Thoughts or witterings. Not sure which.

[truepenny]

bonibaru has wise and interesting things to say about fame and online friendships. She's writing in a fannish context, but I have to say I think it applies across the board. If you're doing ANYTHING for the fame/money/prestige/coolness factor, you are doing it for the wrong reasons and should not be surprised if it does not bring you joy. This applies to pro writers as much as to fans. Even if you've set your sights on being a pro (as, for example, I have), if you're doing it solely because of the money, then it's likely that (a) your work is going to blow dead bears, (b) you're going to be sadly disappointed as riches fail to tumble into your lap (writing is SO not the way to become fabulously wealthy), and (c) it is not going to bring you anything EXCEPT money, i.e., no joy, no self-love, no nothing. I do love myself when I'm writing, not in a Gilderoy Lockhart aren't-I-WONDERFUL fashion, but because I'm WRITING and it feels like the right thing to be doing. Always.

You reap what you sow, in creative endeavors as much as in friendship. If you put yourself into it, you get yourself back.

Which feels really profound, but I'm afraid may merely be lack of sleep. And the head cold.

Comments

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I entirely agree with what you're saying about doing things for fame (to the extent that I think "People do things for fame? Gosh, aren't people weird..."), but I disagree with what she's saying about online friendships -- or at least, it makes me think she must be amazingly shallow if that's her experience. My online friendships have been a joy to me and a comfort in dark places for the last eight years. I think treating them as unreal is probably exactly the way to make them shallow and insubstantial. You meet people who care about the same things you care about, that's a good basis for building a friendship.

I met Rysmiel on rec.arts.sf.written, after all, and that's just one example.

I don't know anything about the fanfic community, maybe what she's saying is more the case within that.

[heresluck]

You meet people who care about the same things you care about, that's a good basis for building a friendship.

Hmm. This seems to me to be exactly her point, though, which (as I understand it) is that online fan-based "friendship" can be the basis for a more durable friendship, but that development is neither automatic nor instantaneous. The deeper friendship has to be built; one can't simply assume it's there.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

My reading of what she said is NOT that online friendships aren't real, but that you can get in a great deal of trouble by assuming that someone is a friend because you agree about this one particular thing entirely isolated from RL context.

And online friendships ARE weird. I'm not saying they're not real, just that they're weird. It's a forum of human interaction that I think we (as a species) haven't worked all the kinks out of yet. I remember talking about this with you at Worldcon, and it's something I still feel, that the personae we (generalized "we") make entirely out of words are not exactly who we are face-to-face. And it still makes me nervous. I find LJ less threatening that usenet, because it doesn't require bulling one's way into an ongoing conversation and a community which has its own dynamic and history, but it's still ... weird.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

But why would anyone?

If that's what she's saying, well, duh, strangers who share your interests are not automatically your friends. But who would imagine they were?

As I said, I'm not familiar with the specific situation she's writing about, but I find no analogy to this whatsoever in any of the online places I'm familiar with. People make friends, friends don't just happen. Which is exactly like anywhere, really, and like anyone over the age of maybe six would expect.

I think there are in fact all sorts of interesting weirdnesses about meeting people online, but none of them are covered by anything she said.

I thought truepenny's points were interesting, which is why I went to see what she was jumping off, and I am clearly missing something.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Which is true of all friendships. It's just that relationships begun and conducted online are very much hot-house flowers, sheltered from any number of RL factors which both parties edit out (consciously or un-), not out of malice but because that's the nature of the beast. But friendship takes time, and one of the things about online interactions is that that kind of time-sense gets thrown completely out of whack. (I am so not going to be able to explain what I mean by that. Argh.) Which, again, is not to say that it can't or doesn't happen, just that there are chimeras to beware of.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Because some people are deeply stupid?

I think the problem is perhaps that you and Bonibaru are actually espousing the same viewpoint; she's saying DON'T assume that people who share your online interests are necessarily your friends. And she has to say this (yes, this is all making sense now) because the fora in which she hangs out ("out in which she hangs"? Get thee behind me, Churchill!) have a higher incidence than rasseff and rasfw of, um, (*searches frantically for a polite phrasing*) people who are dumb enough not to make that distinction and get their feelings hurt when someone they've been counting unwarrantedly as a "friend" reminds them that in fact they are no such thing. And then there is tedious Unpleasantness.

[pameladean]

I think that that "we" is not universal; or perhaps, rather, that the nature of the "not exactly the same" differs. Like Papersky, I have met online someone whom I now live with and someone whom I'd like to live with; I fell in love with one of them in email weeks before we met at all. I don't feel when I am communicating in this venue that I am constructing a persona.

Indeed, I feel much more that way face to face; it's in face-to-face interactions that I must struggle to actually present myself whole; it's in face-to-face interactions that I feel handicapped and that the possibility of lying or constructing things with a slant is most dangerous. I suppose I could do such things online, but I find it much harder to lie or omit in writing than otherwise.

I'm sure people are everywhere along that spectrum; some find both venues pretty much the same, some find it easier to be themselves in one, and some in the other.

Pamela

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Well, weird yes, and I do know what you mean about time. A lot of the people I interact with online, including here, are people I have known online for years, which does a lot to mitigate that kind of thing.

Some of the weirdness is what gets left out, I think, the things not said, into which the wrong things can be read.

I'm more likely to think someone I don't know is my friend because we're disagreed amicably about a lot of stuff over a long time, but maybe I'm weird, maybe everyone else does this thing that seems to me so axiomatically idiotic.

I think there's a weird thing about equality as well, when people percieve that differently and you can't tell. I think that works better on usenet than here, actually, because on usenet you get sfik for what you say, and here there's much more deference for what (people imagine) you are. You see bulling your way in, I see conversations. But then I start off from a position of being quite sure I'm invisible and insignificant, which helps sometimes.

I'm really glad I'm not actually famous, I'd hate it. I think PNH has a quote on Electrolite from Master and Commander about the pressure of captain's cabin conversation which gets that end of it very nicely.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Okay, yes, fair and necessary corrective.

My personal experience, from which I should NOT generalize to the rest of the world, is that online interactions are superficially easy but can become deeply and unpleasantly fraught in the blink of an eye, merely because text on screen does not convey tone of voice or a smile or even a dead-pan joke. It's so terribly easy to be misread online. (Also, to be fair, most of my online experience, pre-LJ, is from usenet in the early 90s, when I was NOT at my personal best. The burnt child, as Bertie Wooster says, fears the spilt milk.)

I know that this is not true for other people, that in fact I've got it ass-backwards from a great many other people who are, like me, introverts, geeks, readers, writers. So I'm sorry for trying to impose my rubric on other people's experience. Bad form.

(Memo to self: Every time you over-generalize, you get called on it. Cut it the fuck out.)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Or, you know, perhaps I'm just making shit up, and that's not what Bonibaru means at all. I have no right to put words in her mouth. Bonibaru, if you read this, I apologize.

[heresluck]

But why would anyone?

I'm with truepenny; some people are stupid. We don't do make these assumptions, bonibaru doesn't, but apparently some folks do.

I'm wondering, now, whether one's fandom factors into this; that is, folks whose fannish preoccupations are TV-oriented might be at a disadvantage because shows come and go (and evolve and devolve) and our specific fannish interests change accordingly...? I wouldn't think that this would be so much an issue for people whose basis of interaction is an entire written genre (or even fairly specific subsets of that genre).

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Rysmiel and I call being able to present better in writing than in person: "text, my native language" and "looking more like yourself written down".

There are ways in which I am more like myself in writing than I can possibly be in person. Things get left out either way, but they are different things.

One of the things that often gets left out of me in person is how vehement I am. I don't look vehement, I look fat and placid, and I smile, and people under-rate the degree to which I actually care about things, except maybe in conversations in the middle of the night. I tend to be more diffident in body language.

Also, text gives you time to think and revise and that might let some people decieve, but it lets me be straight about what I actually think without appeasement.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

You see bulling your way in, I see conversations. But then I start off from a position of being quite sure I'm invisible and insignificant, which helps sometimes.

I think, really, my problem is that it gives me heinous flashbacks to my childhood. I was NOT a popular child, and the cliques in my various schools went out of their way to be sure I knew it. I didn't even get to be insignificant a lot of the time. So for me, opening my mouth on a usenet group is like trying to talk to someone on the playground, and the natural usenet response of tolerant suspicion for newcomers (because a newcomer may be for real, or they really really may not) reads to my inner child like rejection, like getting smacked down (again) for being stupid enough to think that what I had to say was important to anybody. I know perfectly well that that's not what's going on, but it's still how it FEELS. Thus my continued absence from usenet, because I don't feel like inflicting that on anybody, myself included. LJ, weirdly, does not trigger that response, or perhaps I'm simply handling the idea that not everyone in the world likes me better than I used to. Dunno.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Oh well, we may not have you there but at least we're fortunate enough to have you here.

I don't know why I'm saying "we", slrn has been misbehaving such that I've had no usenet since last week.

[pameladean]

There, there, it's a natural human activity. (Over-generalizing, that is.) I do it myself. I've gotten sensitized to it from so much hanging around online with aspiring writers who have read the wrong kinds of advice.

Pamela

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

I'm more likely to think someone I don't know is my friend because we're disagreed amicably about a lot of stuff over a long time, but maybe I'm weird, maybe everyone else does this thing that seems to me so axiomatically idiotic.

I think many people do this. I do, anyway, and have seen others do so. But where Bonibaru is coming from, I think, is a very different section of the online world: a fanfic area that's mostly been developed in mailing lists and bulletin boards much smaller than Usenet, and lately moved to lj. That fanfic world is predicated on consensus and ... not exactly courtesy but *niceness* to an extent that is really quite startling and not always realistic. (So a lot of people who have a hard time with that end up going to the other extreme, and take disagreement as call to be appallingly rude. It's hard to explain, but it's so predominantly female, I think it's based on notions of feminine interaction to a degree I've never seen elsewhere, and this can be good in some ways and bad in others. The bad ones seem to bring up everyone's worst memories of elementary school and high school. Or mine, anyway.)

It is, in any case, very different from Usenet. I often wish I could throw people who misbehave on the mailing lists into Usenet, sort of like throwing a sullen teenager into a pit of lions. But not as often as I'd like to see a real sociological study of the mores of different online communities, and how technology has affected the particular rules of courtesy.