The Skill of Knowing When You're Pissing in Someone's Cheerios (Difficulty: 5/5)

[cimorene]

In metafandom circles yesterday both elynross[1] and cereta[2]  posted about how they don't approve of squee-harshing (aka people commenting in a post consisting of nothing but squee to squash said squee with their opinion that whatever sucks).

Now, usually I find the cult of nice exasperating, but while I won't stand up and wave the flag for thinking of the children, this is a position I have some sympathy with. I have a thick skin, and I've never wanted to stop posting out of fear that someone might come and disagree with me like an astonishing number of people are claiming they have done in the comments. But at the same time, I've been the recipient of the utterly unsolicited "I don't like your OTP at all! I think it's fucking revolting, and I don't know how you can even like it" or "That show is SO crappy" which made me bite my lip and think, well, great, and what are your thoughts on yaoi?

In the comments to the latter post, harriet_spy brought up an explanation which I think is certainly right, but which I'd never thought of before. Of course I never assumed squee-harshing was due to MALICE, but it did seem rather inconsiderate. But I don't think it's just an incomprehensible failure to think about other people at work here - I'm sure she's correct that what's at work is actually a failure of social skills, or to put it another way, that it usually hasn't occurred to the squee-harshing commenter that their negative opinions aren't welcome. They think we want to know their thoughts on yaoi.


I'd argue that, although lj is both a public forum and an inherently social one, there are many people who essentially expect a form of civil inattention in their lj-based social interactions. Most people in fandom resist friendslocking, perhaps because full lj-based-fandom participation is greatly facilitated by a public journal: you want people who might have good reason to want to read your journal for some specific purpose (perhaps in search of your posts about a particular fandom, or your fic/recs/artwork) or might want to become acquainted with you (through a fandom in common, or a friend in common) to be able to browse, to find the information they want. You want the people whom outside of fandom would be termed "friendly acquaintances" but whom you haven't friended to be able to drop in from time to time. At the same time, most interaction in personal ljs is one-on-one and in that sense personal; the fact that, for one reason or another, someone doesn't want to make it physically impossible for strangers to comment in their journal doesn't mean that they are cheerfully welcoming of comments of any sort from any stranger.

Of course, if you don't want strangers to shoulder into your conversations offline you can simply never have a conversation where anyone else could overhear, too, but it would make life much more difficult for everyone - and it's not what people do. Civil inattention is one of the most fundamental and essential rules of our society because it allows us to surround ourselves with a semi-permeable barrier in a public space and use it, to a certain extent, as a private one - to apply makeup in the car, to gossip with friends in a restaurant, to talk on the phone on the street, to get on an elevator without fear of being favoured with someone's thoughts on yaoi the United Nations (the homeless and/or crazy people who do accost strangers in public with their thoughts on such subjects get a reaction from everyone in their surroundings which is very telling). 

The fact that the practices of asking for permission to friend and introducing oneself on first comment are as widespread as they are (hardly dominant, but well-represented) shows that at least an embryonic norm for civil inattention exists in lj fandom space, because both these practices take for granted that the default state is unacquainted, and that that is a barrier to interaction which needs to be overcome. You'll also encounter the idea that you shouldn't butt into a thread between two people who weren't addressing you (again, not dominant, but noticeable). These social barriers to commenting on lj are highly contextual as well, determined on the basis of the tone, fandom and personal content of a post; the fandoms of the poster and commenter; and the mutual acquaintance of the poster and commenter. It's about knowing when you qualify as the audience for a statement and how acceptable it is to respond if you don't.

I don't mean to present these norms as superior. My observations are descriptive, not prescriptive. But they are under negotiation in our community, and the forms providing for polite distance have a strong, or at least a vocal, and strongly-feeling following.

Comments

[anglepoiselamp.livejournal.com]

Ehhh. I'm really more disturbed by people butting into my conversations offline. Once when I was on the bus with lexandros, there was this guy who really thought we wanted to hear his thoughts on yaoi. Which makes me wish real life had a banning function.

That said, your meta posts always make me feel like a failure at fandom studies, because I completely lack your über-articulate cleverness. ♥

[anglepoiselamp.livejournal.com]

...and I just realized that I didn't make my journal friends-only from fear of people butting in. Not as such. It was more that there were people who I knew were reading my journal but *not* butting in. They never commented, but one of them used to bear a (mostly) silent grudge about things that I wrote in my journal. And for another one, lurking around my journal seemed to be a part of stalkerish behaviour. Both people made me feel profoundly uncomfortable, and in time it turned into a more general sort of paranoia about not knowing who's lurking out there. Although maybe that's just another side of not wanting people to butt in, because both aim to control the readership of the journal?

Not quite sure what the point of this comment is. I'm just, er, a big fan of social control? :D

[cimness.livejournal.com]

I think the usual reason for friendslocking a whole journal is privacy concerns - people in fandom or RL they hate/fear. People who just don't want anyone to butt in do it sometimes, of course, or restrict commenting to their flist.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

This crazy woman once ranted to me and wax for like half an hour at a bus stop about how the indigenous peoples of the world only build using wood, not stone, and that's why they are superior. And Finnish people are indigenous people. And the EU is bad. D:

BAN.

[elfiepike.livejournal.com]

civil inattention! i, too, love your posts on meta because i always feel more learned afterwards. ♥

[cimness.livejournal.com]

I thought about putting a link on the term, but I couldn't find anything as short as a dictionary or encyclopedia page on it, just a lot of papers and references. Fortunately, it's somewhat self-explanatory.

Wow, this turned out long.

[guinevere33.livejournal.com]

There are many instances in which people are strictly looking for sympathy, in the broadest sense of the word – "emotional or intellectual accord". They're not looking for criticism, or honest opinion, or a critique. They just want to feel surrounded by a community of people who agree with them. The trick is teasing these instances apart from the times when the person really does want feedback, and the world is littered with the corpses of significant others who fail to pick up on the difference. Here's three big examples of the phenomenon at work:

Venting. "I just had the worst day at work. My coworker Susan is such a jerk – she did X, Y, and Z, and isn’t that just vile? How do they expect me to get any work done when I have to deal with that all day?" Most guys (who are generally problem solvers rather than empathizers by nature) take this as an invitation to troubleshoot your work life and help you figure out how to either get along with Susan or get things done in spite of her aggravating ways. But that's not what you’re looking for. You're looking for someone else to say, "Wow, that really sucks. Susan sure is a bitch. I don't know how you stand her either."

Fishing for compliments. When a friend asks you, "Do these jeans make me look fat?", the correct response is NEVER "Yeah, they're a little unflattering - you should try wide-leg jeans instead." The person asking doesn't want your opinion or your advice; they're trolling for compliments. This happens a lot in fandom when people ask for "reviews" of their fanfic. A large percentage of them don't really want your opinion – they just want you to make them feel good about themselves. Unfortunately, they often use the same language as the people who really do want feedback, making it nearly impossible to tell the difference up front. At least with clothes, you can be reasonably confident that someone who asks "Do you like the blue or the red skirt better?" really does want to know the answer.

Squeeing (you knew I’d get around to it). Likewise, if someone posts something in a fandom community along the lines of "Isn't this SO AWESOME?", they are not asking for a critique. They are trolling for legions of other people to come along and agree with them so they can all be excited together. This is an inappropriate time to come along and nitpick – that should be reserved for posts where the tagline is more along the lines of, "So what do you guys think about this?" Otherwise, you'll quickly find yourself cast out as a Harsher of Squee.

reposted to fix my HTML

Re: Wow, this turned out long.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

All of those are applicable in fandom to a greater or lesser degree, of course, but I think the squee-crushing is actually the simplest in terms of social cues (and the one that arouses the most ire). In the case of compliment-fishing and venting, the speaker is often phrasing herself deceptively, even asking a direct question which she may or may not want the answer to. This would be like making a squeeful post and finishing off with "What does everyone else think?" or even "Do you have any reason to disagree with me?" (In the case of "Does this make me look fat?"). Venting generally implies a question, or at least strongly expects an answer, so it can be nearly as deceptive as the direct questions in compliment-fishing. Squee is clearer because, while many people don't mind argumentative comments, there's nothing inherent in squee situations to encourage them.

[oneko-briar.livejournal.com]

This is very well written and informed and raises interesting questions. What I've done in the past is tell someone who was really negative about a TV show that at the time was my favorite and tell her that I thought a season finale didn't suck. I think I've told you about this situation but anyways.

I wanted to share that I had the wierdest dream which was probably sparked by thoughts of Iconsensual.

guinevere33 was there and you were there and we were fairies and like the three Wyrrd sisters, and/or the sisters who cut the threads of time, some thing like this. If you've ever seen Gargoyles, you know those three faerie sisters that appear all the time and sometimes are represented by three male elves? It was like that. We had a lot of powers and could fly around the world and created mischief and sometimes order and Titania and Oberon were our friends.

The most interesting or best part or whatever was that we were consorts of the fairy king. And he helped us out and he was kind of like a father/brother figure and we went on adventures and it was Viggo.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

I think that solution wouldn't satisfy many of the people who have spoken up in the two posts I mentioned, though. Even aside from the ones who say those responses made them give up entirely on posting squee, the people who haven't been quite that affected were mostly really vehement about their feelings. There was another poster today, and also people in the comments, who tend to lie in the "plain speaking" camp, who expressed considerable surprise that people felt so strongly about it.