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saxonvoter) wrote2019-01-29 09:22 pm
Forced Web Etiquette, Self-doubt and the Pressure to be Original
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.
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I also can relate regarding the not wanting to be controversial or out there, in some way. I mean, I do like being 'different', but it can often seem like a performative differentness that still falls within a standard. like, 'you can be different, but only this kind of different'. Which is bullshit. I used to have discussions with myself about defending and explaining my ideas for alternate universes based on them being 'thematically compatible' with the source material. Recently, I've come to the same conclusion that this post ends on, focusing more on whether something makes me happy instead of whether it fits my hypothetical self-standardized resumé. To quote, 'don't rebel against the mainstream only to conform to the underground'.
I don't know--perhaps this was because I was raised in a very performative household, or whatever.
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Huh. That reminds me... There was a medical emergency in my family last November, and some of my closer relatives gathered to my house for a get-together. And my aunt said to me, "You don't have to be so performative all the time". It kind of confused me and I'm still not sure what they meant by it. It's possible they were just weirded out by the fact that instead of being emotional I was handling things like it was another normal day for me.
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I see. I would've seen being performative in that situation would be making a big act about being worried and caring at a degree you thought you should've been, but actually weren't. That's likely just my personal experience--most of my problems with being performative were all material achievements and and suppressing emotions that were considered a burden, or such.
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Thanks for taking part in the discussion, it's truly interesting to hear other people's thoughts on these kind of matters.
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Back In Ye Oldene Days (i.e. the early 2000s) I used to write much, much longer and more opinionated posts on DW/et al., I guess because that was the content I enjoyed reading, so it... was the content I started producing.
Like, in retrospect it was probably about 99% Hot Takes and maybe 1% of Good Content, but... I enjoyed writing it, and doing that writing helped me be a better writer in general, which in turn helped me professionally and so on.
And then I... stopped. Mostly because I kept running into situations where I'd write something I was moderately proud of, and find people linking to it with snide "why do people feel they have to have an opinion on everything?" sort of comments (which... ironic, in retrospect). And it got to me, so I just... stopped writing longform blog content. That more-or-less coincided with the time I started using DW less and Tumblr a lot more, because the latter was a much better platform for sharing other people's idea than producing my own.
Like, nowadays I can look back and realize that all the longform writers I used to idolize got the same kind of pushback, but... in the moment it felt like it was just something wrong with me. I do kinda wonder if everyone else felt the same way?
(... lol tl;dr 6^^)
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Yeah, it's pretty easy to fall into the trap of thinking that everyone else is doing really well and I'm the only one who has these problems, I gotta be the odd one out right? Which leads me to say: thanks for sharing your experiences, it's really helpful to know other people struggle with similar thoughts.
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I definitely had a phase of being snooty about correct grammar and spelling, but I'm fairly sure that somehow existed simultaneously with me rapidly adopting emoticons and other such modes of communication xD
Those RP forums sound deeply unpleasant :C I will honestly say that I have never considered whether something that essentially amounts to a personal history post might contain copyrighted material. *hugs*
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This?? Is somehow also me? Like, at the same time that I started being really careful about what I wrote on the internet, I would get really into using emoticons when it was just me and my close friends on MSN or something. Although, I gotta that depending on the person I'd use pretty formal language in text messaging. Now I don't really bother, because it just feels weird (unless I'm texting my teacher or boss etc). :'D
I mean I have plenty of really nice memories from those times, but bad memories tend to stick a lot harder than the good ones. In the end I just kept doing my thing so it turned out fine.
And it's not like I seriously thought I was doing an actual copyright violation, it's more of a "what if I saw this one someone else's journal and forgot about it, and everyone is going to think I have no original ideas ever"- thing. It happens often happens when I'm writing fic as well, which is... well, kind of ridiculous when you consider what fanfiction even is.
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sry in advance for the tl;dr, but I've been thinking about this
But if what you want is to adjust your anxiety by finding a way to see your blog as less formal, or just to overcome the internal voices that argue against posting the thoughts you have - saying that it's been said before, someone has said it better, nobody is interested, it doesn't have a point, etc. - then don't forget that that is a kind of writer's block that you fight in solidarity with many, many other bloggers (and writers of other things too for that matter).
The minus side is it's a big problem and people everywhere are failing to find a way around it, of course, but the plus side is that there are a lot of suggestions for ways to overcome it that have worked for different people.
Some people start writing just for themselves, to remove the pressure of imagining what people will think - on paper or in private entries.
Some people give themselves 'homework' assignments or sign up for challenges, like answering a question per day or listing one thing they're grateful for or one thing they've accomplished. Some people make weekly posts listing the things they've watched or read or the games they've played in the week, with or without ratings or reactions.
When I was a kid, I spent hours doing that freewriting thing where you just type whatever comes into your head, but in ten years of adult writer's block I've never really brought myself to do it again because it now feels silly.
After Tumblrpocalypse I decided to aim for one DW post per day to encourage myself to be more active here, which worked surprisingly well... without recapturing the casual feeling of Tumblr and Twitter, though.
Re: sry in advance for the tl;dr, but I've been thinking about this
I've been thinking of looking into writing maybe like three or four Dreamwidth posts a week, I think that should be a good number for me. Not too high to cause stress (since I'm pretty busy with school), but a good starting point for using this site more often.
Thanks for commenting, you gave me a lot to think about.
Re: sry in advance for the tl;dr, but I've been thinking about this
I fall into this all the time too. :/ Actually it's probably a form of survivorship bias - like how they studied bomber planes that came back to see where they took the most damage and reinforced those sections only to later realize that those are the places that needed the least reinforcement because when they get shot in the other places, they crash and you don't get the plane back at all.
Similarly we only see the people who post, but for each of them there are probably 10-20 other people thinking about stuff to write and then deciding their post wasn't worth the effort.
I definitely recommend setting some posting goals! Just go easy on yourself if you miss them.
Re: sry in advance for the tl;dr, but I've been thinking about this
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But regardless, thank you for sharing - as has been said in other comments, sometimes just knowing you're not the only one who's struggling with something makes it a little easier.
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Similarly, thanks for reading and sharing your thoughts.
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My texts to family are a mess because my relationship with the phone keypad and predictive text is a love-hate one that results in some unintentional hilarity. But when I'm posting more publicly I try to be coherent.
If there's some odd or incorrect English in, say, a Flash game, I don't care so long as I can understand enough to play the game, because I appreciate that someone writing in a second language made this amazing thing that I can play for free.
If someone's just talking about their day and there's a few mistakes, that's fine. There's nothing wrong with "OMG the sequel is nearly here!!" excitement, using the internet expressions like the addition of the tilde, or emojis! You're writing something informal.
However if someone is writing meta or a long article on an important subject and they want people to read and understand it, then they shouldn't be refusing to use capital letters and correct punctuation. They need paragraphs to break up the wall of text. The text has to stand alone and presentation is a part of that.
I see more ESOL posts that make an effort to be legible compared to a lot more native English speakers flouting their unwillingness to learn basic grammar (eg they're/their/there) as something to aspire to because "i can rite wht 1 w@nt you cant makeme cHanGe" and honestly, if I have to spend extra time trying to understand what you're saying because you think no rules apply then I'm going to pass on your thoughts.
I say native speakers because the argument is often "what if English isn't their first language?" but how would anyone French try and parse 'rite'? What about someone with dyslexia trying to fill the missing vowels? How would a screen reader react to 'cant'?
Even E E Cummings only wrote his poetry in lower case, it wasn't some 'lifestyle choice' to show how cool he was but his style for one particular form. And Archie of the Archie and Mehitabel books had the excuse that, being a cockroach, he couldn't hold down the caps key as he jumped from key to key to type, another deliberate and unique conceit :)
Tumblr doesn't seem to understand the difference between registers of informal and formal and when aesthetic choices are appropriate or not. But then nuance of any kind has never been a feature there.
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Same to you, thanks for reading and sharing your thoughts.
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So, yes, I'm going to try and do that thing. Post more.
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Found you through a friending meme, and am definitely liking what I'm reading of you. You are articulate, you are interesting, and you say interesting things. Looking forward to more of it.
(I can absolutely relate to hyper-correctness in English as a second language speaker. It took me 5 years in the US before I was willing to pun - before that it felt like people would just assume I messed up rather than was playing with the language deliberately.)
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Oh gosh, I don't think anyone has ever called me articulate. Thank you so much for saying so.
Subscribed back to you. :)
P.S. I am a pun machine.
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