GettingNoLove37@oyve.com:
This list used to be such a warm, loving group, and now it's been devastated by
all this constant arguing back and forth! I can't stand it! You all suck! My
friends all think so, too! My friends and I are all unsubbing, and we're never
coming back!
Sound
familiar? Sadly, if you've been involved with online fandom for more than five
minutes, it probably does.
I've
been involved with online fandom a lot more than five minutes -- I started on
the old FIDOnet back in the mid-80s, before most of us had even heard of the
Internet -- and I've come to the conclusion that the sort of grade-school
bickering that results in explosions like the one above is simply inevitable.
And I've concluded that one major reason it's inevitable is the idiotic
insistence among 'net denizens that fan forums are "communities."
The
idea that a 'net forum is a community is not only utter nonsense, it's also
corrosively self-destructive nonsense.
No,
I haven't lost my mind, although I can understand how my declaring that
anything as warm and fuzzy as a community could be destructive might give you
that impression.
It's
destructive because it's delusional. The reality is that a fan forum is simply
not a community. In a community, people live and work together to accomplish
similar goals. Often they have a broad set of similar problems that need
solving, and often they may continue to work together for a long time to solve
those problems. Consensus among the community members is vital for stability
and security, and disagreement is viewed as a negative, because the community
has goals and issues that are regarded as sufficiently important that small
differences must be put aside for the greater good. As the community members
live and work together, obligations are implied; compromises are made; ideally,
consensus is hammered out and progress is achieved. Some members of the
community may--or may not--become friends.
None
of that is necessarily the case in a fan forum, which often is established not
in the service of living together or working together to achieve something, and
whose members may not have the same goals in mind at all. In a community,
people share more than one narrow interest, while the members of a fan forum
may have nothing in common except a taste for a single TV series, movie or
comic. A fan forum may have as its goal nothing more cosmically important than
to provide a place for meaningful or meaningless conversation. It may even have
no purpose except to stroke the ego of the individual(s) running it.
There's
no progress in a fan forum because there's no goal; if there's no goal, there's
no need for consensus or compromise; stability is nonexistent because fans have
thousands of forums to choose from and frequently move in and out of them; any
implication that there's some obligation to support other members' goals is
complete baloney.
Let's
be honest about this: A fan forum, and especially a fanfic forum, is in essence
a set of large, usually sensitive egos all competing for space and attention.
Nobody who hasn't got a good-sized ego posts fiction to a public Internet group
or a Web site (by definition, a Web site is public); if you think people aren't
looking for attention when they post a story, you haven't been reading those
disclaimers begging for feedback. A collection of egos does not a
community make; the warm-fuzzy connotation of community, in fact, suggests a
consensus situation in which individual egos are suppressed.
And
folks, ego-suppression is as rare as hen's teeth in fan forums on the Internet.
Because
the community concept does not in any way, shape or form reflect the reality of
a fan forum, believing in it creates a whole complex of unrealistic
expectations. People expect members of a community to be supportive of one
another -- one definition of community (according to Webster's) is
"fellowship," a term fairly oozing with brotherly love and the
obligations that go with it. That creates a false sense of security among the
membership of the fan "community," and it imposes an unreasonable and
occasionally offensive familiarity among forum members who actually know very
little about each other.
Take,
for example, the common usage on fandom mailing lists of the terms
"list-mom" to refer to the owner or admin of a list, and
"list-sisters" or "list-siblings" to refer to the members
of the list. ("List-sib" really sounds to me like something you
should have a doctor look at -- it may well need to be lanced, or perhaps even
biopsied.) There's an unasked-for presumption in all these terms that the
people on the mailing list you just joined have some family-like relationship
to you. But for all you know, the "list-mom" may be a 300-pound guy in
Finland who has five convictions for child molestation. Nothing guarantees that
a "list-mom" will have anything at all in common with June Cleaver.
Besides,
nobody on any mailing list I inhabit is my sister. My sister has enough respect
for me that when she thinks I'm full of shit she tells me so, pretty much
point-blank. If she did that in a fan "community," she could be
unsubbed for flaming me.
So
what harm does this "community" delusion really do?
It
serves to encourage off-topic posts. Hey, this is your "community," and its
members are your "list-sibs." They should be delighted to hear about
how your dog ran away and your kid just graduated from high school, and
yesterday you made divinity but it didn't set up. No one will mind, right? And
people in your Stargate: SG-1 "community" share so many of
your interests that they'll be happy when you post the latest news of Kevin
Sorbo in Andromeda, right? Wrong. The idea that the forum is a community
practically begs people to post off-topic messages and far more personal
information than many members of the group really want to hear. And posting
personal information on the 'net isn't just a waste of bandwidth -- it can be
dangerous for the person revealing it.
It
fosters hurt feelings and feeds bitterness into disagreements. It's one thing to have some
total stranger say something negative about you or your ideas or your work.
It's another thing altogether to have your "list-sister" start
sniping at you. That can hurt. Some of the worst fights in history have
sprung up among family members. Remember: Where there's sisterly love, sibling
rivalry is just around the corner.
It
encourages people to pile on in fights. How dare that jerk attack your sister! You must
defend her! Nevermind that you've never met your "list-sister" and
haven't got a thing in the world in common with her. You may not have agreed
with a single thing she's said in the last two years, but that doesn't matter
-- any perceived rudeness to one member of the "community" must be
treated like an offense to the entire "community." Ever notice
that there's almost no such thing in a 'net forum as a fight between just two
people? A dozen or more people usually end up involved before it's over, and
it's not uncommon for the first two combatants to enlist support from others in
or out of the forum -- and get it. The defensive response may rip the whole
forum apart, but that's not important. What's important is that the
"community" members must band together, especially if they're all
dead wrong.
It
gives you pseudo-friends/pseudo-family you didn't ask for and don't necessarily
want. In
most offline situations, you choose your friends based on things like
shared experiences, shared interests, shared acquaintances, similar tastes and
educational backgrounds, etc. By contrast, the mere act of joining a fan forum
"community" creates the expectation that everyone else in the forum
is your friend. Nevermind that inevitably there'll be somebody in that forum
who you'll want to strangle at least three times a week. That person is
automatically your "list-sib," whether you like it or not, and you
will be expected to behave as if he/she deserves your kindness and
respect... even if strangulation is just too
damn good for him/her.
It
chills honest communication by stifling honest debate. In a community, consensus is
vital. It's consensus that makes progress toward shared goals possible, that
allows the community members to band together and stand together. In many
cases, consensus is regarded as so important that any disagreement is viewed as
a threat. Because people wrongly believe that 'net fan forums are communities,
they often regard even civil disagreements in fan forums as threats to the
stability of the forums. (The argument commonly is made that such disagreements
often don't stay civil for long, but that, too, is partly because of the
community delusion, as I said above.) Forum members will argue that "if we
don't stand together, we'll fall separately," ignoring the fact that most
fan forums don't actually stand for anything more specific or enduring than
"we all love Xena."
Placing
so much emphasis on agreement among the members of a forum tends to pressure
people to conform to a (usually bland) common standard. People become wary of
expressing controversial opinions because doing so carries considerable risk of
being attacked as troublemakers. In truth, a forum without an occasional
controversy is a pathetically boring place to hang out. Commonalities bring
people together; diversity makes people interesting to be around. Insisting
that everybody should be nauseatingly nice to each other turns some fan forums
into a mind-numbing orgy of group ego-masturbation.
It
discourages new ideas, especially if they're advanced by members who are
perceived as newbies. Every forum has its own written and/or unwritten rules, and in some
forums, newbies have approximately 3.5 seconds to learn to play by those rules
or come under fire from established members who view deviation from the rules
as threatening or offensive. It doesn't matter whether the new member's
intentions are pure or his/her idea is a constructive one. In a community,
stability is valued far more than individuality -- that's why so many
subdivision homes look so much alike -- and new ideas are destabilizing by nature.
A Highlander mailing list I inhabit blew up recently because a new
member began posting a series of fairly elementary questions and some critique
of stories posted by others (both of which are allowed on the list, but most
members don't actually post critique and have been around long enough to know
the answers to the basic questions posed by the series). Granted, the basic
newbie questions and the rude, fool-headed critique were very annoying. But
oddly, the new member was attacked almost as much just for being new to the
group as anything else. (And this in a forum that only a few days earlier had
been pondering how long it could continue to exist with its series no longer
producing new episodes.) Fear that the status quo was being upset became more
important than the fact that the new member hadn't broken any rules or that the
forum has good reason not to drive off newbies.
And
most of all, the community delusion is destructive because...
It
encourages childish behavior by protecting people who behave childishly. A lot of people in fan
forums get away with behavior that would get them immediately ejected from most
civilized gatherings because the "community" approach values
consensus, stability and mutual support above civilized, adult behavior. Here's
an example drawn from a real occurrence on a Pretender forum (but I've
seen something much like this happen in more than a dozen fan forums):
A
member -- let's call her "Amy," although that's not the name she
posts under -- had a bad habit of posting literally dozens of messages each day
replying to other members' posts with nothing more than "LOL,"
"ditto," "tee-hee" or "You go, girl."
Occasionally she also posted short, wildly off-topic "poems"
exhibiting terrible grammar, execrable spelling and a sense of humor that made
Barney the dinosaur's jokes seem sophisticated. In other words, she was
breaking the rules of the forum by posting "ditto" messages and by
posting off-topic, and generally annoying the hell out of many other members.
(Although "Amy's" behavior might suggest that she was very young or
new to the Internet, and thus reasonably could expect to be cut some slack, in
fact, she claimed to be in her mid-40s and had been online for several years.)
Eventually,
the inevitable happened: Someone -- we'll call her "Charlene" --
spoke up, pointed out that "Amy" was breaking the rules, and asked
her to stop posting off-topic, bandwidth-wasting messages. (No,
"Charlene" is not an alias for me.) Although "Charlene's"
message was couched in relatively civil terms, "Amy" wrote back that
she was devastated by this criticism from "Charlene" and
intended to leave the forum. (She didn't actually unsub, of course; threatening
to leave a forum in the face of criticism from others is a common
ego-preserving tactic particularly favored by people who know perfectly well
that the criticism is justified.) "Amy" wrote that she meant to leave
because it was clear to her from "Charlene's" message that everybody
hated her.
And
that's when the fight broke out. About a dozen people jumped down
"Charlene's" throat for being critical of "Amy," on the
ground that any such criticism should've been sent via private e-mail, that
off-topic posts weren't such a big deal that members should be run off because
of them, that anybody who didn't like "Amy's" messages could just hit
delete; that "Charlene" was just a big meanie, etc.
Note
that it was not "Amy's" childish flaunting of the forum's rules that
touched off a firestorm, but rather the fact that "Charlene" had
asked "Amy" to behave like an adult. It was not "Amy," who
had repeatedly broken the rules, who felt the wrath of the forum, but
"Charlene," whose action had "threatened" the
"community" by upsetting another member and motivating her to
consider leaving. "Amy's" membership in the forum, childish behavior
and all, represented the status quo, and other members of the
"community" felt bound to preserving the status quo by protecting
her.
In
other words, in a fan "community," even the worst offenders can claim
they're entitled to mutual support in the name of the peace and stability of
the forum. We all make mistakes, and mistakes always have consequences--to join
a fan forum thinking that the "community" will protect you from your
mistakes or the consequences for them is the mind-set of a 2-year-old.
Please
note that I am not advocating that everybody should go out onto the 'net and
run wild, indulging in rude, asinine behavior at every possible opportunity. As
(theoretically) adult, civilized human beings, I do believe that we are all
obligated to exercise a little decorum and accord each other a certain
civility. What I'm advocating is a little realism, so that we CAN all
act like adult, civilized human beings.
The
truth is that adult, civilized human beings disagree, and there's nothing wrong
with that. Joining a mailing list does not obligate you to agree with anyone
else on the list; nor does it obligate anyone else to agree with you. It also
doesn't obligate you to keep your mouth shut when you think someone else on the
list has erred or obligate anyone else on the list to keep quiet when you've
said something stupid.
Well,
if we don't have "community," we'll have anarchy, right?
Good.
In
an anarchy, it's every man, woman and child for him- or herself. That would
mean that every one of us would be responsible for our own personal behavior --
it would mean that when we act like creeps, we would get what we deserve. It
would mean none of our "list-siblings" would feel obligated to jump
in and protect us from our mistakes. Newbies would be able to speak up without
being voted off the island. We could disagree without setting off World War
III, because disagreements would not seem like ambushes. It would mean that
nobody's ego would be unjustifiably protected, and that anyone whose ego is
unjustifiably attacked would have the means to fight back without penalty --
and anyone whose fight got out of hand could be ejected without a lot of angst
over the future of the group.
Personally,
I think anarchy would be one hell of an improvement over the chaos we've got,
which basically resembles a junior-high-school classroom without a teacher.
None
of us should have to worry over or suffer for the sake of a
"community" that never existed anyway.
Used with permission, © 2000 Loch Ness.
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