cimorene

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?

Our habits of thinking about the public and private have certainly changed since the days of mailing lists, when there was private communication - emails to one another - and public communication - emails to the list - and publishing, perhaps on a personal website, more often on an archive. Feedback would be sent to the author, or addressed to the entire list; in the latter case it was usually framed as feedback, but potentially contained some qualities of a review aimed at other readers; recs and any reviews would generally be published on a website. The spheres of interaction had their own delineated places - their own websites. Communal conversations and the community maintenance actions of positive and negative reinforcement, casual conversations and serious conversations, idle trains of thought, flame wars, and screeds and manifestos all took place in the newsreader, or the list archive site, delivered to the email inbox by a robot at Yahoo or wherever that would stick all the messages together with or without threading, everything, all those people, under the single list address. Private conversations arising from these, including much feedback, took place in the email inbox exclusively. Fiction and public recs lists were located on websites and archives.

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, let us carry our personal conversations to work, our work conversations to the car or the subway or the sidewalk. The fandom social network on livejournal allows the private (personal conversations, comment exchanges), the truly private (trains of thought addressed to no one but oneself), the semi-public (general conversations, meta debates batted from journal to journal, performative fandom actions such as feedback and positive and negative reinforcement), and the public ("published" items like polished final drafts of fiction, rec and review lists, open letters, petitions, essays) to all take place in the same space - and each of those types of interaction can be (and frequently are) posted publically. To a degree, each type of interaction is govered by slightly different social rules, even in a society like fandom where social rules are constantly under debate, and said debates probably form the dividing lines between armed factions. The problem is that it can be hard to agree on just how public an interaction was. Is it personal because it was addressed directly to someone? Public because anyone could read it?

ii. how this distinction applies to feedback and reviews

A feedback exchange is a personal conversation between a reader and a writer. (Unless it contains no informational content and consists of formulaic responses on each side in which case it is a pair of symbolic actions like a secret handshake [or formulaic greeting such as 'How are you?' - 'Fine'] between reader and writer as members of the fanfiction community meant to reinforce, for both participants and especially for any witnesses, their mutual [collective] membership in said community.) The original form for feedback exchanges was private. Today when many feedback exchanges take place in public, they are considered more semi-public, with many people drawing a difference, for example, between appropriate feedback for comments and appropriate feedback for private communiqués. The substance of feedback is still essentially the mediated relationship between the reader and the writer in these public interactions. The reader communicates about her experience of the story, not to share information about herself with the writer but to gratify the writer in exchange for her writing. It's not shocking or particularly uncommon for third parties to reply to feedback comments when they are delivered in a public forum, even on a mailing list - another sign that they are considered in a sense public property or public discourse, in that such interjections are generally less common in truly personal one-on-one conversations (for example, topical discussions between close friends in a personal post - the most clear-cut example I can think of).

A review or recommendation, on the otherhand, is fundamentally a public, not personal, interaction between a reader-reviewer and other readers - but, in a way, though it's addressed to a wide and nebulous audience, it is even more private than a one-on-one conversation about the story. Why? Because in a review there is no give-and-take. A review isn't a conversation, as a feedback exchange is (a feedback exchange is always presumed to have at least two participants, even if the author may choose in the end not to reply to the initial comment). A review is a creative work, like a story or an essay, expressing the reviewer's personal experience of interation with the story. Its audience is presumed to be passive.

There is no ulterior motive, as it were, to the review's description of the reader's interaction with the text. The text's effect on the reader is, itself, the point, the entire object, of the review. A feedback comment, in contrast, is a conversation or dialogue whose object is the writer of the story and whose motive is to build and reinforce social network; the story itself is merely a medium.