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schemingreader (![[info]](http://www.journalfen.net/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} schemingreader) wrote,@ 2007-09-09 01:42:00 |
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sin and fandom
Aha! See, now you are thinking this is going to be about sex.
Sorry. It's really about speech ethics.
I went to Slichot services tonight. That's the nighttime service before Rosh HaShanah (Jewish New Year) to get into a repentance kind of mood. At my hippie dippie Jewish community, we have a habit of listing our sins on paper and then submerging them in water. They're supposed to float off, but they never do.
I was late for the service, which has moving liturgy, because I had to argue with my husband about housecleaning before his mother comes to visit us for Rosh HaShanah.
Okay.
So I'm thinking about what my major sins are, and how they fit in with what I do all day. Checking my LJ compulsively is a problem--I do it because I'm avoiding something that makes me anxious, usually. A desire to avoid confrontation with people at work makes me avoid certain tasks, because I know that I'll need to pin people down about things they don't want to tell me, or to confront problems. You, my lovely flist, have been the beneficiaries of this anxiety. Lucky you! Me--I'm not so lucky. I'm not really this lazy! I need to be able to just do things without worrying so damn much.
The other thing is, fandom culture is based on community building and--talking about people behind their backs. This is a huge problem for me in my real life, to the extent that I've been considering keeping a book about forbidden speech by my phone. On the one hand, I've read all kinds of feminist analysis of how talking about people with others helps people resolve problems in their relationships, making people feel better about bad situations, working out emotional bullshit.
It's also true that both in fandom and at my job, if I don't pay attention to gossip, I wind up stepping into big emotional minefields.
Still, I have to resist the pull to talk about people instead of talking to them. That's where the two pieces come together. I think it's a piece about the culture of fannish chatting and commenting that hooks into my own bad tendencies.
The internet duplicates the sense of being in a little village (or a small non-profit, academic department, staff of a bookstore, whatever.) The only difference is that we don't actually see each other. Every parenting discussion board, community of fans, knitting discussion list, what have you, is basically a small group culled from a very big world. So we simultaneously have all the dynamics of a small tightly knit group AND the added difficulties of not communicating in person most of the time and not sharing cultural expectations. (That's true even where people all speak English as their first language, and I often find that I share more cultural expectations with people who speak English as a second language than I do with folks from another region of my own country.)
So a lot of pull to gossip: a lot of need for relationship building, a lot of misunderstandings to sort out, steam to blow off, that sort of thing.
I'm not making excuses--I'm just saying that it's going to be hard to keep getting the good from the personal interactions without talking about other people in a negative way.
Aha! See, now you are thinking this is going to be about sex.
Sorry. It's really about speech ethics.
I went to Slichot services tonight. That's the nighttime service before Rosh HaShanah (Jewish New Year) to get into a repentance kind of mood. At my hippie dippie Jewish community, we have a habit of listing our sins on paper and then submerging them in water. They're supposed to float off, but they never do.
I was late for the service, which has moving liturgy, because I had to argue with my husband about housecleaning before his mother comes to visit us for Rosh HaShanah.
Okay.
So I'm thinking about what my major sins are, and how they fit in with what I do all day. Checking my LJ compulsively is a problem--I do it because I'm avoiding something that makes me anxious, usually. A desire to avoid confrontation with people at work makes me avoid certain tasks, because I know that I'll need to pin people down about things they don't want to tell me, or to confront problems. You, my lovely flist, have been the beneficiaries of this anxiety. Lucky you! Me--I'm not so lucky. I'm not really this lazy! I need to be able to just do things without worrying so damn much.
The other thing is, fandom culture is based on community building and--talking about people behind their backs. This is a huge problem for me in my real life, to the extent that I've been considering keeping a book about forbidden speech by my phone. On the one hand, I've read all kinds of feminist analysis of how talking about people with others helps people resolve problems in their relationships, making people feel better about bad situations, working out emotional bullshit.
It's also true that both in fandom and at my job, if I don't pay attention to gossip, I wind up stepping into big emotional minefields.
Still, I have to resist the pull to talk about people instead of talking to them. That's where the two pieces come together. I think it's a piece about the culture of fannish chatting and commenting that hooks into my own bad tendencies.
The internet duplicates the sense of being in a little village (or a small non-profit, academic department, staff of a bookstore, whatever.) The only difference is that we don't actually see each other. Every parenting discussion board, community of fans, knitting discussion list, what have you, is basically a small group culled from a very big world. So we simultaneously have all the dynamics of a small tightly knit group AND the added difficulties of not communicating in person most of the time and not sharing cultural expectations. (That's true even where people all speak English as their first language, and I often find that I share more cultural expectations with people who speak English as a second language than I do with folks from another region of my own country.)
So a lot of pull to gossip: a lot of need for relationship building, a lot of misunderstandings to sort out, steam to blow off, that sort of thing.
I'm not making excuses--I'm just saying that it's going to be hard to keep getting the good from the personal interactions without talking about other people in a negative way.
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