Everyone has said more than enough about the blog panel, and yet. Blah blah here I go, blah. As someone else said, there really wasn't a huge schism between bloggers and those who thought it was wack. There were in fact only four people there, I think, who were representing non-bloggers; specifically, people who had self-confessed issues with it. And I was glad they were there, because to my mind the first logical discussion of blogs at a con should be the one between those who do, and those who don't. And then, over the years, the discussion should progress somehow. I mean, I would love to see a blog panel at Escapade every year, with a slightly different focus of discussion each time.

Even so, the particular comment about 'respect' that got everyone's dander up got mine up too. It was probably well-intentioned, but it was clearly an idee fixe, and pretty irrelevant to the discussion. As so many people have pointed out: what the fuck? You can invite mockery just by existing, not to mention for your stories, for your list posts, for the comments you make at a con, for your behavior in general. Anything you put out there establishes a risk that (a) people will get to know you better, (b) people will decide, once they know you, that you're on crack and they're gonna plonk you. The sense I got listening to this person's comments was that she'd perhaps been on a list where one blogger was mocked and/or there was an anti-blogging thread, then generalized from this, trying to instill a sense of paranoid panic in every blogger present, like a zealous Christian missionary trying to convince the natives they're all going to hell. Good intentions, maybe, but with a bad, bad vibe.

And as one of the natives, I did cringe at the time. Because it was effectively provoking--those vague but loaded comments which made it sound as if any or every blogger in the room might be the subject of mockery by non-bloggers. And the more this point was harped on, the more I began to question the motives behind this. I suspect it's just issues, not motives, at root. But at the time, to me, it was like, why would you tell a friend that someone on another mailing list was mocking her or ripping apart her stories? Why would you come to a panel of bloggers and--with obscure references guaranteed to make everyone wonder "Am I the one?"--try to instill bad feelings in a group of people on the fucked principle that it's for their own good?

What I took away from this: she kind of proved her own point, but not about blogs. She put something out there in the world, namely the comments at this panel, and my respect for her opinion--sustained for years because of her writing and friendly communications--took something of a blow, because that obsessive agenda to edify us poor, ignorant bloggers was misguided nearly to the point of rudeness.

Nonetheless. I did thank her afterwards for being there, and I meant it, because we needed more non-blogging voices; and I was also glad that T. and Shoshanna were there to speak from that perspective in a more balanced way. I promised Shoshanna that I'd set the record straight, by the way, and clarify that she does not consider blogs exclusionary by intent of the participants, but in the sense that anyone who self-selects not to join in blogs naturally will feel excluded from its venue of conversation. It's possible my comments might have given that impression, but I didn't intend to convey that. So there you go, Shoshanna. {g} We love you. And T. too, who braved herself and said very cool things.

There were so many people there with so much to say that, de facto, the panel became a less dynamic conversation than a more free-form format would allow. But better more structure than none at all, and I was really glad when the moderators began listing names. (Shout out to Rache and Kat!) I got freaked when my turn came; I had too much to say. And then I said as much of it as possible, at too great a length, and anxiously. But oh well. This is why I have a fucking blog! I can't talk in person. I'm all gah, incoherence, jitters, blah blah, someone stop me. I remember I said something about links from blog to blog being like doorways, but frankly I'm just going to try and forget my ramblings. (And I wasn't on acid or anything, but in retrospect, doorways? How very Jim Morrison of me.)

I'm looking now at my notes made after the panel, on my torn napkin--and I should point out that these are all just my thoughts, for the most part. I don't mean to imply group consensus. So, we talked about how blogs model female friendships. Say you're on a list with twenty people you know with varying degrees of intimacy. You have some infodump to share, but if you post to the list, you're essentially forcing it on all members; you are putting it in their inbox, in a venue which carries with it some degree of obligation--or maybe I should say pressure--to read. If you put it in your blog, though, people's visits are self-selecting, elective. You are putting less pressure on your friends; by not making a "forceful" gesture of putting yourself forward into other people's space, by making your friends come to you by choice, you allow them to decide where to set the boundaries. This goes counter to comments made at the panel suggesting that blogs may be an ego-gesture to draw people to you, sort of like (my words) courtiers around a queen.

Blogging requires your friends, your readers, to be actively participatory in a dialogue--they have to step forward to listen. Whereas on a mailing list, there's a passivity there; which can give the poster pause, particularly if she gets no reply. It's like in real life, if your listener is staring at you stone-faced, giving no clues as to whether your comments are welcome or not. At least with blogs, if they're reading/listening, you know they've done so by choice. And while this may seem to be built on egocentricity, reciprocity comes if the friend has a blog, which you in turn visit. Which is why everyone should have blogs! Okay, no. But I do see that there's an imbalance there, between bloggers and non-bloggers, at least if the blogger does not have comments. (*cough*)

With all of that in mind, I see a blog as a kind of tactful machine, a device that allows more comfortable proxemics between speaker and listener. It's like a list, but different--and the differences have to do with issues of pressure and obligation that center on response. I think that blogs are often (not always) adopted by people for whom lists can be intensely frustrating. And I need to bullet point my thoughts because they are somewhat disconnected:

• Lists are more personal; they're designed to invite personal "quoted" responses. Once you enter a dialogue, you're dealing face-to-face (so to speak) with another person, triggering all the possible grief and misunderstandings that come with that. Even if you avoid replying directly to someone you are usually still "read" to be riffing off someone else's comments, which they can take amiss. You can do this in blogs, and yet--why are there so few flamewars in blogs? Because we have the comfort of speaking from our personal space: we're allowed the luxury of replying from home in our jammies, not standing self-consciously in the middle of a party for which we have to dress a certain way. The virtual space we create is like a home away from home. Lists are public.

• Lists are also more impersonal. They subtly or not so subtly require you to speak in a certain way. You are always conscious of how other people speak, and how they will interpret or respond to your words. You know that person A likes to give back quick snarky jabs if you mock Blair too openly, person B will think you're full of yourself if you reference critical theory, person C thinks it's rude if you use the word 'fuck' too often. And, in general, you're expected to try and argue things logically and intelligently, give reasons for your likes and dislikes, write in complete sentences, qualify your comments so as not to give offense, and mostly--stay on topic. In blogs, you can say whatever the fuck you want, how you want to say it, and you can be tangent girl all you want, and blend the personal and the political, as feminists would say. Or, to be literal: the personal and the fannish. You just don't see that on lists very often, and when you do, it can trigger all sorts of weird list dynamics, because it's breaking unspoken understandings.

• Just to rephrase what I said above, because lists are not your space / personal space / comfort space, you're bound by "cocktail party" rules and it's going to be constraining to some degree. Think how difficult it is to step into a thread, or the chatter of a list, and do something different--share a goofy poem about your BSOs, say unapologetically negative things about the characters, post a long critical essay on the fandom, detail your thoughts on an old ep when this has nothing to do with the current conversations taking place. And when I say 'difficult' that doesn't mean just that it's difficult to speak up--I mean that you're dealing with the unspoken expectations of others to behave a certain way, stick only to certain topics. If you do hoe your own row, you could well be perceived as someone with Aspergers, someone oblivious to the social compact, insane. In a blog, all this looks normal. Heh.

• Lists set expectations on others to read and respond, and in turn on you to read and respond to people's responses. Disregard the concepts of lurking and killfiles and skimming and cherry-picking and mass deletion--there's still an underlying structure to a list which is read/respond. I.e., if there are ten people on your list whose intelligence you respect and who say cool things and keep the list afloat, you will find that guilt often creeps in, because you are not participating and posting the things they make you think about. You feel like a consumer, not a contributor. All lists, to some degree, foster guilt. And guilt is tiresome.

• In fact, lists foster a lot of negative feelings, for some people. Aside from guilt, they enrage us, frustrate us, bore us. Lists are frictive. You're crowded together in one room with 900 people, not all of whom you like or respect. In blogs, you are in a huge mansion with a room for every person, and you select those with whom you want to interact. When a blog is like a list, it's like a highly customizable list. And that ability to customize is what makes it particularly distinct and cool.

More notes from my napkin--blogs are like salons, yes. Blogs versus annual Christmas letters: S. was describing blogs as being like those mass mailing X-mas letters, the photocopied ones that blurt out the news of the year with no personalization. J. disagreed, because the sheer frequency of blogs--their day-to-day nature--allows you to weave your friend's life into your own, and so it is not so impersonal. I can see sort of both sides of this. I understand the argument which goes: "My friends have blogs, but if they're my friends, why don't they share their feelings and thoughts with me personally?" As a blogger, there are lots of reasons for this. My own aren't exactly noble, and would have to include time, emotional buffering, probably laziness to some degree, along with the difficulty of maintaining very personal friendships online, the kind where you say to someone you've met in person less than a half dozen times in your life, "Oh, by the way, I'm an alcoholic and here are my thoughts on that." Yeah.

Napkin says "feedback." This was interesting--it was argued, I think, that having no comment functionality is just another way to bolster ego, because it lessens the similarity between blog and list. It makes it all about your monologue, doesn't allow response. For me, though, the absence of a comment function is akin to the absence of hit counters: it drives ego off, because I don't want to be toting up my hits and number of responses. Doing so would feed into egocentricity for me, emphasize this blog as a device to garner attention. It's not this way for others, I realize, and I like the comment function in livejournals, etc. But for me, that apparatus would be dangerous.

Linking all of the thoughts above is an overarching concept: the fiction of privacy. A good or useful kind of doublethink, someone called it. This was discussed in the panel and afterwards. It's the idea that when blogging you are talking to yourself or just to a group of friends, even though it's in a public forum. There has to be a sanity-check, though. During the panel, Zen gave an example of how someone from real life stumbled across her blog, and the jarring feeling this gave her. I know I've seen experiences like this mentioned in other blogs.

Personally, I maintain the fiction of privacy, simultaneously while staying conscious of boundaries between my real life and virtual life. It may not look that way, since I dump a lot of stuff out there. But while I think the "voice" I use in my blog is really close to who I am and what I'd say if I were never making this public, there's also a degree of restraint and awareness of audience. I censor myself in certain ways--I use initials for people at work, I don't give into my worst impulses to namecall or say "stupid bitch!" I don't say things that would truly embarrass me and show me at my most disgustingly human. And when it comes to the overlap of mundane and fannish life, I have one occasional reader, a friend from work, and she's my mental test-case: am I saying something I'd hate to get back to people at the office? That would freak me out so much if they knew that I'd be unable to show my face? Not that I think she'd say a word: I just like to use that as a mental exercise. And sure, I'd feel uncomfortable if people I worked with knew about slash, or the drinking thing, but I work in a very liberal company and milieu, and neither issue is going to scandalize anyone.

Blogging is one area where I don't feel the need to buy trouble by giving into paranoid worst-case scenario fantasies. As Devon said during the blog panel, it's about shame: why should we feel ashamed of who we are? Of what we think and feel? To hell with that. Devon, you rock.

If I could summarize a rule of blogging for myself in one sentence (after all this blather) it'd be: Unlearn shame, exercise tact. It seems contradictory, but I don't think it is. Tact is partly about self-censorship, yeah, but it's also about being part of a community, maintaining friendships, and so on. And to the person at the blog panel I've talked about, who in fact will probably never read this: I'm fine saying what I've said here, wish that I'd been brave enough to say it in person, and hope you understand my feelings.

Here ends the boring meta-post on blogs, which contained no kittens.

posted 2.23.2002 @ 10:21am -- right-click here to grab a link