cimorene

metafandom circles yesterday both

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.