Feedback vs reviews, conflation of; the public and private spheres of fandom

Moved here due to difficulties with the date function

Drawing with Carmela

We went to Moomin World yesterday. Not realising the drive was only about 15 minutes, I packed a zipper pouch of spare coloured pencils - Derwent watercolours because anything other than Prismacolor is a spare - and a little bright fuschia blank composition book (which is to say with lined graph paper but I didn't have any mini sketchbooks lying around), to entertain Carmela if necessary in the car.

Carmela is four, and her drawings are still toddler-level with a circle representing the person containing eye and nose circles, mouth lines, and long lines for the limbs attached directly to the main circle. But this doesn't stop her from being really interested in my drawings (more accurately, doodles or sketches - she's not very patient...) and I've recently hit a GOLD MINE in Carmela-entertainment by offering to "draw together", which means she holds a coloured pencil and adds scribbles as necessary while asking questions about the details of whatever I'm drawing. She sometimes asks me to choose the subjects myself but is interested in little beyond princesses. (YESTERDAY, walking out of Moomin World: SMILING MW EMPLOYEE: Would you like a free colouring book page? WAX'S MOM: Carmela, want a little magazine sheet, see, it has a colouring page? CARMELA: NO I DON'T WANT IT! WAX'S MOM: Well, that's okay, Grandma will just take it then - CARMELA, bursting into tears: NOOOOOOOO! I DON'T WANT MOOMIN MAGAZINES I ONLY WANT PRINCESS MAGAZINES! I DON'T WAAAAAAAAANT IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIT!)

So there was no recourse to drawing in the car, but after about an hour when we were standing in line for french fries, because she didn't want to walk out of sight of Grandma to do anything with me, she was whiny and tired and I had to cajole her into sitting down on the deck of the french fry hut while we waited, and happily pulled out the book and coloured pencils... and she instantly was not just calm, but cheerfully engaged. Meanwhile I drew an audience of several mothers and little girls as well as two tiny boys (TINY BOY to his sister: That was really cool!) from the french fry line as I drew the butterfly-theme bedroom from the Moomin House, the canopied princess bed, and a Princess Carmela in a blue floral dress to inhabit the room. (Her butterflies were named Flower and Flutterby.) Well, uh, GOOD THING I BROUGHT THAT THEN. It's like a magic wand. The four-year-old version of a pacifier.

Feedback vs reviews, conflation of; the public and private spheres of fandom

This week saw one of the loudest and wankiest outbreaks in the last year or two of the endless fight between people who support constructive criticism and people who think that if you can't say anything nice, you shouldn't say anything at all.

This iteration was a bit more entertaining than usual, however, because the issue had gotten pretty thoroughly mixed up with the separate but related issue of reviews and recs. I don't mean that the issues were conflated by participants who failed to distinguish between them, but that the discussion, especially in lamardeuse's anti-concrit post, was divided between discussion of concrit and discussion of reviews, frequently explicitly separated by people on both sides of the argument, but then (apparently) conflated again just a few inches away, or even within the same comment - treated, although they were labelled as separate issues, as connected ones if not two sides of the same one. And I'd argue that that's not wrong.

Feedback and reviews are two separate things, but they are also two sides of the same issue: the interactions between the reader, the text, and the writer. (I put them in that order deliberately - fiction is at most a mediated interaction between reader and writer, and more properly an interaction between reader and text. The author doesn't have to be dead for that to be true. The author is simply irrelevant, at least until later when it's time to interact with her as two individual community members and not in your roles in relation to her story, because the author's not there in your head when you read.)

The conflation of feedback and reviews is a strange and fascinating issue for me in itself, something present in the comments of the post and something which I have encountered several times recently. There's a wavery line in fandom between the public (which recs and reviews by nature are) and the private (which feedback is generally considered to be, even though it is frequently performed in public, in which case it is often more a social ritual than a private communication).

i. the public and the private spheres

Most of us in lj-based media fandom generally regard as personal spaces the arenas where we interact with our personal friends which are frequently not, in fact, friendslocked. People also feel a natural sense of ownership of their own journals even when the contact is explicitly public, i.e. addressed to the public. Perhaps it is this and the journal-based fandom model's ability to fine-tune and filter privacy and participation for each individual user that causes this conflation?

( Livejournal's multiple functions have done for that web 1.0 culture what the mobile phone did for our physical lives: erased the physical delineations for our spheres of interaction. )

meet the newest member of our household.

His name is Vader, of course.



And he pulsates. The standby light shines from under the screen and slowly brightens and dims with a red glow reflected in the interior of the stand arch.