Meta: Derailing, Linking, Labelling, and the Internet
A couple things have combined to make me think these thoughts about derailing which aren't fully developed yet. I wanted to put them together here for future reference. This is not actually meta. This is, oh, protometa, maybe, the primordial soup of meta. I'm on painkillers and just found that line hilarious, if that gives you any idea of how foggy my brain is right now.
linkspam, which I haven't been following but have now added to my reading list, uses warnings on their links which includes a warning for derailment. Though the mods do address that warnings are inherently subjective and potentially problematic and they are working on their warning guidelines.
Over in by
phoebe_zeitgeist ("On derailing and complexity. Or one tiny corner thereof."),
sqbr post comment talking about how she views derailing and provided an example.
To give some extreme examples:
Suppose fandom is going through DisabilityFail2010.
Poster A makes a locked post read by their 10 friends saying "So there's been all these posts about ableism in fanfic, and it got me thinking about how Castle fans deal with disability way better than Bones fans. In general those Bones fans are a bunch of idiots, let me tell you..."
Poster B makes a post saying "All these posts about disability are making me feel silenced. Don't they realise how that hurts my feelings as a woman? Our voices NEVER get to be heard, and now these oversensitive disabled people are telling ME what I can and cannot write! Helen Keller would be ashamed." and then links it to metafandom and linkspam themselves.
Poster C has no idea about DisabilityFail but happens to make a very good post about the way women's voices are silenced which is included in the same metafandom post as Poster B's, and helps encourage a shift of the conversation onto the way women's voices are silenced.
Posters A and B are derailing in the sense of avoiding a difficult topic by deliberately (albeit maybe subconsciously) shifting to something that makes them the centre of the conversation.
Posters B and C are derailing in the sense that their posts are shifting the centre of the conversation away from disability onto gender.
Afaict a lot of the conflict around derailing comes from people who see themselves as, at worse, poster C, feeling as if they are being equated with Poster B. Based on the arguments they're making I'd say some of them are Poster B (at least a little bit), and where that's obvious it should definitely be called out. But regardless: even Poster C, despite not meaning any harm and genuinely not being ableist still does harm.
legionseagle here and
zvi here talk about (quoting zvi here) "the same stimulus can provoke conversation on multiple axes of difference."
I'm still not sure where all these things going in my thoughts, but using the hypotehtical above, I have a hard time with the idea that because, say,
linkspam links to Poster C's post in with the links about DisabilityFail (possibly with a warning that it is derailing) it actually is a derailing post. Though I do understand the idea of sheer volume silencing speakers, Poster C's post is from an entirely different conversation and the meta community combined the two.
This comment by
jonquil is mixing with the above in my thoughts: There is a difference, and a substantive one, between walking into a journal or community and saying "Well, what about X?" and saying, in one's own journal, under flock or not, "I'm thinking about X right now." Calling the latter derailing is insisting that there is a single social-justice fandom rail which must be adhered to at all times.
There isn't.
I am dealing with a lot of physical pain right now, so if I've dropped code in all that, I'll try to clean it up as soon as I can. Also, I shouldn't have tried to watch Fringe like this. Yes, being forced to stay on the couch has given me time to catch up, but I can't brain.
linkspam, which I haven't been following but have now added to my reading list, uses warnings on their links which includes a warning for derailment. Though the mods do address that warnings are inherently subjective and potentially problematic and they are working on their warning guidelines.
Over in by
phoebe_zeitgeist ("On derailing and complexity. Or one tiny corner thereof."),
sqbr post comment talking about how she views derailing and provided an example.
To give some extreme examples:
Suppose fandom is going through DisabilityFail2010.
Poster A makes a locked post read by their 10 friends saying "So there's been all these posts about ableism in fanfic, and it got me thinking about how Castle fans deal with disability way better than Bones fans. In general those Bones fans are a bunch of idiots, let me tell you..."
Poster B makes a post saying "All these posts about disability are making me feel silenced. Don't they realise how that hurts my feelings as a woman? Our voices NEVER get to be heard, and now these oversensitive disabled people are telling ME what I can and cannot write! Helen Keller would be ashamed." and then links it to metafandom and linkspam themselves.
Poster C has no idea about DisabilityFail but happens to make a very good post about the way women's voices are silenced which is included in the same metafandom post as Poster B's, and helps encourage a shift of the conversation onto the way women's voices are silenced.
Posters A and B are derailing in the sense of avoiding a difficult topic by deliberately (albeit maybe subconsciously) shifting to something that makes them the centre of the conversation.
Posters B and C are derailing in the sense that their posts are shifting the centre of the conversation away from disability onto gender.
Afaict a lot of the conflict around derailing comes from people who see themselves as, at worse, poster C, feeling as if they are being equated with Poster B. Based on the arguments they're making I'd say some of them are Poster B (at least a little bit), and where that's obvious it should definitely be called out. But regardless: even Poster C, despite not meaning any harm and genuinely not being ableist still does harm.
legionseagle here and
zvi here talk about (quoting zvi here) "the same stimulus can provoke conversation on multiple axes of difference."
I'm still not sure where all these things going in my thoughts, but using the hypotehtical above, I have a hard time with the idea that because, say,
linkspam links to Poster C's post in with the links about DisabilityFail (possibly with a warning that it is derailing) it actually is a derailing post. Though I do understand the idea of sheer volume silencing speakers, Poster C's post is from an entirely different conversation and the meta community combined the two.
This comment by
jonquil is mixing with the above in my thoughts: There is a difference, and a substantive one, between walking into a journal or community and saying "Well, what about X?" and saying, in one's own journal, under flock or not, "I'm thinking about X right now." Calling the latter derailing is insisting that there is a single social-justice fandom rail which must be adhered to at all times.
There isn't.
I am dealing with a lot of physical pain right now, so if I've dropped code in all that, I'll try to clean it up as soon as I can. Also, I shouldn't have tried to watch Fringe like this. Yes, being forced to stay on the couch has given me time to catch up, but I can't brain.