Metafandom

Sat, Dec. 26th, 2009, 12:44 am
alias_sqbr: Dear metafandom mods

Something I've been pondering a post on as a result of the recent discussions but can't quite articulate is the fact that because you're not officially a social justice blog it's harder to pin down issues of equitable representation eg I was feeling a bit narky about the fact that afaict you haven't been posting much of the disability meta that's been sloshing around my flist recently (I mean the disability tag certainly has a lot of good stuff on it. But there could be even more! :)).

And then it occured to me that maybe you're just not seeing it. So! I will try and post links as they come up, and also recommend that one of you subscribes to access_fandom.

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Sat, Dec. 26th, 2009, 01:00 am
p-zeitgeist.livejournal.com: Re: Dear metafandom mods

Thanks! Odds are good that we are indeed just not seeing it -- it's a big internet, and as you say, we're not officially a social justice blog.

I don't want to say that there could never possibly be an instance where a compiler would consider a given link to be too tangential to fandom/fanworks to really fit within metafandom's mission statement -- there are going to be times when that's a judgment call on which reasonable people could disagree -- but I can and will say that we're not failing to link out of any lack of interest, or out of any sense that this isn't a damned important set of issues.

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Mon, Dec. 28th, 2009, 04:38 am
alias_sqbr: Re: Dear metafandom mods

Oh, I'd never suspect you of not considering it important, and until disabled_fandom started you were afaict the best place to find fandom disability stuff online. But I think with an Actual Social Justice Blog it's not enough to be open to all viewpoints, if you aren't giving equal voice to particular POVs you have to actively seek them out. Which is not really how metafandom operates. I'm undecided as to whether or not you should be expected to be more proactive, in the same way as I'm undecided as to how pro-active I should be in reading and writing for my own dw journal, which is social justice heavy but not an official/serious social justice blog.


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Mon, Dec. 28th, 2009, 05:50 pm
p-zeitgeist.livejournal.com: Re: Dear metafandom mods

Which is not really how metafandom operates.

And when it comes down to it, no matter how proactive we were, to a nontrivial extent I suspect that the goals and methods of an Actual Social Justice Blog are not only not the same as metafandom's, but would actively conflict in some (nontrivial) instances. At its heart, metafandom is about discussion -- one of the core policies, and the one the comm's never knowingly made an exception to, is that we don't link to a post where participation is restricted. Which means that if the OP is, for instance, making any effort to provide a safe space for commenters, we can't link. And if the OP is making it clear she doesn't want to be argued with, we likely won't, no matter how important the viewpoint being expressed: if she's not willing to have her analysis contested, what's going on isn't open discussion.

And of course, a lot of the tools anti-oppression discourse uses do restrict discussion: deliberately and for stated analytic purposes, but the restrictions are nevertheless there and nontrivial. (What one participant experiences as derailing may be what another participant experiences as an examination of some issue upon which the analysis as a whole rests. And so on.) Not to mention, anti-oppression discourse makes it a priority to respect the experiences of members of oppressed groups, which means that something that routinely takes place in other forms of discussion -- that is, an examination of the premises undergirding the argument -- will often be out of place in anti-oppression contexts because it risks, at the very least, the appearance of a challenge to someone's felt and lived experience.

So it would be impossible, I think, for metafandom to both retain its original goals and to be a Real Social Justice Blog. Where our mission puts us at odds with anti-oppression work, well, we rely upon others to put the anti-oppression goals in first place. We have to, or else we're abandoning both neutrality and our original mission statement.

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Tue, Dec. 29th, 2009, 12:06 pm
alias_sqbr: Re: Dear metafandom mods

we don't link to a post where participation is restricted

Ohhhhhh.

Does that include posts where comments are screened (but eventually posted)? Because um..that's the case with my recent post you guys linked. Oops! I did unscreen all the comments eventually, at worst a few waited while I came up with a rebuttal/clarifying question etc. Also I have rules about what sort of comments and I will and won't allow, to try and make my dw a safe space.

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Tue, Dec. 29th, 2009, 07:18 pm
p-zeitgeist.livejournal.com: Re: Dear metafandom mods

That's an interesting issue. If you want the link left up, and all the comments are now unscreened, I wouldn't now go back and take it down, so that part's all right.

But going forward, we normally wouldn't link a post where comments were screened for substantive content (as opposed to being screened because, say, the OP was having a problem with spam postings, or with unmistakable harassment of one or more participants in the discussion, or something of a similar viewpoint-neutral nature). If it isn't clear from a glance that commenting is restricted, though, we won't necessarily know about it until we've already linked and somebody tries to comment, fails, and comes back and tells us about it. We've always taken such links down when we get a report like that, and I don't see that policy changing.

It seems clear from this conversation, though, that just because everybody who was following the comm knew this back when the original mods launched metafandom doesn't mean everybody knows it now. I've been thinking of writing up a personal post about how I pick links (as opposed to anything purporting to represent how my fellow compilers approach it), and this gives me a certain amount of extra impetus.

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Tue, Dec. 29th, 2009, 10:26 pm
alias_sqbr: Re: Dear metafandom mods

Yes, after reading your comment I went and checked the FAQ and there's nothing I could see in it about screening. On the other hand, up until recently I was CERTAIN it was policy not to link to posts with no comments. Clarification would definitely be good.

How is the comm about commenting policies? I have a post all written that I definitely want on metafandom and need to know where to post it :) (I'm willing to not screen non-anonymous comments for that one post)

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Tue, Dec. 29th, 2009, 11:43 pm
p-zeitgeist.livejournal.com: Re: Dear metafandom mods

I just took a look, and the quick and dirty answer is that this particular post is too old for us -- although I'm pretty sure this isn't in the FAQ anywhere, one of my first encounters with the original metafandom mods, before I was on the team, involved one of them telling me sadly that she wished she'd seen one of my posts in time to link it, and telling me when I told her she was free to link anyway as far as I was concerned that the comm didn't link things that were more than a week to ten days old, max.

But! If you wanted to do a new post about commenting policies and why you have one, that might well be something we could link happily, if you were willing to accept an open comments policy for that post. I myself admit to some curiosity about how having one works out, whether you find it's made a substantive difference in the kinds of conversations you have, and like that. And there'd be no reason for you not to refer back to your actual comment policy post, right?

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Tue, Dec. 29th, 2009, 11:51 pm
alias_sqbr: Re: Dear metafandom mods

Oh no, what I meant was: are you ok with me linking to a new post on my dreamwidth account given that I expect commenters to follow that policy?

(The policy has worked pretty well, actually. The same people will be more careful with what they say than they are on my lj, and people who aren't willing to watch what they say don't read or comment in the first place. Creating a new journal with it applying from the start made a big difference, though)

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Wed, Dec. 30th, 2009, 12:11 am
p-zeitgeist.livejournal.com: Re: Dear metafandom mods

Ah, I see.

I think that's something we're going to have to discuss, because there may be ways to distinguish among situations and allow for some such links. But generally speaking -- and right now I'm only speaking generally, since I didn't read your individual policy closely enough to do more than that yet -- for our purposes a policy that restricts comments to those expressing a certain point of view puts a post outside our guidelines. If someone reading can't disagree on a fundamental level, what you have isn't an open discussion. It might well be highly educational, and something I could wish everyone in the community at large paid attention to, but value doesn't make it a metafandom post: discussion and ideas that provoke said discussion are what do that.

On the other hand, if you have a policy that isn't actually preventing people from expressing disagreement, that might be something we could work around. I know of some posting policies that basically say, 'Please do not use this set of ablist words in this space,' and I wouldn't say that was such a restrictive policy as to be disqualifying for us. Thus both my hedging and my sense that this is an issue the compilers are going to need to talk about.

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Wed, Dec. 30th, 2009, 12:49 am
alias_sqbr: Re: Dear metafandom mods

Fair enough. I think my policy is probably in a grey area: I am definitely ok with disagreement up to a point, but there's some ideas I just don't feel like dealing with (Like "Racism doesn't exist").

Anyway, I was all inspired to post it Right Now so have just said the comment policy isn't binding for that post: http://sqbr.dreamwidth.org/261234.html

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