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saxonvoter Last week I shared kore's post about not needing something worth to say in order to post on Dreamwidth and muccamukk's post about dogpiling. Afterwards, these two posts stayed in the back of my mind and I came to a somewhat unpleasant realization.
I agree with the point that Dreamwidth, like any other platform, is what the users make of it. But despite this, I also constantly feel like I need to be be eloquent in the text that I produce. These feelings often culminate to the point where I will often refrain from writing a post or a comment, because I feel like everyone else has already said what I wanted to (usually better), and I feel like I don't have a single original thing to add to the conversation.
In order to dig deep and explain the cause for these feelings, I wanted to share some of my history on the internet, and list some of the things which cause me anxiety when taking part in discussions, sharing headcanons, or even when writing fanfiction.
Me and The Netiquette — d0nt sp34k l1k3 th1s!!
The following experiences probably aren't very universal. Firstly, because I spent a good amount of years on the Finnish side of the internet before venturing onto the "true" World Wide Web, where people mostly write in English. And secondly, because I spent my early teenage years on very specific niche of websites. However, my experiences do partly explain the pressure I feel when writing something I unconsciously deem as more "formal", such as blog posts, websites, forum posts or comments.
When I first started actively using the internet, I mostly spent time on fandom forums, text based role playing forums, and art websites. To my knowledge, the user bases of these sites consisted mostly of kids, teenagers and younger adults, but I'm sure there were plenty of older adults as well. But as a 12-14 year old kid who wanted to be seen as an equal, it was very important to show that you were just as mature as any adult. And that was directly tied to writing with correct grammar and punctuation. Doing otherwise would make you an object of ridicule, or depending on the website, you might even get a warning.
For the purpose of writing this post, I asked around in my immediate circle of friends for their experiences. One of the four people I questioned admitted to feeling similarly pressured to write correctly and appear older and more mature than they actually were. Two hadn't felt pressured at all outside of school, and the fourth one admitted to paying more attention to writing clear and correct text when creating blog posts, but never having felt excessive pressure to do so. I suspect the main difference here is the types of websites we all used to visit, because the one person who admitted to feeling pressured mentioned a website which is similar to my most frequently used sites from back then.
In junior high school, my use of English speaking websites such as FFN.net increased. However, I didn't start communicating on English speaking interactive websites until tumblr, where the forced grammar rules had seemingly flown out of the window.
To quote myself from an earlier discussion:
Then came tumblr... and people were just writing like they wanted to??? No capitalization, no punctuation was necessary??? -- Sure, tumblr has its own unwritten rules about how to write readable text, but it was nothing like the Real Grammar Rules. Gosh, I remember most RPG's having an entire pages dedicated to grammar rules that the players had to follow... And I feel like that just wouldn't happen on tumblr or twitter these days.
I'm aware that some people on tumblr write with proper grammar and punctuation, but that's the point! You could do what you wanted to. After years of paying attention to my writing, and then it suddenly being okay not to capitalize every sentence or even use punctuation was weird. But eventually I got used to it, and developed another writing style which mixed in well with the locals. In fact, I got so used to writing in this informal way that even now I need to kind of take a step back and switch gears when I want to switch between writing "chat speak" and writing "properly". And both are equally difficult to switch off.
As I was writing this, I came across a podcast that talked more about code switching between writing mediums, and I pretty much agree with what was said in it. On certain platforms it just feels unnatural to use formal language, and on others the opposite is true. In the end it's a very personal matter which depends heavily on your background and habits.
"You're a copy cat" — Is it even possible to be original?
I used to have my own text based role playing game until I grew out of the hobby around high school. And I suspect that many of my current precautions and feelings about coming up with ideas or expressing my opinions come from having to deal with quite bit of drama during my role playing years.
I was friends with another RP game's founders and some of our players were members in both games, so it worked nicely for a while, we even had affiliate links going on. However, some time later I was accused of copying their new idea for a plot arc, which resulted in them shit talking about me on their public forum and then sending me threatening private messages on other platforms. I tried to defend myself and explain my points, but kids can be cruel, so my arguments were largely ignored. This drama caused a lot of friction and even broken friendships within our partially shared friend circle.
Looking back, both of our ideas were horribly unoriginal, so I still don't get what the fuss was about.
Bit earlier when I was in 5th or 6th grade, one of the fan forums I was part of started a movement to weed out copyright violations around fan & art websites. Their mission was to report copyrighted images on various websites to get them taken down, but they also cracked down on people who made web comics with unoriginal, or "stolen" ideas. This usually resulted in a large group of people dogpiling on kids or teens who didn't really know or care that they had uploaded a picture they had no rights to, or had been inspired by someone else's story or comic. At the time, the movement was spearheaded by some big names in the communities in question, so I ended up agreeing with them and going with the flow to a certain extent and being really strict about copyrighted content. (As a result I was never really targeted by them.)
These days most people on the internet really don't care or even know much about copyright (just look at memes), but I have to admit that being in that kind of environment left its mark on me. That, in combination with having been accused of copying someone else's ideas, and now being constantly warned about the real life consequences of plagiarisation in the academic circles, well... Let's just say that even as I'm writing this post I'm wondering if I unconsciously stole the idea from someone else.
Deep down I know that cliches are cliche's because they work, most ideas are the same old ideas but with a new angle, and there's really nothing new under the sun. But still I worry and strive to be original, and suspect I'm not the only one.
Why would someone care about my opinion / work?
I'm sure that most, if not all, tumblr refugees agree that tumblr (and similarly Twitter & Facebook) is dependant on the fact that people would rather share someone else's opinions than their own. "Hey, look this person said something I also think, but in a funny way," leads to a reblog and a like. On the contrary, trying to make your own post might lead to nothing, unless you have enough followers and/or the stars are in the right position.
This is where we come to another thing thing I've lately realized about myself: I often feel like my opinion just isn't valuable, so is there really any point in expressing it? At a certain point, isn't that just shouting into the void and expecting it to answer back? Other can probably do it better and they have better arguments. Other people can write books and produce TV shows and draw comics, and they'll do it better than me. And on top of not feeling good enough to produce content, what if my opinion is just... plain wrong?
I don't want to be controversial
Often I find myself avoiding making direct statements in order to avoid conflict. I might say "I love this", or "In my opinion, I think character X is Y", but I'll go round and round just to avoid being blunt in what I say in order not to offend anyone who might disagree. Because if someone does end up disagreeing with me, it's surely inevitable that I'll end up hearing their craftily written arguments (and in my head they're always craftily written), and that in the end I'll just end up looking like an idiot. I have no idea if this is the result of the constant call out culture that tumblr and other social media sites are so fond of, or if it's just a realization of my general lack of self-confidence, but it sucks. It really does.
Largely, most of my anxiety concerning writing and producing content just come down to one thing: fear. Fear of being wrong or unoriginal, fear of being ridiculed, fear of people getting angry at me (which can lead to highly unpleasant things like doxxing) either for my opinions, political alignments or simply for existing as I am. Some time ago I largely stopped really using Facebook because of these fears, and I still have a profile only because I need it for school related announcements. I don't want continue being online on a website like Facebook, which is chock-full of people with wildly different ideas about constitutes as a human right, and who probably wouldn't stop and think before trying to ruin my life in creative ways.
(TLDR; Now this is pretty far-fetched, but if you're familiar with the Broadway musical Hamilton, I would like to be like Hamilton himself, but I'm probably actually more like Aaron Burr. Just saying, because I often listen to one of the songs and feel like it's about two of my last brain cells yelling at each other.)
And your point is...
I don't know. I didn't write this to prove an argument or point. I just needed to vent out some thoughts, because isn't that what we've been saying about the ongoing comparison between Dreamwidth and tumblr, and about how on tumblr you could just shitpost to your heart's content, yet people feel the need to be so goddamn serious on Dreamwidth for some reason? How about we stop de-valuing our opinions and creations and just write what we we want to share with the community, whether it's just a sentence or a 20-page ramble about our favourite character's luscious hair.
Dreamwidth can be what we want it to be, and at the moment it's a platform where I feel relatively safe to express myself in this half-reminiscing, half-rambling way. Because Dreamwidth exists, I was able to write and ponder about my general feelings of inadequacy, which stretch out into all of the various fields which interest me, including writing.
In conclusion, there are plenty of people in the world who can do things better than me, and that has created an unfortunate habit of me comparing my content to other people's. And I have a lot of conscious and unconscious fears about creating said content. But that's completely okay, because acknowledging the fears and working on them might be the only way forward.
Maybe 2019 can be the year of conquering some of those fears. Starting by hitting that post button.
