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pegkerr wrote about seeing the movie United 93, which prompted a discussion of why people would want to see such a movie. In the course of that, huladavid wondered about why the World Trade Center became the symbol of those events. I wrote:
They do seem to be the symbol--which makes sense in terms of visual thinking, because the damage to the Pentagon was repairable, and planes have crashed in fields before. The other visual effect is a lot harder to reproduce on a poster in a way that will make the connection--the empty skies, for a few days during the "total ground standdown," a weird thing to see in a major city with as many airports as we have.
Those weren't especially loved buildings, as architecture or for long history, but they were familiar to a lot of people, from movies and television even when not from real life. Coming into the city from Queens in the couple of years afterwards, I would find myself glancing at the skyline, to make sure the rest of it--and in particular the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings--was still intact.
Responding to a post byozarque on How to disagree online without being disagreeable and specifically how people identify hostility in online communications. I digressed--one of the reasons I read Ozarque's journal is that she leads me to these digressions:
What's amazing -- to someone my age -- is that online hostile attention is real enough to them to be satisfying. Or perhaps they are "hearing creatively." Perhaps they're hearing emotional messages that aren't really there?
Maybe they're reading into it what they'd expect--if X has said something deliberately provocative to Y, or to a group, and Y responds with words that are denotatively hostile, it's plausible that X will read the hostility that zie is expecting. Also, if the goal is attention of any sort, getting lots of replies may be sufficiently satisfying whether or not the troll is sure that the answers are hostile.
A flipside of the absence of anything but text is that I've occasionally been really annoyed at someone online (Usenet, usually); written what I thought was a hostile and condescending reply, explaining exactly where their errors of fact and reasoning are; and discovered that my answer was being read as useful and informative, rather than nasty, by third parties and sometimes by the person I was addressing. This has its advantages--usually, by the next day, I don't want a fight, even if I was angry at the time. It can be a relief, if I've given up on the original poster and am writing entirely for the other people reading (and especially those new to the newsgroup in question), to let them know that not everyone agrees with the original poster. I should probably bear in mind that, if my hostility is falling out of messages so intended, it's likely that people are reading hostility where I didn't mean it, or where I thought I was masking it.
I'm fairly sure that there's a wide range of how people handle, interpret, and use written communication, as distinct from spoken (and, for that matter, spoken text when they can't see the speaker: telephone, radio, books on tape, PA systems...). I suspect not only that there are approaches that are better and worse for this medium, but that people with different approaches may have more difficulty interacting in text than those whose approaches match well.
In response to the inclusion of a fanfic on the Tiptree longlist,matocioquala touched off a long discussion. pnh wrote
Yes. It's the difference between "required" and "permitted"--when I was a Tiptree juror, we got things sent in from large publishers and small, pointers to short stories from a variety of magazines, paper and online alike, and some self-published works. Someone looked at all of them; in the end, we didn't find any of the self-published material we were sent to be worth recommending. That's not a judgement on self-publishing, it's an observation on a specific subset, and a data slice from a couple of years ago.
laurel asked why people might think a particular political action was a good idea. I was one of quite a few people who made what I think were well-meant efforts to answer it, the result of which was that she felt overwhelmed. (Somewhat vague, and not linking, because it's friends-locked.) In response to her post talking about that:
I don't know if this is my character flaw, or a neutral trait, or one that is usually beneficial and you got the short end of this stick, but if someone says something like "Why do people think X?" I will tend to treat that as a factual question and try to answer it. I will register some phrasings as indicating disgust or disbelief rather than curiosity: the difference between "why do they think that will work?" and "what kind of selfish, short-sighted idiot could do this to us?" is clear (at least to the extent that I might sarcastically say "One who has never heard of Newton's laws" or the like to the latter, but not try to speak for the people so defined unless I actually am one of them), but there's a lot of middle ground that could be meant, or read, either way.
It's also a little too easy for five or ten or thirty people to offer slightly different angles of answering a question that may have been a request for information rather than a rhetorical expression of disgust, without realizing the cumulative effect.
Responding tovito_excalibur's Wiscon report, where he was talking about the panel on "the myth of class mobility".
An audience member said sharply that if you depend on the money you get from going out every day and working, then you are working class. Query: what then does middle class mean? Wouldn't you call someone who was able to live entirely off her investments upper class?
I think a large part of the point of that statement was to question to utility of the term "middle class". Once upon a time, it referred to merchants and skilled workers, the class between the nobility and the peasantry; is that still a useful grouping, and if not, do we want to draw the lines in three groups? Note that almost all Americans (I don't know much about the rest of the world in this regard) will say they're middle class, regardless of income, background, or whether they work for someone else.
This came out in response tocallunav saying that she/one can't waste time, because time is a dimension:
Alternative terminology: time, as you say, is a dimension. But in a way, if I go through long periods getting nothing done, or not doing what I want and mean to, it feels like I'm wasting myself. In that four-dimensional universe, I am not infinite; I have only so much space and time to inhabit and enjoy.
pegkerr wrote about seeing the movie United 93, which prompted a discussion of why people would want to see such a movie. In the course of that, huladavid wondered about why the World Trade Center became the symbol of those events. I wrote:They do seem to be the symbol--which makes sense in terms of visual thinking, because the damage to the Pentagon was repairable, and planes have crashed in fields before. The other visual effect is a lot harder to reproduce on a poster in a way that will make the connection--the empty skies, for a few days during the "total ground standdown," a weird thing to see in a major city with as many airports as we have.
Those weren't especially loved buildings, as architecture or for long history, but they were familiar to a lot of people, from movies and television even when not from real life. Coming into the city from Queens in the couple of years afterwards, I would find myself glancing at the skyline, to make sure the rest of it--and in particular the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings--was still intact.
Responding to a post by
ozarque on How to disagree online without being disagreeable and specifically how people identify hostility in online communications. I digressed--one of the reasons I read Ozarque's journal is that she leads me to these digressions:What's amazing -- to someone my age -- is that online hostile attention is real enough to them to be satisfying. Or perhaps they are "hearing creatively." Perhaps they're hearing emotional messages that aren't really there?
Maybe they're reading into it what they'd expect--if X has said something deliberately provocative to Y, or to a group, and Y responds with words that are denotatively hostile, it's plausible that X will read the hostility that zie is expecting. Also, if the goal is attention of any sort, getting lots of replies may be sufficiently satisfying whether or not the troll is sure that the answers are hostile.
A flipside of the absence of anything but text is that I've occasionally been really annoyed at someone online (Usenet, usually); written what I thought was a hostile and condescending reply, explaining exactly where their errors of fact and reasoning are; and discovered that my answer was being read as useful and informative, rather than nasty, by third parties and sometimes by the person I was addressing. This has its advantages--usually, by the next day, I don't want a fight, even if I was angry at the time. It can be a relief, if I've given up on the original poster and am writing entirely for the other people reading (and especially those new to the newsgroup in question), to let them know that not everyone agrees with the original poster. I should probably bear in mind that, if my hostility is falling out of messages so intended, it's likely that people are reading hostility where I didn't mean it, or where I thought I was masking it.
I'm fairly sure that there's a wide range of how people handle, interpret, and use written communication, as distinct from spoken (and, for that matter, spoken text when they can't see the speaker: telephone, radio, books on tape, PA systems...). I suspect not only that there are approaches that are better and worse for this medium, but that people with different approaches may have more difficulty interacting in text than those whose approaches match well.
In response to the inclusion of a fanfic on the Tiptree longlist,
matocioquala touched off a long discussion. pnh wrote A lot of nominally professional publishing lacks any discernable "editorial standards" as well. I wouldn't dream of arguing that awards juries should feel obliged to comb through 5,271,009 self-published works, but I don't see any reason to prohibit them (or the voters who determine awards like the Hugos and the Locus awards) from recognizing something self-published or "amateur" should they wish to.
Yes. It's the difference between "required" and "permitted"--when I was a Tiptree juror, we got things sent in from large publishers and small, pointers to short stories from a variety of magazines, paper and online alike, and some self-published works. Someone looked at all of them; in the end, we didn't find any of the self-published material we were sent to be worth recommending. That's not a judgement on self-publishing, it's an observation on a specific subset, and a data slice from a couple of years ago.
laurel asked why people might think a particular political action was a good idea. I was one of quite a few people who made what I think were well-meant efforts to answer it, the result of which was that she felt overwhelmed. (Somewhat vague, and not linking, because it's friends-locked.) In response to her post talking about that:I don't know if this is my character flaw, or a neutral trait, or one that is usually beneficial and you got the short end of this stick, but if someone says something like "Why do people think X?" I will tend to treat that as a factual question and try to answer it. I will register some phrasings as indicating disgust or disbelief rather than curiosity: the difference between "why do they think that will work?" and "what kind of selfish, short-sighted idiot could do this to us?" is clear (at least to the extent that I might sarcastically say "One who has never heard of Newton's laws" or the like to the latter, but not try to speak for the people so defined unless I actually am one of them), but there's a lot of middle ground that could be meant, or read, either way.
It's also a little too easy for five or ten or thirty people to offer slightly different angles of answering a question that may have been a request for information rather than a rhetorical expression of disgust, without realizing the cumulative effect.
Responding to
vito_excalibur's Wiscon report, where he was talking about the panel on "the myth of class mobility".An audience member said sharply that if you depend on the money you get from going out every day and working, then you are working class. Query: what then does middle class mean? Wouldn't you call someone who was able to live entirely off her investments upper class?
I think a large part of the point of that statement was to question to utility of the term "middle class". Once upon a time, it referred to merchants and skilled workers, the class between the nobility and the peasantry; is that still a useful grouping, and if not, do we want to draw the lines in three groups? Note that almost all Americans (I don't know much about the rest of the world in this regard) will say they're middle class, regardless of income, background, or whether they work for someone else.
This came out in response to
callunav saying that she/one can't waste time, because time is a dimension:Alternative terminology: time, as you say, is a dimension. But in a way, if I go through long periods getting nothing done, or not doing what I want and mean to, it feels like I'm wasting myself. In that four-dimensional universe, I am not infinite; I have only so much space and time to inhabit and enjoy.
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It's tempting for me to think of "rich" ro "upper class" as "I never need to work again to maintain a relatively comfortable lifestyle", if I wanted to make a lower/middle class edge I'd be tempted to look at whether someone was able to save money for a rainy day, for retirement and stuff, but given the number of folks who have enough money to do that and live comfortably but instead pay up for fancy cars but don't manage to save a dollar so they won't be asking if I "Want fries with that?" when they're 80, it can be hard to find an good clear boundary for that point.
(Note that I'm using a financial-only sort of look at class here, where class can also be a lot more complicated.)
I also worry a little bit about getting too ... well, labelling with class terms. I think it's important to talk about wealth differentials and class differentials, but the danger of any simplified way of talking about people is that it gets overgeneralized and/or overcompartmentalized. Tricky. *shrug*
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I do, too, and when I ask "Why?" I mean simply that: can someone please explain to me why ___________ . However, I long ago learned, to my sorrow, that many people hear "Why?" as either a doubt or a challenge.
(You know, I'm beginning to get the impression that you and I share some viewpoints/worldviews that are not particularly common.)
From:
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In Sweden, many middle class people with working class backgrounds define themselves as working class. We discussed this sometimes in the first year of med school, and while we almost all grudgingly admitted we were from solid middle class backgrounds (often with family in the medical professions), many of us, including me, mentioned how our parents have made a class journey.
The free education reform really did make a change in our society. Very many people in my parents' generation are the first in the family ever to have higher education, or even secondary education. (Swedish secondary education used to be very restricted until the sixties.)