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Revolt of the commentariat (the comments are revolting)
Ever since my dream that I was trapped on The Hills, I've mostly been avoiding Twitter, not posting and only checking it once a day. Last night I had a dream in which I was getting ready to go to work in the morning, and as I was about to leave my apartment I discovered that all of the locks on my door had been removed, including the chain and the deadbolt.
My first thought in the dream was that someone had taken them off in middle of the night while I was sleeping. But then I realized (again, in the dream) that the locks could have only been removed from inside of the apartment, and nobody could have gotten in while I was asleep, so I must have somehow done it myself. Upon waking, my first thought was that this, too, is a Twitter anxiety dream.
It seems like Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails fame has also been going through some social media anxiety viz. Twitter:
Um, wow, Trent. But the rest of his forum post is worth reading. He's been a huge pioneer and advocate for online music distribution and social media, so when he pulls back from Twitter, it takes on more weight than your typical flounce.
I can't help but read this in the context of recent events on the feminist group blog Shakesville, which Sady from Tiger Beatdown posted about here; see also this post from The Apostate). Personally I've never really been a fan of Shakesville, and don't read it regularly; when I do follow links to it, I've tended to find the in-jokes and invocations of community increasingly off-putting. That definitely biases me towards wondering how much of their recent problems are a direct consequence of both the personalities involved and their particular way of claiming and promoting themselves as a community.
But then I suspect that many would say the same about Trent Reznor -- that he opened the disintermediation doors too wide, made himself too accessible and responsive to his fans, and now he's reaping what he's sown. And because, from a no-fan distance, I've respected the end-runs that he's been trying to make around the corporate music industry, here I'm biased to distrust that argument and want to reject it on principle.
And it strikes me that I generally don't see these kinds of dynamics play out on LJ-type services, except perhaps in the case of moderated LJ communities. So I wonder if the lateral, decentralized nature of LJ/DW/etc. mitigate against these conflicts, or at least insulate against their more destructive manifestations. Both Shakesville and Reznor-on-Twitter reflect more vertical, hierarchical community structures with their own centers, compared to the relative flatness of LJ/DW.
Of course, that's not the only difference; both Reznor and Shakesville seek money from their communities. And I don't want to valorize LJ/DW-style services as "best of all possible worlds" superior. Facebook, for example, has the same characteristics, and my guess is that builds in a similar resistance to Reznor/Shakesville-type drama.
And maybe there's something here about the difference between building social networks vs. online communities. But I don't think that Reznor's pitch (echoed by Techcrunch) for verified identities or the demarcation by Shakesville's Melissa McEwan of "safe space" necessarily get to the root of the dynamics in play here.
My first thought in the dream was that someone had taken them off in middle of the night while I was sleeping. But then I realized (again, in the dream) that the locks could have only been removed from inside of the apartment, and nobody could have gotten in while I was asleep, so I must have somehow done it myself. Upon waking, my first thought was that this, too, is a Twitter anxiety dream.
It seems like Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails fame has also been going through some social media anxiety viz. Twitter:
Looks like the Metal Sludge contingency has discover Twitter! Finally! For those of you that don't know what this is, please let me explain. Metal Sludge is the home of the absolutely worst people I've ever come across. It's populated mainly by unattractive plump females who publicly fantasize about having sex with guys in bands. Kind of like a role-playing game where people NOBODY will fuck make up stories about their incredible sexual encounters with people they WISH they could fuck. It would be kind of funny in a sad and pathetic way except the fun doesn't stop there - hate and good old-fashioned outright blatant racism are also encouraged to spice things up and remind you how truly ugly these scourges are. TRULY ugly on the inside (the outside is obvious).
Um, wow, Trent. But the rest of his forum post is worth reading. He's been a huge pioneer and advocate for online music distribution and social media, so when he pulls back from Twitter, it takes on more weight than your typical flounce.
I can't help but read this in the context of recent events on the feminist group blog Shakesville, which Sady from Tiger Beatdown posted about here; see also this post from The Apostate). Personally I've never really been a fan of Shakesville, and don't read it regularly; when I do follow links to it, I've tended to find the in-jokes and invocations of community increasingly off-putting. That definitely biases me towards wondering how much of their recent problems are a direct consequence of both the personalities involved and their particular way of claiming and promoting themselves as a community.
But then I suspect that many would say the same about Trent Reznor -- that he opened the disintermediation doors too wide, made himself too accessible and responsive to his fans, and now he's reaping what he's sown. And because, from a no-fan distance, I've respected the end-runs that he's been trying to make around the corporate music industry, here I'm biased to distrust that argument and want to reject it on principle.
And it strikes me that I generally don't see these kinds of dynamics play out on LJ-type services, except perhaps in the case of moderated LJ communities. So I wonder if the lateral, decentralized nature of LJ/DW/etc. mitigate against these conflicts, or at least insulate against their more destructive manifestations. Both Shakesville and Reznor-on-Twitter reflect more vertical, hierarchical community structures with their own centers, compared to the relative flatness of LJ/DW.
Of course, that's not the only difference; both Reznor and Shakesville seek money from their communities. And I don't want to valorize LJ/DW-style services as "best of all possible worlds" superior. Facebook, for example, has the same characteristics, and my guess is that builds in a similar resistance to Reznor/Shakesville-type drama.
And maybe there's something here about the difference between building social networks vs. online communities. But I don't think that Reznor's pitch (echoed by Techcrunch) for verified identities or the demarcation by Shakesville's Melissa McEwan of "safe space" necessarily get to the root of the dynamics in play here.
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Yeah, I don't... I dunno. I read those posts on Shakesville (I subscribe to the blog but don't usually read the comments or comment), and just got a real sense of... I dunno. I don't want to say "oversensitive" because that's such a typical attack on feminists--but I do want to say, "Buck up and moderate your space, then!" I'm a member of multiple online communities, with and without moderators, and if you insist on really controlling the discussion, you have to both moderate heavily, and delegate some authority to the community to enforce your standards.
The sense I have of Shakesville is that while they do have multiple moderators, it's still so very much Melissa's space that she's the only one who gets to set the tone. And she's... hmm. Emotionally labile, I would say. She's pretty much not the right personality-type to be a moderator, especially the way she takes every failure of civility in the community as an assault on HER. And they all buy into it!
I mean, seriously: I look at Shakesville and they're all just desperate for her approval. That's not a community, or at least not the kind I'm comfortable with.
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If I comment on a blog, I don't assume that automatically makes me part of a community, and I'm certainly not interested in being part of community centered around a blogger or even a group blog. So I'm generally wary of the big blogs that cast themselves as communities, though it does seem a little more valid when the "community" isn't just limited to commenting and generating donations or ad revenue, but can also set up their own blogs on your site (e.g. Daily Kos diaries).
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I had thought a while ago about attempting to start a mainstream public forum that required real verification of it's participants for purposes of context. The idea was to have a place where you can actually discuss whatever and have some idea of who you're conversing with. For example, if we were discussing drumming techniques and you can see that someone participating in the discussion is a drum instructor vs. a 13 year old kid Googling answers, you'd have the proper context in which to have a potentially valid discussion. If we were discussing EDLC's heart condition and a real cardiologist speaks up, I'd value his opinion over, say FredFuckFaceWhateverHisLastFuckingNameIs's "opinion".
And would it require photos of women so he'd know whether they're the Right Sort to have sexual fantasies about him? Because that's what he was ever so concerned about in this post, about, not heart conditions or drumming.
Aaaaand: Rocknroll version of pseudonym wank!
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Because the discussion should never be judged on the basis of what's actually in the discussion. *sigh* And God forbid you be forced to get to know a person before judging their worth.
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I don't know anything about Metal Sludge, but even if they were the 4chan of rock fans, Reznor's comment is totally unacceptable and an asshole move.
In the meantime, would you accept a virtual *hug* from me?
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And I didn't mean to make you feel bad or imply in any way that you're responsible for making me feel that way! I'm just... interested to observe my reluctance to click through, even though I'm vaguely interested in what's behind.
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But, yeah, the reluctance to click through is totally understandable. Mainly I wanted to juxtapose Reznor & Shakesville, because -- especially with that excerpt from Reznor -- it makes me wonder what part of Shakesville's travails are not about their being a feminist blog.
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I would say: most of them. Establishing and sticking to community standards of discourse isn't a function of one's position on the political spectrum: it's a result of identifying those standards, establishing a means of enforcing them, and getting the community to buy in. That Melissa casts it as a result of the blog being feminist is, I think, more closely associated with the fact that she's been attacked repeated (and horribly) because she's a feminist.
I also suspect that the higher-profile a blog or community is, the harder it is to keep the discussion within certain boundaries, because of the drive-by effect. B.org has very little in the way of driveby because we're so self-contained and low profile: Shakesville is very high profile in the feminist/progressive blogosphere. They are naturally going to attract a lot of trolls (the same way Tiger Beatdown is getting more an more trolls).
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And that's a really good point about the drive-by effect.
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(1) Some of my fans are less cool than I would like them to be. This creeps me right the fuck out.
(2) I talked about my love life in public, and people didn't react the way I wanted them to. It's distressing.
(3) I view myself as an expert. I am mostly interested in talking to other people I would view as experts. The problem with the internet is that I can't immediately tell who the experts are.
How is this different from any other supposed authority figure who's exercised poor judgment about online communication and is unable to cope?
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*still haunted by my dream of the disappearing locks on my door*
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