinking a lot about context lately. It came up in the squee/Cheerio pissing discussion, it came up in the discussion of race in fanfic, and I'm sure it came up somewhere that I'm not aware of (see, context! That's a joke, son.)
Bakhtin, who is one of my personal gods, argues that all utterances (speech, writing, any act of communication) are inherently responsive. He's speaking primarily of response to other utterances, but I'd expand that to say: pretty much every time we open our mouths or put fingers to keyboard, we are responding to something. An episode of a TV show, a current event, something someone else said/wrote, heck, banging our shin against a coffee table.
The point here is that context, the situation that prompts someone to speak (I like the word "exigency," myself; it just sounds nifty), is key to shaping the utterance and thus key to decoding it. In other words, you have to know what prompted something to fully understand it.
Now, clearly, this is more or less true depending on the utterance itself. Some utterances, particularly of the artistic sort, can be experienced out of context and given a whole new meaning. I once wrote a paper about Comedy of Errors that, based on the historical context of certain references in the play, argued that it was in its time an anti-Catholic polemic. Now, I do believe that's how the play was shaped, but the play can certainly be watched and enjoyed (well, maybe - it's not a great play, really) without that information.
Argument, overt argument, is more vulnerable to context, in part because it is generally more immediately situated, and also because it relies on authorial intent in a way artistic texts do not. We can agree that an argumentative text does not always achieve its intent, but it's generally considered that if you're going to engage with an argument, you first have to decode what it's intending to argue, and very often, that means figuring out the context of the argument. What is it responding to? What prompted it?
(Side note: you can certainly spark off of the argument the text seemed to make that the author wasn't intending, but stubbornness aside - and I've seen people be plenty stubborn about this one - it's fairly futile to try to get a debate going when you insist on arguing against something the person wasn't arguing in the first place, because there’s no way for the person to respond except, "But I’m not arguing that." And man, have we all been there. Recently, even.)
Many moons ago, I looked at how hypertext can complicate context. I mean, the whole point of hypertext is that chunks of text can be read in varying order determined by the user. That's gotta complicate things, no? I drew these elaborate charts of mailing list and bulletin board discussions that number posts chronologically, then put them in a chart by response train. It was fun (for values of fun that equal "pain in the ass but it took up a page of my diss"). Part of the point was that a message that dropped 195th in your mailbox might actually be a second or third tier response, and that it would read very differently if read, say, second or third after the starting post verses being read after a long, involved discussion. And the tech at the time allowed a great deal of end-user control over how messages were read and in what order.
LJ is both better and worse at this context. On the micro-level, an immediate discussion is threaded such that pretty much every reader at least sees the comments in the same order, and each post is visually situated as a reply to whatever it, well, replied to. There's very little end-user control except in selection of which posts to read (not trivial, but not as powerful as being able to re-order posts with a click of the mouse), and there's also very little end-user control in situating your post. The once pervasive "response to thread" post is pretty much gone, or has mutated into posting in your own LJ, in which case you have little guarantee that the participants in the original discussion will read your post.
Which gets me to the larger point: on a macro-level, the context of any given utterance on LJ is tremendously more problematic and difficult to discern than a message on a mailing list. This is true for a number of reasons.
1. As a culture, we kinda sorta suck at being specific about what prompts a given post. We don't link back, we don't point to specific discussions. Instead, we tend to make vague statements and assume that everyone reading our post knows what we're talking about. (Yes, I did that above. Guilty.) This creates what I often call the "people who are saying X" phenom: someone rants about something "people are saying" without pointing to who's saying it. They may assume others know about and have read whatever prompted the post, they may just think, "well, I'm addressing a general issue," they may just not want to name names (which, admittedly, is its own kind of fraught). And this isn't always a problem.
But I'm sure we've all seen situations where "people" turned out to be one isolated loony, and we've all worked ourselves into a lather over one crazy post. Okay, so drama, but no real harm or foul. However, where harm and foul can occur is when "people saying X" turn out to be "people saying X-2," or even "people saying Y." In other words, people are responding to someone's interpretation of what's being said, and that may or may not match the intent of the original argument.
Why harm or foul? Well, let's say I respond to someone's "people who are saying X" post, never having read the post(s) that prompted is. Those who made, or even just read, the posts that prompted that post see my comment and think I am arguing against Y, when I'm really arguing against X, or even that I'm slamming them - not always a huge leap when it turns out the post I'm responding to is implicitly slamming them, even if I didn't know that. That can lead to all kinds of fun hurt feeling and misunderstandings.
2. Everyone, literally everyone has a different reading experience. Every has a different flist, which means every person reads a different set of posts on the subject, or reads them in a different order at different times. Never mind the different backgrounds with a topic we all bring to any conversation: the odds of any two people seeing the exact same set of posts on any given event/topic are incredibly slim.
This, too, can lead to fun with commenting. I may be bringing an entirely different set of immediate experiences with a given kerfuffle to my comment in someone's LJ than the person making the post had. I may read their post as problematic or even dismissive of something, when the truth is that they were entirely unaware of it. Or vice versa: I may read her post as overwrought and alarmist, when it's prompted by something I know nothing about.
Now, it may sound like thus far, I'm calling for people to provide greater context to their posts, and in some ways, I am, I suppose, but that's not the sum total of my argument, here. Because there's one more complicating factor.
3. Every LJ creates its own context. We can talk all we want about public posts being read by anyone, etc, and that's certainly true. But the truth is, most of us write most posts in our LJ as if we are writing to a particular audience of people who have at least a passing familiarity with us and our ways. There are exceptions (I'm kind of assuming this post will be read outside my flist - watch, metafandom will ignore it entirely ;), but an everyday post does tend to assume that people are familiar with the context of our LJs.
And I would argue that LJ by its nature encourages this. The whole point of a "friends list" (and isn't that a telling name) is that these are people you read regularly and become familiar with. That's kind of the point. Yes, people add you, but the idea is that you grow to know people, know their habits, their background, etc.
Now, the problem of course is that people can be pointed to your post, or even stumble across it, who aren't familiar with you and your ways. Let me say up front: I'm a fan of metafandom, and I'm a huge fan of newsletters. But they do by their very nature take posts out of the context of a person's LJ.
Now, sometimes, this can just be really funny. Other times, it can create real misunderstandings and problems, or even just the frustration of, saying, being accused of wanting to censor critical discussion when you've spent a chunk of your fannish career create spaces for people to have those discussions.
Um, yeah. Digression.
Anyway, back to what I was saying. The truth is, too, that short of locking everything down (and not always even then), we don’t have any real control over how and when a given post gets linked. And I’m not suggesting we should. Really, really not. What I’m suggesting, however, is that this sometimes leads to competing expectations, particularly because we frequently cannot anticipate which of our posts will be linked where. It’s one thing for me to type this expecting it to be metafandomed (again, watch, they’ll ignore me). But I can’t be the only person who’s been surprised at something being linked, either formally by a newsletter or informally by an individual, and been a bit blindsided by a response.
Let me offer an example that is perhaps more fitting than the one above. I have a type of post I do that I call grading hell theater. The sole function of these threads is to give me something entertaining to pop in on while grading papers. That’s it. All they’re for. That other people enjoy them is kind of nice, but I don’t consider any larger fannish contribution when I come up with them.
Now, every so often, they get linked to, and one in particular on favorite fanfic cliché made metafandom. And hey, it was great fun. However, I had mentioned in the post that I would follow it up with least favorite fanfic cliché. However, besides having fun with the favorite cliché thread, I was really not having fun with grading at that time, and I decided that a thread that focused on negatives would not be good for me (or, I suppose, for my students) right then. So I never did the second post. Someone who had participated in the first commented (in her own LJ) on this, attributing it to fandom’s reluctance to talk negatively about such things. I responded that no, really, these posts were entirely about me and what I wanted at that particular time.
The subsequent (very friendly) discussion came to two very fair points: one, that people coming from outside my LJ couldn’t know that context, and two, that I labeled and tagged these posts, and I didn’t think I had a responsibility to recreate that context every time on the off chance that something got linked. If nothing else, putting a "these threads are solely for my enjoyment and should not be taken as any larger fannish statement" would feel really…silly. I mean, I can’t think how to set the context in a way that would have avoided that particular misunderstanding, and frankly, it never would have occurred to me to.
And I would argue that both of these points are not only true, but sensible. However, they point to something that I’ve been thinking a lot about in the recent discussions of squee and Cheerio pissing. It is both fair and sensible to suggest that people make their expectations and preferences for response clear. However, that’s…just not as simple as it sounds. I was thinking for example, "Well, what if I created a tag, something like ‘squee/fluff,’ and even wrote out a post saying, ‘okay, this tag means I’d prefer you not make negative comments.’" Except that, of course, does not solve the problem of someone who does not read me regularly being linked to the post, or even just coming across it on friendsfriends or whatever.
So what am I arguing? That the burden here goes both ways. Yes, I think it’s in your own best interest if, when making an overtly argumentative post, particularly one that is likely to be read outside your flist, you make your context as clear as possible. That’s just good rhetoric. However, as I argued in the squee discussion, I think that readers, particularly when reading outside their flist, must also take a certain amount of responsibility for at least realizing that there might be a context they’re not aware of, and finding out. I’m not just talking about making the two clicks that would tell you that someone is not a sociologist with no real experience in fandom politics (no, that’s never going to stop being funny). Maybe we should get better at asking, "Hey, before I respond, are you talking about this thing?" (I say this having made exactly that kind of mistake recently, assuming a response to one thing when it was really a response to something else.) And if doing so prompts a clarification of the post itself, so much the better.
It’s been argued that it’s naïve to expect readers always to know what response you want, and that’s fair enough. But I think it’s equally, if not naïve, then perhaps not thinking about the nature of LJ, to assume that every post is going to be accessible to every reader on the same level, and that particularly when you follow a link, that the person making the post will have thought to, or is even obligated to, provide context for those who do not regularly read her LJ.
Okay, I think 2500 words is enough, don’t you? I mentioned I thought this stuff was fun. You were warned.