Archive
Done, done and done!
My paper is finished and can be found here. I’ve spent the last couple of days tweaking it, and I’m happy. Steve, feel free to review it whenever you’re ready.
Ouch! Head hurt!
I found some of the material I was looking for in regard to my research paper, and right smack dab in the middle of it was reference to another situation in which the principle players are friends of mine. It’s weird when fandom collides with real life in unexpected ways.
Ack!
I’m starting to panic a little over my paper — how to start, how to convey what I know, how to, how to, how to and so on. I know what needs to be said, but I’m suffering a loss of confidence in my ability to say it.
God, I hate stage fright.
Nothing new for the paper…or maybe it is
I wanted to record an incident that is fairly revealing of fandom in general, even though this tidbit won’t make it into the paper. Fen can get fairly clannish: there’s the Supernatural Clan, the Star Trek: X Clan, the Buffy: The Vampire Slayer Clan, etc. Within the safety of the clan, people post requests for beta readers (test readers/editors, depending on how serious the writer wants their beta to get), post fic or fan art, post recommendations, and post stories about the actors who portray their favorite characters.
This last piece — stories about the actors — can be taken a couple of different ways. The first is that fen discuss actor sightings at cons, what projects the actor is working on and what’s happening in the actor’s personal life (girlfriends, boyfriends, etc.). The second is that fen will write fiction about the actor(s), and this type of work is called real people fiction (RPF) or real people slash (RPS), depending on the content of the story. Fen know perfectly well that these stories aren’t about the actor so much as they’re about the persona the actor projects during public appearances (in a way, the actor plays a character that has their name and appearance and that has little to do with their personal life). RPF has a long history, as evidenced by Gorgias and Phaedrus, and the only time it might get a little hinky is when the fan writes RPS with explicit erotic content.
Even so, this type of writing is done within the safety of the clan. There is zero expectation of the actors finding the RPF/RPS or fan fiction, and when a person violates that expectation by sending the URL of another fan’s story to an actor, the reaction is almost universally negative against the person who sent the URL. In other words, it’s okay for fen to look at the actors and the show, but it’s not okay for the actors to look back. There have been a few exceptions to this rule, but they only occur when the actor stumbles across the fic on their own, as when Eli Roth discovered fan fiction and dove in headfirst, much to fandom’s delight.
Misha Collins, who joined the cast of Supernatural as a regular this season, is another exception to the rule. As one fan put it, “Misha looked into the dark heart of fandom and said, ‘Hm. That’s interesting.'” Misha has a devoted following on Twitter (I think he’s planning on taking over the world, but as pretty as he is, I really don’t want to be one of his minions, so I haven’t been paying attention), and within the constraints of Twitter interaction, it’s fine that he recognizes various fen.
Outside of Twitter is another story entirely. Yesterday or Friday (I don’t know the full story), Misha was at a Supernatural con and happened to mention a fan by name, specifically referencing her LiveJournal. The fan in question became very upset and locked down her journal as soon as she could get to a computer. He was apparently very sorry that he upset her so much and in an effort to reestablish the expected boundaries, he promised that he wasn’t actually reading her journal or even searching out fanfiction.
The story is interesting to me in the way that it highlights fandom’s relationship with celebrities (we look at them) and what happens when that relationship is turned around (they look at us). Supernatural in particular has been breaking that fourth wall since last season’s “Monster at the End of the Book,” when it was revealed that a prophet had been publishing the two main characters’ life story as a series of novels and that the books had a decent fan base.
In a way, Supernatural shining a light on fandom is parallel to the way fandom shone a light on Ogas and Gaddam. They, like fandom, expected to be able to look at their subjects of interest without the subjects of interest really looking back. Unfortunately for them, not only did fandom look back, it looked back with a vengeance, producing tentacle porn and RPS (with Ogas and Gaddam as the starring characters) in response to the researchers’ complete inability to see that they had failed in their primary responsibility to ensure their research subjects were protected.
Supernatural has responded to fandom in a similar fashion (not quite as viciously, though there may be fen who disagree with me), playing with fanon much the way fen play with canon.
Grr. Argh.
I know Bitzer is the BSD of rhetoric, but he makes me a little nuts. He strives for an objective definition of rhetorical situation and then he throws in a loaded word like “positive:”
A rhetorical situation may be defined as a complex of persons, events, objects, and relations which presents an exigence that can be completely or partially removed if discourse — introduced into the situation — can influence audience thought or action so as to bring about positive modification of the exigence. [Bitzer, Lloyd F. “Functional Communication: A Situational Perspective,” The Nature of Rhetoric, ed. Eugene E. White. (University Park and London: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1980) 24. Emphasis mine.]
He had me right up until he used “positive,” because at that point, I had to ask, “Positive by whose definition?” The word is entirely subjective and entirely dependent on one’s point of view. Rush Limbaugh regards as a positive modification of his exigence the failure of President Obama. I regard that as a negative modification, and my father disagrees with me.
Rhetoric is rhetoric is rhetoric. If done well, it fulfills the rhetor’s purpose of persuasion, whether or not that persuasion is seen as good or bad. People give meaning to exigence and situation based on what various rhetors say, not based on some inherent “good” or “evil.” And really, Plato put paid to that notion 2,500 years ago in Gorgias when he described the pilot of the ship getting people safely to shore. Sure, on the face of it, he did a good thing, but what if one of the passengers was suffering a wasting illness and would have been better off dead? Or how about if one of the passengers was traveling specifically to commit an act of violence against someone else? It’s impossible to assign a value of “good” under those circumstances, so best not to assign any subjective description. Instead, just say the pilot got all of his passengers safely to shore. That way, the individual can determine if it’s a good thing or not.
Anyway, I thought I might be able to use the essay quoted above, but now, I’m thinking not so much. I’m better off looking at Edbauer-Rice and rhetorical ecology for my paper, with perhaps a word or two from Robert L. Scott’s essay, “Intentionality in the Rhetorical Process” (same book as above).
Quotes from Syverson
I’m not sure if I’ll even use the quotes below, but they do seem to describe rather well the the framework of the situation Ogas and Gaddam first presented and that fandom generally ended. Certainly, the idea of rhetorical ecology makes far more sense than trying to cram an analysis of the situation into an Aristotelian model of ethos-pathos-logos. The concepts themselves play a role, but in the case of Surveyfail, audience reaction was so widespread that trying to suggest this event was situated is pointless beyond saying it took place on the Web.
(Saying that anything “took place on the Web” is incredibly problematic, since the Web doesn’t have a physical space beyond the fact that it comprises thousands of servers, and there’s no telling which server is playing host to a particular commentary at any point in time. Easier to describe it as a town hall meeting but without the town, the hall or even the meeting. Oh, existentialism — you make my head hurt.)
Syverson, Magaret A. The Wealth of Reality: An Ecology of Composition. Southern Illinois Unversity Press: Carbondale, 1999. Electronic text.
Page 22:
This more complex sense of the historical dimensions of an activity has a direct application to the writing situation, in which relationships among writers, readers, and texts unfold over distinct historical trajectories in a landscape of historical relations—the emergence and reception of genres, styles, and topics; the politics of race, gender, and class; economic cycles; cultural trends; life cycles of writers and readers; particular writing tasks or reading episodes.
Page 23:
Further, each of the properties can be deployed across all four attributes. For example, the social dimensions of composition are distributed, embodied, emergent, and enactive (see fig. 1).
|
|
|
|
|
||||||
| Distribution | ||||||||||
| Embodiment | ||||||||||
| Emergence | ||||||||||
| Enaction | ||||||||||
|
||||||||||
Page 25:
| It seems that composition researchers, even those working with collaborative composing, are still constrained by some common cultural assumptions about mind, language, and society. Central to these assumptions is the idea of cognition as uniquely the property of individuals, as computational activity of the brain. Second is the assumption that language represents thought, which somehow precedes it. Third is the assumption that a group can be treated simply as a gathering of individuals, who make individual plans, decisions, contributions, and “moves” in enacting the group process. Fourth is the assumption that text composing can somehow be isolated from the physical and material conditions of its production and use. |
Define:slash
One of the things I need to do within the paper is define slash, primarily because that was the reason for Ogas and Gaddam to approach fandom in the first place. The problem is that fandom itself hasn’t really come to consensus on how to define slash.
The first use of the term came about within the original Trek fandom and referred specifically to the punctuation mark set between character names to show a romantic pairing: Spock/Nurse Chapel. I think from that point on, it started to refer more to non-canonical romantic pairings (Uhuru/Spock) and then more specifically to non-canonical male/male romantic pairings (Kirk/Spock). Or possibly I have the sequence reversed. I’m not convinced the history of the term is necessary for the development of the paper, so I’m not going to get into it.
Broadly speaking, these days slash generally refers to non-canonical same sex pairings (McKay/Sheppard in SGA, Spike/Xander in Buffy, Catherine/Sarah in CSI) but not to canonical same sex pairings (Angel/Spike in Angel, Tara/Willow in Buffy). But there’s a school of thought that says slash can also refer to non-canonical heterosexual pairings if one of the characters goes against his or her own sexual orientation for the sake of the pairing (Tara/Giles in Buffy). And then there’s the school of thought that suggests slash can refer to any non-canonical romantic pairing (or threesome, foursome or moresome — fandom doesn’t discriminate against polyamory).
What each of these definitions has in common is the fic writer’s development of a non-canonical romantic (and usually erotic) relationship between characters. For the purpose of this paper and because Ogas and Gaddam focused on it, I’m going to define slash as: A story featuring a non-canonical romantic pairing between two characters of the same gender, with male/male pairings being the predominant expression of the genre.
Good call
Steve suggested The Ethics of Internet Research by Heidi McKee and James Porter as a possible resource, and it was a good call. One of the issues fandom in general had with Ogas and Gaddam was their repeated insistence that they didn’t need to get to know fandom before asking questions of it. This is in direct contrast to Laurie Cubbison’s stressing “the importance of truly belonging to a community as a critical requirement for studying it” and that
It is unrealistic to expect us to be totally divorced from the topic that the research focuses around. Not only is it unrealistic, I would say it’s bad scholarship. In order to be a part of the community and observe the community, we have to have a preexisting relationship with that community in order for the research to even begin to take place. (McKee and Porter, pg. 100; emphasis mine)
Burke’s “Terministic Screens” and Dramatism
Every time I see “dramatism,” I always want to point out that drama splatters, because it does.
Anyway. Burke’s take on language, the symbology of communication and terministic screens all seem to mesh nicely into my topic. Aristotle is good for examining the underlying rhetoric, but Burke is useful for explaining how both sides (researchers vs. research subjects) managed to talk around and through one another, even though some of the research subjects did attempt to make their point by using the researchers’ terministic screens in their language choice. It boils down to immediate experiences being so widely divergent that even when common ground was sought by the subjects, the researchers couldn’t seem to let go of their own terministic screens long enough to recognize the effort, let alone respond to it.
As interesting and brain-breaking as Burke is, though, he’s also kind of depressing, because based on his view of language, it seems a wonder than any of us are capable of communicating at all, let alone with sufficient precision to be reasonably hopeful of being understood.
Note to self (1):
From Book 2, Chapter 21, Section 15 of On Rhetoric (pg. 186):
Maxims make one great contribution to speeches because of the uncultivated mind of the audience; for people are pleased if someone in a general observation hits upon opinions that they themselves have about a particular instance.
I don’t especially agree with Aristotle singling out “the uncultivated mind” as being solely susceptible to someone who presents himself as one of like mind. I think it’s possible for anyone to be taken in by an agreeable, flattering speech. I think this also provides a good description of some of the methods Ogas and Gaddam used to build trust with fandom.
~*~*~
From Book 3, Chapter 2, Section 4 of On Rhetoric (pg. 222):
As a result, authors should compose without being noticed and should seem to speak not artificially but naturally. (The latter is persuasive, the former the opposite; for [if artifice is obvious] people become resentful, as at someone plotting against them, just as they are at those adulterating wines.)
This statement does a good job of describing why Ogas’ and Gaddam’s overly technical responses were so irritating and seemed so patronizing to those who received them. Had they responded with a more natural style of language, they would have gotten further. Or perhaps not — it seems likely the language choice was a deliberate attempt to obfuscate their true purpose. Though honestly, it’s difficult to say what their true purpose actually was. Neededalj, a neuroscientist herself, tried to parse out their intentions, and even she wasn’t convinced she sorted it out. She did, however, make a fairly compelling case for what she thought might be going on.
Tara on the 505 