Meta: Derailing, Linking, Labelling, and the Internet

[escritoireazul]

A couple things have combined to make me think these thoughts about derailing which aren't fully developed yet. I wanted to put them together here for future reference. This is not actually meta. This is, oh, protometa, maybe, the primordial soup of meta. I'm on painkillers and just found that line hilarious, if that gives you any idea of how foggy my brain is right now.

linkspam, which I haven't been following but have now added to my reading list, uses warnings on their links which includes a warning for derailment. Though the mods do address that warnings are inherently subjective and potentially problematic and they are working on their warning guidelines.

Over in by phoebe_zeitgeist ("On derailing and complexity. Or one tiny corner thereof."), sqbr post comment talking about how she views derailing and provided an example.

To give some extreme examples:
Suppose fandom is going through DisabilityFail2010.

Poster A makes a locked post read by their 10 friends saying "So there's been all these posts about ableism in fanfic, and it got me thinking about how Castle fans deal with disability way better than Bones fans. In general those Bones fans are a bunch of idiots, let me tell you..."
Poster B makes a post saying "All these posts about disability are making me feel silenced. Don't they realise how that hurts my feelings as a woman? Our voices NEVER get to be heard, and now these oversensitive disabled people are telling ME what I can and cannot write! Helen Keller would be ashamed." and then links it to metafandom and linkspam themselves.
Poster C has no idea about DisabilityFail but happens to make a very good post about the way women's voices are silenced which is included in the same metafandom post as Poster B's, and helps encourage a shift of the conversation onto the way women's voices are silenced.


Posters A and B are derailing in the sense of avoiding a difficult topic by deliberately (albeit maybe subconsciously) shifting to something that makes them the centre of the conversation.
Posters B and C are derailing in the sense that their posts are shifting the centre of the conversation away from disability onto gender.

Afaict a lot of the conflict around derailing comes from people who see themselves as, at worse, poster C, feeling as if they are being equated with Poster B. Based on the arguments they're making I'd say some of them are Poster B (at least a little bit), and where that's obvious it should definitely be called out. But regardless: even Poster C, despite not meaning any harm and genuinely not being ableist still does harm.

legionseagle here and zvi here talk about (quoting zvi here) "the same stimulus can provoke conversation on multiple axes of difference."

I'm still not sure where all these things going in my thoughts, but using the hypotehtical above, I have a hard time with the idea that because, say, linkspam links to Poster C's post in with the links about DisabilityFail (possibly with a warning that it is derailing) it actually is a derailing post. Though I do understand the idea of sheer volume silencing speakers, Poster C's post is from an entirely different conversation and the meta community combined the two.

This comment by jonquil is mixing with the above in my thoughts: There is a difference, and a substantive one, between walking into a journal or community and saying "Well, what about X?" and saying, in one's own journal, under flock or not, "I'm thinking about X right now." Calling the latter derailing is insisting that there is a single social-justice fandom rail which must be adhered to at all times.

There isn't.

I am dealing with a lot of physical pain right now, so if I've dropped code in all that, I'll try to clean it up as soon as I can. Also, I shouldn't have tried to watch Fringe like this. Yes, being forced to stay on the couch has given me time to catch up, but I can't brain.

Comments

[sqbr]

I've only just woken up, but an important point while I try and think of a proper reply to jonquil and yourself: the problem here is that the definition of derailing I'm using to clarify things to myself is afaict way broader than everyone else's in the conversation. So feel free to disagree with me, but don't see my argument as part of the general "Don't derail" argument being made by wistfuljane etc. By my much broader definition, the effect of a derailing post is bad, but that doesn't mean the post itself is bad or shouldn't be made. Meanwhile, when wistfuljane etc say "Never write derailing posts" they are afaict talking about people like Poster B.

Also the reason I locked the post I cut and pasted that from is I really am still figuring out what I think!

[adelheid]

when wistfuljane etc say "Never write derailing posts" they are afaict talking about people like Poster B.

The thing is, I'm not sure Wistfuljane's post is just about Poster B. I don't know about Jane, but it seems to me that Zvi definitely includes Poster C, which I see as unfair and unworkable.

[sqbr]

I think this sort of ambiguity is one of the big problems with this discussion: if you're defending your right to be Poster C and they think you're defending your right to be poster B it's all going to get unnecessarily nasty. And I don't know exactly what Zvi (or phoebe_zeitgeist, or anyone but me :)) means exactly by "derailing".

I had a go at explaining what I mean by it a bit better, after deciding that redefining the word was just a recipe for misunderstanding: http://sqbr.dreamwidth.org/266749.html

[hl]

I'm going out on a limb here and say that poster C shouldn't be included in that conversation. Of course deciding in what conversation is each post is a somewhat subjective activity, but if Poster C doesn't acknowledge that other discussion (i.e., 'I've been reading that discussion about X, and...') or one of the posts in it ('T wrote X in this post, and I say...') in the post itself, then the inclusion was a mistake.

Not talking officially here (I can't), but if we do make a mistake, you can always drop by and point it out.

Sadly is not always that simple. For example, if the conversation starts to shift, and particularly if there are intersectionality issues, it's difficult to say what's derailing, what's pointing out a previous fail with the discussion, what's a definite shift and at what point (if ever) posts about that other topic stop being tangential and start being the main curve, so to speak.