(no subject)

[zen_monk]

It's a significant dislike to see someone modifying someone talking about a particular experience for a group and turning it into an objective fact for an even larger group. 

Some significant problems shared in one group isn't going to be shared by suddenly everyone else, and presuming it is as such as a matter of "solidarity" denies the particular experience of that one group of its identifying uniqueness. 

Comments

[sarasa_cat]

tumblr, eh?

or, this sounds like something that happens far too often on tumblr and most other LOUD social media sites. :/

[zen_monk]

I found words to articulate this, but tumblr has highlighted this trend of having people's social media becoming commodities and being lifted up as ephemeral buzzwords and catchy one-liners where suddenly anyone can twist something into their own choosing while ignoring (or even overconflating) the fact that these are people's personal statements or inanity on their blogs. It seems so easy for a person's reblogged statement to reach a level of ephemeral-ness to the point where if you try to address that person, you know it's a futile gesture because look at how many thousands of other people have either shared or liked a thing that an OP or a commenter is most likely never going to see it. You're either shouting to the wind or talking in the third person away from someone right next to you (figuratively).

I was late on the LJ scene (and... pretty young and awkward) but I remember that there was not only a sense of privacy in blogs like LJ or myspace, but it's like there's implicit knowledge on when to engage in someone in dialogue and when you gotta leave a personal thing alone (whether it's friends locked or comments locked or neither).

Or it's like "this is my personal experience" and then this user is like "but it's -everyone's- personal experience!" as though this is a very appropriate thing to say or modify! And it's not like I want to start gossiping over certain individuals (since I'm still in that internet age mentality where like, there's measures of privacy to maintain sometimes) but sometimes it's galling to see how easy it is and how cavalier some people are in revealing very personal information... or having that information shared openly by other people who think they're engaging in private dialogue...

...but in an incredibly public venue.

and that's my.... tumblr rant of the night..

[sarasa_cat]

There is a long meta-in-the-making on my DW right now (FRIENDS LOCKED!) with a lot of good commentary beneath it that is all about this.

On tumblr I have seen so much of what you mention above. :/

Related: it bothers me when someone on tumblr honestly believes they are helping people like themselves understand another person's perspective so they speak for that other person (without permission) and either name that other person by an identity that the other person selectively uses with qualifications or they give a neat and clean "this is how it is" explanation when, in reality, the situation is far more complex. Or both. And then more people reblogs this and feels like they have been educated while the actual people who were used as examples are stuck in this awkward position. Do the actual people add the reality/complexity back in -- complexity that is hard to understand without lived experience -- and end up saying something that muddles the situation and leaves people feeling awkward and invalidated or their help/support/allyship was unwanted? Or just say nothing because, meh, too much trouble, too much headache, the simplistic version is well meaning and close enough so, whatever …

So, it isn't just that the venue is INCREDIBLY PUBLIC. The problem is also that people will attempt to represent other people in an incredibly public place where messages get reblogged over and over again with random information that is less and less on the mark.

[zen_monk]

The blogger: becoming subject and objectified.

Or it's like attempts at intersectionality means that there's suddenly overlap over things that aren't meant to be overlapped as though people remembered The Butterfly Effect movie and think everything is connected when they are things in their own categories to be talked about as it is in their category. It's the "stay in your own lane" talk, but then there's also people who want to invite others in this lane or others because it is "discussion."

Like, this one person I know (and is the topic of this post but this happened very recently) who would use the @username thing to get that person to notice their posts and reblogs, and y'know it happens as a way of sharing. But it crossed the line where not only did they mentioned their usernames, but they used them as examples for a topic in which they started to say "@username is from _____ and their lives are _____ and their thoughts are _____"

with the explicit intention to not only identify people she's talking about to whoever is looking their blog, but to make them look at what was being written about them and engage with what they reblogged.

Worst kind of singling out of a person, and this kind of private information was being shared not only by whoever they reblogged from, but also to a presumed audience they have, and to whoever wanted to look at people's comments on the post. But this is not the first person who has decided that someone's life experience who has shared that information, either to that person or on their blog, decides to take that person's words to make a sweeping generalization as though they've become arbiters of information and, apparently, of a person's own personal life to be shared to others.

And I dunno, it just appalls me that things that are really private becomes shared just as easily as things that are meant to be shared, and coupled with something as uncontrolled as tumblr (where individuals are groups unto themselves, thousands of whole entities interacting, instead of entities consisting of like-minded individuals), there's really less agency for the blogger in very important ways.

[sarasa_cat]

Yes. The objectified subject called to everyone's attention with the @username feature. I… uhhhh.

I've seen this happen often and I am now wondering if we're both thinking of the exact same recent occurrence. When I saw this sort of thing happen yet again last week when hitting a little too close to home, I needed to ignore tumblr even more than usual. That happened immediately after a few other similar but much much much smaller incidents where I felt like a bunch of tumblrites were objectifying me, leading me to retreat to DW for reasons because of the attention my blog was suddenly receiving from a small handful of people who collectively set off my "we're looking for a subject we can point to" warning bell.

but to make them look at what was being written about them and engage with what they reblogged

This. Which is why I try to be very careful about only giving out nebulous information about myself on tumblr so people who play this game are less able to invoke me as their token example and then have me swoop in to give them a cookie and a pat on the back.

Everything you said makes me livid when it happens because the person who is doing the speaking always appears to be someone who has far less to loose and far less to risk. Meanwhile, the people who have been singled out are now forced to provide a lived experience expert statement on The Issue.

Over the past few weeks a few people on tumblr (in academia) singled me out to perform like a museum tour guide and, nope. Just nope. I don't know why or what they will do (reblog? reblog with their own commentary?) and none would give me clear answers when I inquired.

[zen_monk]

I didn't want to name names because it could be a different but similar incident, and that this might skirt onto gossiping best left to private messages. But to follow on it, I'm also wary of how much I share, and how i present myself, due to not wanting to be tokenized or somehow be associated with someone and be spoken for too casually.

Everything you said makes me livid when it happens because the person who is doing the speaking always appears to be someone who has far less to loose and far less to risk. Meanwhile, the people who have been singled out are now forced to provide a lived experience expert statement on The Issue

Speaking of, there's also people who are like "Oh yes, your experiences are also my experiences... except mine is very different and of a different lived experience or focus, but I also suffer a thing ." And thus they will.... speak on a thing but using a very different example to tack onto it, as though this is what might be intersectional. Like turning a particular into a generality, or drawing similar lines when sometimes things can't be spoken for across all the lines, if that makes sense.

[sarasa_cat]

Indeed, no public gossip. Oh no.

As we have both said, this sort of thing happens often all the time and is a common pattern rather than some random occurrence on tumblr that any one person should be singled out for.

Whenever I see these sorts of things happen, I feel for all of the parties involved. When a person feels just empowered enough by their position in society and they want to help other people similar to them see a problem that their sociocultural group is mostly blind to, helping other people expand their awareness is a good thing. The problem we're talking about only occurs when Person A mistakenly assumes that the people they are naming are willing to represent the specific identities that Person A names those people as.

It is less of a problem when Person A names someone who has publicly presented themselves as someone who normally speaks as a representative of Identity X, although misrepresentation can still occur when alternative representations of Identity X are left out of the discussion or when the person named as a representative of Identity X holds views that many other people of Identity X disagree with.

Sigh… :\

"Oh yes, your experiences are also my experiences... except mine is very different and of a different lived experience or focus, but I also suffer a thing ." And thus they will.... speak on a thing but using a very different example to tack onto it, as though this is what might be intersectional. ...

*nods*

I've watched personal statements from tumblrites and interesting quotes from public figures (authors, activists, etc.) show up on someone's tumblr blog and then, after a few reblogs, people have tacked on extra comments or specific tags that remove half of the meaning of the original quote or, worse, changed the meaning of the original statement to become something else while erasing what the OP was actually calling attention to.

For some reason, various feminist issues are the ones that come to mind and the specific incidents that have stuck with me the most over recent years always involve the giant chasm of misunderstanding between sex positive feminism versus any woman or group of women who are viewed as the Sexual Other: sexually fetishized, sexually available for men's pleasure, meek-and-passive-therefore-conquerable, sexually harassed and targeted because of their ethnicity or sexuality, etc.

During all of my years in fandom, I have seen some interesting (and, frankly, comforting) fan works (fiction, art, tiny bits of meta attached to screencaps) that have called attention to what this unpleasant/unsafe experience is like for people who are sexually othered and … uugghh … I become *very* VERY uncomfortable when these works suddenly receive comments or reblog commentary in the tags that not only mis the point but blindly reinforce the problem because the comment says "SDKLJSAKLDJALKJD. THIS IS SO HOT! MOAR PLZ MOAR" or "aw… so cute <3" That is when my skin starts crawling and I recoil with a big nonononnonononnonononononoNOPE NOPE NOPE. DON'T. And then the OP is left feeling unsafe and, behind the scenes, away from the Big Public Fandom Monster, the OP and others who understand privately exchange words of support.

I have had some disagreements with genre romance writers ranging from fanfic writers to well known published authors over the lack of intersectionality in sex positive feminism. The most recent disagreement was with a published romance fiction author who semi-recently tweeted about how romance fiction caters to women's fantasies thus, any woman who disagrees with this and criticizes (american) genre romance isn't a feminist because they are upholding the patriarchy. Well, gee thanks Ms. Romance Author for upholding colonialism and for ignoring the realities of lgbtqa+ people with female bodies. >:|

Uh… one of these days I need to write an essay on why I don't read m/f romance fiction written by sex positive feminists who do not understand intersectional issues around sexuality. I am not joking when I say that someone once filled a prompt of mine with what they thought was HOT HOT HOT EROTICA except the story literally terrorized me.

[zen_monk]

What is interesting about Tumblr interaction, and I'll give some users that, is that it's very interesting level of textual poaching where we, as generators and sharers of information and knowledge, can be molded and re-molded into someone else's interpretation. And when it does it well, it does it well, but I think that it does so because the person is aware of not only their watchers but are also mindful of the level of privacy and interaction. So it's not this mentality of like "I agree with this vague post and i will discuss it in my own words as though I happen to come across and not from making it an inadvertent response to the person sharing and reblogging it." It's always the chance encounter that OP might see it however many notes would happen, or knowing from experience what might happen if getting a reply.

And I think that's successful because of being careful in forming a community out of this nebulous space. Or at least on their wavelength. It's a careful maintenance in protecting whatever boundary one has that they can still utilize.

And man don't I feel it over people who alienate a lot of people from Identity X. I mean, everyone has different experiences and it adds to the multiplicity of identities within X. But then along comes someone saying "I am identity X, and here is what I think why it doesn't exist like this and that here's what I think it actually is." And then an added spice of "And here's where i can believe Identity X to be true always to men because of this narrow criteria, but that when it comes to women being as such, I can't help but wonder what kind of other external circumstances which strays away from the definition of the identity and might be something else."

The greatness of logic, where when applied causes one to rationalize away problematic things within that logic and digging deeper into another hole, rather than unearthing something.

What also really gets me up the wall was when people attempt headcanons or discussion involving analogous cultures and ended up enforcing even more Eurocentric values and affirming more orientalist beliefs whether willfully or not. I see this even in fictitious humanoids such as the Qunari where suddenly everyone is an expert in political concepts and declaring something must be Communist because it is just like X. Doesn't help that WOG had likened it to a very precariously worded identity.

Man, isn't it something that some sex positive feminist talks say the darndest things about gender and MOGAI identities. Especially when it still focuses on cis-men as an instigator for women's pleasures or personal objectification as though turning the gender around for focus is automatically subversive and time to dust off the hands since the work is done already.