Dreamer Easy

The Cowards Who Spread Bile Into Fandom: rage against an anonymous online forum dedicated to personal attacks on the people behind the scenes of Stargate: Universe.

Given his feminist cred, I wonder if Neil Gaiman remarking that "George R. R. Martin is not your bitch" can be read not as a misogynist slip, but a use of the culture's current popular metaphor for exploitation and abuse. In which case, the insult is not directed at the targets of abuse, but at the abusers, with the sense of "stop treating other people like your personal property". It's not a metaphor I'd use myself, and it's right to point out its ugly connotations. But just how useful is it to pillory a long-standing feminist ally on the basis of a single remark? How about (and has this expression has ever been more apposite?) playing the ball instead of the man?

In the grip of mid insomnia around 3 am, I listened to a short talk on the Buddhist idea of Right Speech. As someone with a history of wading into arguments with a sword swinging around her head, and someone who sees all the damage done by teh net.stupid, I'm becoming convinced that Right Speech is the only hope for text-based online communication.

Importantly, the talk wasn't about morality - about judging our own speech and others' speech and how well it conforms to some standard of correctness. If that was the emphasis, it would really be no different from the how-very-dare-you oneupmanship of current online conflict. Rather, it was about using speech skilfully, about recognising the effects of speech - for example, avoiding lying because of the terrific damage this could cause to ourselves and others - and about using speech to connect rather than to separate and alienate.

The talk identified four kinds of speech that tend to drive people apart rather than bringing them together: lying, malicious speech, gossip, and harsh speech (IIUC the latter is upsetting without necessarily being intended to be). It's the work of minutes to find examples of each of these online.

Teh net.stupid is not stupidity or malice, but negligence, the result of quick, shallow reading and posting. The impact of a careless word can be hugely magnified by the Intersplat - how serious it seems, how many people it reaches. An awful lot of online untruths are not deliberate deception, but strawmen created by carelessness: it doesn't take much to distort a debatable statement into an outrageous one, especially with the help of Internet maths. A debatable statement invites, well, debate; but someone who's made an outrageous statement is beyond the pale, fair game for gossip and malice.

So spending more time and thought on reading and posting is one key; and I think that idea of trying to speak in ways which connect people rather than driving them apart may be another. This may mean putting down our righteousness, our indignation, and our need to reassure ourselves that we're good and worthy by attacking others as bad and worthless.

(Ultimately this comes back to grace, the complement to reciprocity. I need to make a proper posting about both concepts. But if you want a bald example of grace, check out the end of The Doctor's Daughter, where the Doctor is justly entitled to take something and doesn't.)

Last bunch of notes, ISTG.

( Read more... )

Last bit from Cyberbullying and Cyberthreats.

( The Invisible Fan )

Someone reserved Cyberbullying and Cyberthreats by Nancy E. Willard, which means I have to take it back next week, so I'm going to take some brief notes from it. It doesn't add a whole lot to what I've already said, just reinforces and clarifies some of it.

( Some more on cyberbullying )

I started these postings with these questions: "Right - my experience of fanbullying. How is it like, and how is it unlike, my experience of bullying in school? How is it like, and how is it unlike, cyberbullying and bullying in general?" I think I can now answer them.

The most important factor in comparing these four things is the level of control the victim has. At school, I had no control. With cyberbullying, I have a lot of control over harassment - in fact, I am seldom harassed - but feel completely powerless in the face of malicious gossip.

At school, I was largely unaware of the infrastructure that supported the constant harassment. Only occasionally would some remark make me realise that the bullying was going on out of my hearing as well. My tormentors were sharing malicious gossip about me (and, I'm sure, plenty of others). For them, the rumours and lies acted as social glue. When two people bitch about a third, it brings those two people closer together.

Malicious gossip is also a crucial component of cyberbullying. It not only supports harassment, but it can directly be bullying itself: Web sites set up so that everyone can share their hate of an individual who cannot stop them or defend themselves; anonymous gossip sites where anything goes, however vicious.

Ring any bells?

In school, I would have been perfectly happy for the gossip and rumours to go on in the background without my ever knowing about them. Online, perhaps because I can avoid or stop direct harassment, it's the more indirect bullying that concerns me.

If you get into fights, the way I tend to, you have to take your lumps. If I piss someone off and they grouch about me a bit, that's one thing. But fanbullying is not fighting. In a fight, you can see your opponent, and you can land blows too. Robbed of the ability to directly harass, this is how fanbullies operate: through indirect, repeated attacks on those who are powerless to resist, with the intention of causing distress.

You can prevent people grouching about you by avoiding fights. But you cannot prevent bullying through your own behaviour. If you haven't done or said something outrageous, something you have done or said can easily be distorted. At a pinch, hey, we'll just make something up. This was true in high school, and it's true online. You could, of course, constantly search for these attacks (I used to) and counter them with the facts. This misses the point that the facts are irrelevant. Trust me - even in a face to face fight, you'll end up spending all your time defending yourself against personal abuse, instead of actually discussing the subject. Besides, people sometimes believe gossip even when it contradicts the evidence of their own eyes. (In any case, you can't respond in fandom_wank unless you already have a JournalFen account... and those are "temporarily" unavailable.)

Bullying, of any kind, is not about the victim. We are not responsible for stopping it, and we cannot stop it. That's not to say that there aren't things we can do to protect ourselves - nor that nothing can be done about fanbullying. The first step, IMHO, is to call it what it is. Like all bullying, fanbullying is harmful and wrong. It is the bully's fault, not the victim's. Fandom should not accept it. Fans who engage in it should be ashamed of it and stop doing it.

All this has made me examine some of my own behaviour, of course. I'm satisfied that I don't engage in behaviours which meet the definition of bullying I've given here. Which is not to say that I can't improve my interactions online through more skilful speech. Not that this will make any difference to the bullies... but it may mean less grouching. :-)

Knackered now. I'll try not to post anything further on the subject for, say, a week. Thanks for listening.

Right - my experience of fanbullying. How is it like, and how is it unlike, my experience of bullying in school? How is it like, and how is it unlike, cyberbullying and bullying in general?

First, let me talk about high school.

The bullying I experienced at school was mostly harassment. It was unpredictable and continual. There was no moment of the school day, nor between school and home, when I could be sure I would not be bullied. Every aspect of my life was under constant surveillance - everything I wore, said, or did was subject to attack.

It took the form of verbal abuse. Physical violence or threats were rare. The bullies were almost always girls. I responded by trying to ignore it. In six years, this never, never worked.

I was socially excluded, of course, but in my case, this wasn't damaging. I preferred to be left alone. (Last year, someone actually flaunted their sekrit LJ comm in front of me, like little boys putting up a NO GURLS sign on their treehouse. I wasn't hurt - just gobsmacked.)

I am, as you can tell, deeply scarred by these experiences. My parents did their best to support me (my brothers, too, who were facing their own bullies); no blame attaches to them. Instead, it's the teachers, schools, and the bullies' parents, as well as the bullies themselves, who are to blame.

To me, the most obvious legacy of the school bullying is rage. When my shrink asked me how I felt about it, I was barely able to articulate the amount of anger I'm still carrying. That anger is based on a profound sense of injustice. The bullying was unfair on every level, from the unfair things said to me or about me, to the fact that the bullies were never punished.

btw, you may have heard Helen Razer talk about her terrible experiences of bullying in high school... my high school. From her accounts, she had it ten times worse than I ever did.

(Thanks for listening, peeps. As you can tell, it helps me enormously to articulate this stuff.)

Wait, just -

just wait a -

Just wait a cotton-picking minute.

The Who anon meme. fandom_wank. And similar sites where you can personally attack another fan with the protection of anonymity and without consequences (and, often, where they have no way to defend themselves).

Are they cyberbullying?

I was bullied relentlessly through high school, but it always took the form of harassment; the cyberbullying equivalent would be abusive texts, emails, etc. But watching the anti-cyberbullying PSA that angriest just embedded, it struck me that if some twat scribbled a bunch of rumours or abuse about someone on the toilet wall, and all her little mates added something, they'd be doing basically the same thing as those comms do.

I don't want to overstate the parallel. Cyberbullies sometimes set up Web sites which target specific individuals, but that's not exactly the same. The term "cyberbullying" is usually reserved for minors harassing other minors. I can largely (though never totally) avoid the abuse by simply avoiding the comms in question.

Nonetheless, the parallel is extremely disturbing. I thought I had long ago left behind the nightmare that was high school. But I'm a tough old bird now - there must be younger fans who are far more vulnerable to this shit.