A Personal Schema for Meta, by cupidsbow

[cupidsbow]

A Personal Schema for Meta, or Why You Say Po-tay-toe, and Sometimes I Hear Po-tah-to

an essay by cupidsbowI had no idea until today that I had a personal schema for meta, let alone that it's quite sophisticated and complex

Comments

[ide_cyan]

I think I tend to start out trying to be right, but I don't necessarily have an expectation that I should receive a response according to a schema based on the mode of my discourse. (The semiotic success of a posted text varies according to the commensality of its auxiliary performance codes?)

How much does the expectation of a codified response rely on the expectation of the audience one will have? Does an expectation like the latter increase by the degree of audience interaction someone tends to get?

I'm not particularly popular. I don't have a particularly pristine reputation online. A part of that may be due to the fact that "matching tones" doesn't necessarily seem like the better goal to me. Which sometimes sucks royally, because it's personally damaging, because sometimes other people put a premium on matching tones, or misread my intent according to their perception of my "tone", but there are things that cannot be accomplished by that goal, and points of view that are unattainable within that framework.

...actually going back to my first paragraph, and rethinking about your examples, they do not strike me as variations on tone so much as variations on mode of discourse. You make some allusions to "cheery casualness" and "polite response", but most of your examples, such as "discussion between commenters", comments being directly directed at you, or polemics being posted -- these have nothing whatsoever to do with tone. They're modes of discourse. (Which I mightn't have noticed if I hadn't started on my digression about matching tones often not being my goal, but that's another digression.)

[cupidsbow]

You know, you're right. I have mislabelled. I was thinking about it from the perspective you allude to, of the way in which the word "tone" is used as a supression technique, especially in discussions of race or gender.

I was wondering if I'd unwittingly been doing something similar in my knee-jerk reaction to the Position Statement poster.

I don't think I was -- I think it was that she and I were involved in different discourses, as you suggest. I actually agreed with her position, for the most part, but she expressed it as lecture on the power of women's expression and why women have rape fantasies. I've just re-read my cached version of it, and she only mentions her own emotional reaction to darkfic (in abstract terms) once, and the rest is structured as a counter-argument. She doesn't address the fact that my emotional response to such a story was the actual topic.

So for me reading it as a direct response to my emotional take on a story, yes, I can totally see why it came across as an attack; and also why she was clueless about what had upset me.

I think that answers the question you asked in your other comment, too, which is very economical of me. :)