Current mood:	content
Current music:	Sealab 2021
Entry tags:	best of, meta: fandom

three years, three months, and 1,188 entries later
So, a while ago, I tried to write this post and lost it to the vagaries of my computer. Moaning and bitching (in public, too!) ensued. I made some quick notes and now, more than a week later, am taking a stab at reconstruction. (Utilizing, this time, the SAVE DRAFT function I moronically ignored last time.) I don't think it's quite the same as before, but c'est la vie.



You'll note I just used a cut-tag there. Which is as good a jumping-off place as any.

Why do people use cut-tags? Usually, it's for one of the following reasons:

"TMI" - Usually it's either emotional or personal information, usually locked and possibly filtered.

"Review" - Usually a summation of or opinion on a movie, comic, book, television show, or something else. Often combined with "Spoilers"

"Spoilers" - Usually concerning recently-aired television episode, or recently-published comic issue, though some people use it for all types of media. Probably the most often-cited reason for a cut-request from a reader.

"Story" - Usually used because a story is long, though some people use it for any fiction, including drabbles.

"Boring" - Usually concerning roundups of the poster's day, work complaints, to-do lists. Has an overlap with "TMI." Interestingly, often seems to be a pre-emptive strike against being considered boring, or at least against not knowing one is boring.

"Length" - Usually a completely subjective reason.

I'd say 5 out of 6 are pretty valid, most of the time, but what's up with that last reason?

(We're now jumping off.)

Because no LJ-meta post would be complete without a brief history, and because I think it's interesting to look at how we got to making this form of communication our primary means, let's sum. Briefly. You have cons, which involved actual face-to-face contact, combined with the use of zines, which involved actual physical possession of paper with words on. Discussion at this point involves talking, but is heavily supplemented with written communication. Enter the internet and the birth of the BBS, which provided centrality, threading, and zero privacy. Along comes e-mail and mailing lists, threading and centrality are reduced but privacy has a heyday, from private e-mails to private lists. We're still gathering in groups, though, and while there's a degree of self-selection going on the membership of any list is still a fixed quality which is, importantly, impervious to change by any one list member. Blogs came along, but were site- and single fan-oriented in the same way a "Rants" or "Essays" page might have been on a personal website. And then we had Livejournal.

(For the sake of disclosure, where do I fit into this timeline? I came aboard just in time for the blossoming of mailing lists, sometime in 1998, and acquired a Livejournal in spring of 2001, just before they blossomed. I went away for the summer with five Friends and came back to find out that fandom had moved in. *g*)

So here we are. What makes Livejournal so drastically different?

Well, for starters, there's that self-selection thing. No longer are we blocking that hated listmate, or scanning for messages from the people we really like -- we now have the capacity put all those people in one place. We've got a pretty nice linking capacity, with individual posts pretty easy to find, especially if someone's organized their memories section well. We're got communities for linking entries, and kind-hearted people (coffeeandink, fabu, and stakebait, to name a few from my own list) who frequently do round-up posts of these links, weeding through fandom for the rest of us lazy or time-constricted fen. The signal-to-noise ratio is improved -- but isn't it noisy in here?

This is over-simplifying, but it's pretty easy to spot the source of the noise, besides friendslists of 250: the concept of "Off-Topic" simply doesn't exist anymore. So we're not scanning past the entries of people we dislike (unless you're an auto-friender who doesn't use filters), or scanning to find our favorite people, because now we have the capacity to actually choose our neighbors. What we've lost is a capacity to filter for subject, and I don't think anyone realized how valuable that was until it was gone.

Lists, of course, had moderators, and boards had public opinion, and both of those worked towards keeping people talking about the topic du jour. If you were on a Xena fic list, then by god, you were going to be reading some Xena stories, or else. If, like me, you don't trust even the fic list, you can join a recs list or read a recs site to have your reading material seriously filtered to your tastes, be they for spanking fic or just above-average grammar.

That doesn't exist anymore. You can join a community, of course, though I tend to find those even more specific than lists, to the point that I ache for a little variety. (The general absence of discussion topics may have something to do with this, and I won't even get started on the difficulty of following threaded comments to an entry [until later, of course]). You can wait for people to give you links to good stories or good posts, or read recs blogs, but there's no one out there reading through all those posts on your friendslist and nicely compiling a list of all the fandom-related ones for you to read, by topic and poster. We've got the freedom (though it was at first rather hotly disputed) to say whatever we want, because this is our piece of intellectual turf, buster, and we are individuals.

Ahh, individuals.

Look at your friendslist. If you're like me, you're seeing a page full of vibrant colors, vibrant images, instantly conveying personalities, tastes, and moods, possibly even matched as well as possible to the posters' journal colors. (You know, if you want to drive yourself crazy trying to do that.) If you continue to emulate me (and really, why wouldn't you? *g*), you're visually hard-wired, so this looks even more vibrant. It takes up more mental space. It stops being The Internet Talking To You About Buffy, and starts being 79 Strangers Talking About Buffy, Stargate, That One Fandom You Hate, And Their Bosses.

What did we used to do? Look at a block of text with a name. In this context, Mary Sue Ficwriter and Worship-Worthy Fic Queen weren't so different. You might have had associations with that name that will color what you expect to read, but for most of us, I think, associations are triggered much more strongly with visuals. (Not to mention the fact that the mood icons and the userpics are often chosen to reflect a mood or topic as well.) That block of Courier New with some code at the top has become a personal statement, rather than a part of a contiguous whole, thanks to the phenomenon of the userpic.

They're vibrant, they're differentiated, they're downright strange. We've never seen anything like them before in fandom, with the exception of the sigquote, which doesn't seem to have carried the same weight. They almost seem quaint now. Never before have fans had such an immediate and intrusive opportunity to amuse, impress, offend and insult. We bitch about creatorship rights, credit-giving, My Fandom, cliques, spoilers, nudity, and the recent Tiny Text wars.

Icons are:

- Easy to make
- Easy to borrow
- Easy to modify
- Easy to see

which makes them perfect weapons and tools for people with lots of time, lots of wit, and/or lots of grudges. In other words, 99% of us!

So it's new, and customizable, and image-heavy. It's also organized differently, with threads tied to posts rather than free-forming through list archives and mailboxes. With communities, this makes for a very small time footprint on things you don't want to read (you skip the post instead of deleting all 30 messages in a thread), which pretty much sounded the death knell for mailing lists, I think. Posts are easy to ignore, drop back out of sight quickly, but are easy to find and archive when you want them. And yet... communities aren't the automatic hubs that mailing lists once were. Worship-Worthy Fic Queen is as likely to be a hub as a discussion communities, and far more likely than a fic list (in terms of generating comments, not necessarily members).

Quick: When did the BNF = bad!wrong!evol concept first evolve? Answer: At the same time as the ability to see how many Friends a person has.

There have always been BNFs, whether or not they were called that. It was easy to see if someone was getting recced a lot, or agreed with a lot, or publicly stalked/praised a lot. It was easy to know who you thought was a BNF, based on their posts or stories or archive-building skills, and easy to see who worked the strings in fandom as mods, archivists, or creators of fanon. But they didn't publish all their e-mail on their websites, which is just about exactly what the comment function in LJ does for us.

Public feedback used to be a phenomenon, to a small degree. So did public adulation. It didn't used to be the rule. I admit, I've always been a slow feedbacker, mostly because I always e-mail it, and the advent of the comment function has made it much easier for me, since I tend to be a sender-of-praises feedbacker, rather than a "You guys HAVE to read this"-type public feedbacker. But the fact that almost everything gets done in front of the curtains (even filtered posts are rarely aimed at a single person) makes those social distinctions between Mary Sue, Worship-Worthy, and Average Scribbler even more, well, distinct. You're suddenly seeing exactly who liked the story, and why (which can, of course be helpful for the rest of us, to know what other think works in a story), and what kinds of posts generate comments for others, and most oddly, lots of varied personal comments. The sorts of fun, shallow, intimate exchanges that used to be the province of private mails suddenly spiral away into long comment threads, weirdly enough, sometimes in someone else's journal.

Since we go on about our intellectual turf so much, it can be utterly jarring to have two people chatting, or fighting, in a thread in your blog. Sometimes, as happened not too long ago on my own friends list, the side conversation can become not just irritating to the writer, but downright offensive, which begs the oft-disputed question Does the fact that the discussion originated in someone's blog mean that their opinions continue to be a factor in the ensuing threads?. I don' t think we're going to answer that one any time soon.

I do think, though, that one of the most important aspects of comments is exactly that -- they're comments. Not really even responses, and certainly not the equally-weighted posts of mailing lists. They're subordinate. They appear below, their font is often smaller. They don't show up with the post on friends-lists, but must be accessed from a separate page. On some journal styles (I'm thinking of Boxer and Component in particular), the layout and threading is so terrible as to make comments difficult to read and follow, and I myself often don't. Most importantly, far less text space is allotted to comments, and I think it's sort of generally agreed that if you have to make a "Part 2" comment after your first one, you're saying too much. You're "rambling in someone else's journal." Go make your own post.

What does one do, though, after making one's own post? You can go comment in the original post and link it back, you can hope the original poster will mention it, or that people chronicling the discussion will include yours too, but if your post is in response to Worship-Worthy's post, there's absolutely no way you're going to get to the same kind of response. She's got 971 people reading her; you have 71. Unless someone largely-read mentions you, or enough people follow your link back from Page 2 of the comments to her post, you're just not going to get the same readership.

And that, I've begun to feel, is a very disturbing central inequity in the structure of Livejournal. Of course people had the right to block or delete or skip posts on mailing lists, or skim BBS posts, or whatever means we used to employ to not reading things that didn't interest us. But now the un-famous have been deprived of even the possibility of being heard, simply because if you don't want to be interested, you don't have to be. Can you imagine a mailing list, en masse, deciding that only the most well-liked people could post?

If you're lucky, like me, and you're clinging to the title of Average Scribbler by your fingernails, chances are you have a Friend or two who's largely-read and mentions your posts or stories from blue moon to blue moon, and you can get just enough readership to thrive that way. (This in no way constitutes bragging or complaining -- I'm just stating the facts of my fannish existence.) But what happens when you haven't been so readable lately? When it's been several months since your last meta post, you're not doing episode reviews because the show is on hiatus, and you've been blocked on your writing for a while? It's easy to get forgotten, and from there, it's hard to get back up.

There's another way to gain readers, of course, which is to comment and friend prolifically. This isn't necessarily harder than posting thoughtful mailing list messages, or writing detailed feedback, but it seems like a backwards way to earn what should be a basic right, now turned privilege -- the right to have a voice. Now you can only earn the right to be widely heard via the arduous BNF route of producing, in steady supply, the most valued commodities of our community.

And I think that's what a lot of Livejournal flamewars and kerfluffles and bitchfights have boiled down to, though it may not be obvious on the surface. There have always been cliques. There have always been friendships with benefits -- getting recced by your buddy, getting webdesign from a talented friend, getting beta and vid-editing from the best of the fandom. That's pretty human. But I think what drives so many people who feel marginalized is that their community is just so small now, comprised only of people who genuinely like them or are interested in them, and while that notion sounds appealing on paper, I don't think facing a Friends-Of list of 12 is particularly heartening when you're reading 120, even if those are your 12 bestest buddies. The fact that you're an absolute non grata in fandom is maddening when you know it's just because people don't have the time.

Of course, it's pretty fair. I sure as hell only have people on my friends-list I'm really interested in, because I can barely even keep up with them. I'm not going to go around and add everyone whose name I ever see in the comments to someone's blog, or everyone on my Friendfriends. It's how this thing works. Why do I only have time for less than a hundred people? Back to the concept of "no such thing as Off-Topic anymore."

The less-than-a-hundred people I have friended probably didn't use to post five times a day, at least not in the sense we now have of "posting." When they posted to mailing lists or bulletin boards five times a day, it was in response to discussion threads -- essentially, the equivalent of our current comment system. Now you can post 100 comments a day (which may not be obvious to others, since they may be well-dispersed), and still easily post five journal entries. And absolutely zero of those five journal entries are "required" to be anything approaching what we would have called on-topic, back in the day.

This is my modus operandi too, of course. My fannish content has drastically shrunk of late, as my shows go off the air and I don't find new replacement fandoms. I don't feel like disappearing just because I'm not critiquing an episode, so I write about other things, sometimes personal, sometimes related to other types of non-fan media, and I'm pretty certain that sort of post is often skimmed. Hell, I know a few people whose content is almost 100% non-fannish, and their read-by list is equal to or greater than mine. There's a taste for everything.

But the annoying fact remains that there's no way to filter people's posts for the fan-related content we're generally interested in. It's obviously a problem, since without any kind of central way of monitoring how often and what people post, there's no gentle, peer-based way of encouraging people to post less, or post shorter, or post "on topic." (And neither, it can be argued, should there be.) There's no "fan content" feed to subscribe to, no way to get your Friends to better announce when they're posting fannish things, or any way of getting onto a "fannish" filter without forcing people to lock, and then filter, their posts.

The lack of peer control is, in the end, one of the most frustrating aspects of livejournal. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, or something that should go away. I'm just saying -- it's changed the way we interact.

Humans control their personal herds with, well, herd behavior. It isn't rants that change behavior, or hissy fits, or even kerfluffles. It's those generalized, unspoken, emotions that influence the masses, and with the dispersed, multifannish, disjointed nature of livejournal, it's almost impossible to have that sort of indirect influence over each other. What's the "norm"? What's the "status quo"? I know people who make incredibly short posts several times a day, people who post large quiz results or large polls, people who write about personal things at length and uncut, people who write at length and uncut, period. I see, from time to time, people complaining about this, but it seems that nothing really changes. Some of the most irritating modes of communication are utterly persistent, beyond all understanding.

I say beyond all understanding, because we have personal accountability like never before. Journal identity, in this vast and changing community, is of vital importance. Your username, attached to a recognizable userpic, is your only currency. Not only is it rather incumbent on you to keep this identity intact and in good condition (making it a daunting prospect to change a username), but it's damn easy to see who no longer wants to read what you have to say. You'd think that, given the ease of checking to see who's "unfriended" one, there would be more concern to not do things that annoy one's readers, but that seems, inexplicably, not to be the case. You could be an absolute raving asshole on a mailing list, and not get kicked off unless you committed a cardinal offense like plagiarism or serious harassment, but people, under the banner of It's My Intellectual Turf, commit amazing fannish faux pas despite tangible evidence it annoys people.

Perhaps people don't unsub over bad posting behavior. I'm not sure. The rules of keeping readers happy are so nebulous, with that independent My Blog streak running through every attempted list of "rules," but everything does seem to boil down to a central tenet -- use the cut tag, asshole.

It's often a justified complaint. Polls, once you've taken them, can mess with your friends page horribly. Quizzes are slow to load. Spoilers are annoying. So are large images.

So is someone's complaint about their period. So is someone's rant about their co-worker. So is someone's ode to their boyfriend. So is someone's depressed and borderline-suicidal drunken ramble. So is someone's long story in a fandom you don't read. So is someone's very very long meta essay.

Hm. We're hitting some gray, aren't we?

Along with the issues of readership and content, the cut-tag completes the holy trinity of Things That Make Livejournal An Ambivalent Blessing. You're already worrying about who's reading you and what you're having to choose to read or not read; now we're on the shaky ground of what you're sending out to people, and how.

I think it's fairly universally agreed-upon that things which might screw up a friendslist are verboten, along with spoilers and inappropriate (or just plain large) images. Those are acts of rudeness, an immediate visual intrusion into someone else's field of vision. Fine. But what about content?

I've heard it argued, and have argued myself, that looking at a huge block of text is annoying. I don't like having to scroll through an undifferentiated ramble about someone's afternoon; nor do I like having to scroll dooooown past someone's story I'm not interested in reading at the moment. You can pack a lot of verbiage into an entry, and having to skip it can be a pain. But is "scrolling is annoying" really a valid excuse to dictate how someone else presents their content?

There are other reasons for cutting. The old "TMI" reason is usually appreciated, though sometimes overextended. (We're all 99% women here; we can HANDLE a little menstruation talk, ladies.) Cutting for personal chatter reaches back up to the content issue -- it's a poster-initiated attempt to help others filter for content, and I think it's a pretty efficient fix for a prevalent problem. But once you start looking at plain old length, I think you're getting onto shaky ground. We're only talking about a few seconds of scrolling, and some possible eye-crossing. And yet I'd never dream of leaving, say, this essay uncut, because it would be annoying as hell. I think that fandom as a whole has settled on the "When in doubt, cut" philosophy, which is easy on our friendslists, but a little questionable in the face of the It's My Blog argument. But I guess no one said compromises had to be logical.

Mulling over all this has brought to mind a previous thought -- fandom needs its own blog system. I'm not just talking about something separate, like journalfen, although we could certainly use servers that weren't subject to the usual vagaries of Livejournal. I'm talking about a total structural redesign, based on the issues mentioned above: readership, content-filtering, and content presentation. The disputed idea suggested by the LJ staff of differentiating between people you read and people with access to your posts would be a big step towards allowing a larger readership. Creating an option to, when posting, categorize your post and add it to a filter being read by other users would be an excellent way to allow for more people to be heard (though I should mention here, because I forgot to above, that discussion-linking comms like mutant_allies that allow for self-promotion do fill this need to a degree). I can imagine it being set up as "feeds", which could be added to any time someone created a new fandom. Users would not, of course, want to read every single Harry Potter post that every single Harry Potter fan writes, but feeds further subdivided by interests (in the style of mailing lists), combined with a way to select for certain users (a user listing?) would do a lot to fix that problem.

Since I don't have the first clue as to how journal software works, I'm probably harboring useless hopes. But a journal system that helped to change some of the inequities and inconveniences of our current system would be a serious step forward for fandom.