#but absolutely unfollow me at any time! curate your online experience! it should be good for you | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

farfartothewestofeverywhere · 1 year

Text

so i'm still annoyed about this tumblr person who blocked me (no not that one) – like – wow tumblrinas are block-happy jfc. — anyway — i was in the tag for a show, liking & reblogging, and i think i saw a post asking for suggestions of what to GIF for the current episode. excitedly I mentioned three scenes/moments i really loved and would love to see. later i went to try and check back on the post/her blog and couldn't find it. then eventually realized i had been blocked. as far as i could tell – all for engaging with a post in the show tag.

i just. I'm so mad. not a ton of people are GIFing that show and they have SO many good GIFs. and now i can't see and reblog them. because...i suggested GIFs in a post literally asking for suggestions???

now I've looked at the blog since then – because of course i can't let things go and it does seem like she's a block-happy person. which is "fine." like. a strange number of posts about how much she enjoys blocking without thinking twice. so. ok. maybe it's not 100% me. maybe because I was too chipper responding, maybe because i suggested more than one scene. i don't fucking know.

but being blocked. just know. that if other people out there are like me – being blocked is one of the most painful experiences on the internet. like it DESTROYS me. i even hesitated blocking some porn bots until this most recent surge because i wasn't always 100% sure they weren't just tumblr people who happen to enjoy porn and the stuff i reblog.

like i AGONIZE over blocking someone. because i know how it makes me feel. now. i have unfollowed people more readily. not VERY. but there have been times I've asked people to tag things and they don't – and i can't have certain things untagged on my dash – so I'll unfollow. i don't block. because they're not part of my experience anymore. and someone reblogging from me...like...whatever you add to a post will NEVER bother me. (probably). but I'm definitely not going to block someone over ANYTHING trivial. and especially not over one possibly misinterpreted interaction.

like believe me i remember almost every time I've been blocked on any social media. and it fucking HURTS. it hurts like being ghosted by a crush. and it's mostly that lack of closure. WHY. what did i do? why can't i get a chance to fix it or know what I've done to cause harm? why can't i be asked politely to please no longer interact?

i get that no one OWES me that. and your online experience is your own to curate. but that doesn't change the effect it has on me. it Hurts so painfully. absolutely more than it should. but it does. and I've tried to learn to let go. but there is still the absolutely horrible pain in my chest. physically, mentally, and more – from realizing I've been blocked.

anyway. also i assume there are a lot of cptsd-related reasons for this but i have no coping mechanisms or real outlet or support and my therapist is worthless when it comes to the real, hard, deep stuff ✌️

thanks for reading or, lol, not blocking. as always if you want me to add a certain tag, especially to posts like this, that you want to be able to filter – please just let me know. <3

#personal #rant #tumblr #long post

1 note · View note

santamonicayachtclub · 7 years

Text

on curation, validation, and prioritization in fandom

Fandom is legion.

None of us “do” fandom the same way as everyone else, and none of us get all the same things out of it as everyone else. It’s okay to listen to discussions and not partake. It’s okay if fandom is a place for you to decompress and take time for yourself. It’s just as valid to view diversity analysis as your fandom calling as it is to view drawing fanart as your fandom calling. It’s okay to not feel comfortable participating in certain parts of fandom. It’s okay to have a finite amount of energy. Something to bear in mind is that this probably indicates you also lack the energy to complain about negativity and, in effect, contribute to it yourself. This is what it means to curate your experience. Preserving your energy and your need for self-care is never invalid, but neither should it occur as a result of cutting down others. If you’ve noticed yourself finding certain topics uncomfortable or frustrating, this might be a good opportunity to examine why POC and LGBT+ fans discussing GMM from a social justice perspective makes you feel that way. Bottom line, no one is being forced to perform fandom to anyone’s specifications. Cultivating your own experience need not occur at the expense of putting down people who engage with fandom differently than you.

And I will say...I've been here a little over a month and most of the time I have no idea who anyone is talking about. I work with immigrant families full time and have a side hustle doing ESL tutoring and am lowkey trying to keep up with my book club and get some academic stuff published without popping a vein. I have no idea who the original post was about or who wrote what fic with what thing that’s possibly objectionable. I’m just here to be America’s Next Top Model.

On that note, I realize the hoary old chestnut that is the “depiction isn't endorsement” argument has been thoroughly cracked open several times, I really do. Exploring gritty, uncomfortable topics is something people do in every realm of media, and by no means indicates a creator’s desire to partake in the same subject matter in reality. Creation is fueled by everything from escapism to therapeutic expression to sublimation of emotion to just plain curiosity.

There's merit to the concept of self-curation, but it also involves work on both ends. Creators have been stepping up their tagging game considerably in recent years, and there’s been an uptick in author’s notes that allow readers to click to the end of a fic and read detailed synopses of potentially triggering contents. Fanvid makers have been doing the same, which allows viewers to skip over certain segments of their vids. In many ways, fandom has been making great strides towards protecting its participants. On the other hand, there will always be creators who opt not to engage in these practices, just as there will always be fanworks that repel certain fans. Tailoring your dash by blocking and unfollowing won't stop these works from being posted or their creators’ accounts from existing. Plenty of fanwork creators use their works to sublimate trauma or mental illness or to explore the deconstruction of tropes typically considered trite or problematic. Saying this work shouldn't exist full stop is concerning and often leads down the slippery slope of implying authors should be obligated to divulge personal information in order to prove they have the right “credentials” to be writing certain subjects.

Continuing along that topic, it’s impossible to know for certain the mental illnesses, survivor statuses, and ethnic background of every other person in fandom, let alone how those things might manifest or how each individual person might cope with them. It’s concerning to me that there’s been a spike in individual fans declaring in very broad strokes which fanworks pass muster and which should be scrubbed from existence, based on their own status as a member of a given group. There are certainly occasions where this is valid and necessary (e.g., calling out a fanwork that is blatantly racist or transphobic) There are also occasions where such declarations set up a false dichotomy in which there’s a right way and a wrong way to “do” fandom if you are a member of this group, whether it be one’s status as a POC, a sexual assault survivor, LGBT+, etc. This is erasure of those who share the same trait(s) but have a completely different perspective.

POC, survivors, LGBT+, and mentally ill fans all have and are continuing to both consume and create problematic things. Many of them may not feel comfortable disclosing personal information online for a variety of reasons. Someone repulsed by BDSM fic might have a weakness for daddy kink. Someone might view a given fic's content as gratuitous while another person might see it as nuanced and sensitively portrayed. There are few absolutes in fandom and trying to force them into existence is a headache waiting to happen.

Trying to stop the existence of every fanwork you find problematic will leave you exhausted, frustrated, and burned out. For every person crusading against XYZ, there will always be another person transforming into a “challenge accepted” meme circa 2010 and eagerly producing more XYZ. That isn’t to say there’s no conversation to be had about the portrayal and treatment of certain tropes and concepts in fandom, because there absolutely is. At the same time, there has to be a moment where you realize, however difficult it may be, that sometimes it’s necessary to take a step back and protect yourself.

If you’re unsure about clicking on a read more tag to see someone’s art or clicking on a fic that hasn’t been tagged specifically enough for your comfort, send the creator a message asking about the content. This can be anxiety-inducing, so an alternative is to have a vetting squad, a group of trusted friends you can turn to and ask, "hey, does anyone know if SassySweaterRhett’s fic contains D/s?" or "I just got added by chinchillinwithchase, does anyone know what kind of stuff they post?" If you notice a fic with minimal tags that the author has labeled Choose Not To Warn, maybe post a quick "hey, has anyone read this and if so what can I expect?" to your blog before clicking on it.

Fandom will never be a tailor-made safe space for everyone who enters it. But we can try to promote consistency. When in doubt, using too many tags is often better than using too few. Knowing your own limits can be a tedious process that often involves stumbling across content you immediately wish you hadn’t. My own triggers and squicks are almost all atypical and not likely to be covered by anyone's tags. I’ve had a number of rude awakenings, the vast majority of them from back in the day when it was considered courteous if you included content warnings at all.

That said.

It is so, so hard to try and make a space for yourself and your unique voice in fandom only to then be told fandom doesn’t want to hear it. As I said earlier, curation works both ways. One person’s expression is as valid as any other’s unless hate speech, abuse, doxxing, etc. enter the picture. And to be honest, some of the anon messages I’ve seen lately have veered pretty unequivocally over the line. Attacking someone for expressing an opinion by telling them to die or kill themself is never, ever appropriate no matter how much you disagree with what they're posting. This is a great example of when it might behoove one to add a few new terms to one’s blacklist and practice the gentle art of not being an asshole. Dialogue, discussion, and even arguments are bound to happen, and should happen in any venue that involves a a group of people with shared interests but not a shared brain. There is no reason it should ever devolve into personal attacks.

tl:dr Fandom is a tangled web when it comes to trying to walk the tightrope between self-expression and self-preservation and it would be great if we could figure it out.

#gmm diversity #i guess #long post #unsure how to tag this #i just have a lot of feelings #eva screaming into the void again

30 notes · View notes

duaneodavila · 5 years

Text

Twitter Rules, Blawgs Drool

Want to know how clueless I am? When twitter came onto the scene, I scoffed. Back in 2008, the blawgosphere was in full swing, vibrant and, for the most part, pretty darn thoughtful. Posts were a fraction of the length of a law review article, informal and, for the most part, sound. Sure, there were some bad actors in the blawgosphere, and some less-than-good actors, but at least there was good stuff to balance it out.

But I was wrong, and twitter became a thing. I refused to accept this for a while, and even now refuse to discuss my blawg posts on twitter, as twits are transitory and thus fail to contribute to the discussion here. It doesn’t stop anyone from commenting about a post on twitter, but I won’t engage with it. One law student chastised me for it, impugning my motives because she demanded I do things her way. Aren’t law students adorable?

Today, however, my posts are too long and require too much effort, and they aren’t read by enough people to make a difference. David French explains why.

One of the first things you learn when you start your professional life is that the people who care the most have the most influence.

It’s true in every business, from entertainment to the law to politics. In fact, given our extreme levels of public apathy and civic ignorance, it’s remarkable how few people it takes to transform a political debate.

When one juxtaposes the influence of people who care versus people are are apathetic, this assertion is sound. But caring alone isn’t enough. There are tons of folks who care, and I mean really care, who have no influence at all. It may be because their passion is offset by their ignorance or their attitude, such that they can care all day long but nobody cares back.

And that brings us to Twitter. By measure of active users, it’s a lightweight. Facebook is the behemoth, with more than 2.2 billion people on the platform. YouTube has 1.9 billion, Instagram 1 billion. Twitter is all the way down below China’s Qzone and TikTok at a mere 335 million. But in public influence it punches far above its weight. Why? Because it’s where cultural kingmakers congregate, and thus where conventional wisdom is formed and shaped — often instantly and thoughtlessly.

In other words, Twitter is where the people who care the most spend their time. The disproportionate influence of microbursts of instant public comments from a curated set of people these influencers follow shapes their writing and thinking and conduct way beyond the platform.

This raises a serious question. What makes someone a “cultural kingmaker”? Why do millions of people follow Kylie Jenner? Why do other people have twelve followers despite tens of thousands of twits? Why do the latter persist in twit-storming the former, when they’re just random people who harbor the mistaken belief that people who don’t know them care deeply about their feelings on a broad array of issues?

Even worse, given the geographic and social sorting that dominates American life, Twitter can present any given activist with a near-exclusive look at the other side of the aisle. Thus, MAGA-Twitter is Trump’s America. Social-Justice Twitter is progressive America. And to the extent that other influencers (CEOs, studio heads, government bureaucrats, etc.) are online themselves, they’re often captured by the same hysteria.

David is, as everyone who twits is aware, absolutely right about the perception created on the twitters. There are complete nutjobs spewing utter nonsense who huge followings who are taken to represent wide swatches of America. While one can question whether they really do, the fact that they have hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of followers can’t be ignored. Nobody forces anyone to follow them. If someone follows (or unfollows), that’s a personal choice. That people follow someone as loony as Amy Siskind or Seth Abramson (who has blocked me) speaks to the influence they wield.

Yet, David continues to write blog-post length articles, just as I continue to write SJ posts (although he does so for a living, while I, purist that I am, do so for love). Why bother? If we’re not reaching enough people to influence the masses, to gather millions of followers and, with a pithy twit, change the course of legal or political discussion, is this anything more than mental masturbation?

It’s tempting, when reading a news feed full of rage and hysteria, to console yourself in the knowledge that it’s “just Twitter.” But behind those angry, hyperbolic tweets (well, the blue-check-marked ones, anyway) are people, and those people are disproportionately the most engaged and most influential men and women in American public life. It’s “just” the American political class putting its rage and intemperance on display, hoping to remake the world in its own irate image. And the surprising success of that attempted makeover should scare you, whatever your own political views are.

It does scare me, but less so for its influence than for its shallowness. My initial reaction to twitter haunts me, that the constraint of a twit, a “microburst” as David calls it, is just enough to fuel the simpletons to fury, but markedly short of achieving any communication of depth. What it’s manage to accomplish, beyond merely spreading misinformation to the confirmation biased, is leave people with the firm belief that all problems, all issues, all positions, are susceptible to a 280 (up from the original 140 character) solution. Anything beyond a twit is too requires too much effort to consider.

What twitter has managed to do is create tribes that rally around slogans with neither the knowledge nor experience to grasp what the hell they’re talking about. And yet, we take these tribes seriously as a reflection of what society believes, what people really want. The problem with twitter isn’t just whether it reflects only the loudest, most hyperbolic views, but whether it has managed to replace the expression of any deeper thought with the most simplistic of echo chambers.

What scares me isn’t that twitter rules, but that blawgs, short-form though they may be, are too long and require too much effort to be worth the bother to read. When it comes to law, more than a twit is almost always necessary to address any issue thoughtfully and accurately. But the only thing harder than law is thinking.

There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking.

–Sir Joshua Reynolds

Who knew the expedient would end up being twitter?

Twitter Rules, Blawgs Drool republished via Simple Justice

0 notes