What Are We Supposed To Conclude
I’ve really enjoyed doing the Q&A’s, but based on how many times I’ve been asked the same question … I’d like to end the Q&A’s now.
The ellipsis there removes some specifics from the final answer in what became, as of, and because of, that answer, the final SlayAlive Q&A with Scott Allie about Buffy: Season 8. I’ve removed the specifics because I think that the more general statement the above sentence becomes via the ellipsis nicely sums up my own general view of those Q&A threads.
Or, at least, it does so when combined with an earlier use of paraphrase by Allie himself, in which he reduces (aptly) a question he says has been “echoed, rephrased, reflected” repeatedly to this: “What are we supposed to conclude from this thing that you’ve only started to reveal to us?”
And there you have it in a nutshell, the fanatical thread that ran through every Q&A discussion thread. Whether merely ignorant or simply rude, the insistence on running up to a serial storyteller, waving him off before he opens his mouth, and declaring that you don’t care that what he wants to do is Tell Us A Story (storytelling, of course, being something of an event which occurs over time), you just want him to tell you what it means, and/or how it ends, and/or at least what happens next.
I wish I knew, or at least I think I do, whether all these fans are just ignorant of how storytelling works, or whether they really do simply not care how it works, and just want their God damned answers now. But the storyteller — and, make no mistake, the editor necessarily is part of the storytelling process, not the marketing process — is under no obligation to be serving anyone’s interests in the story except the writer. The editor is not the publicist (who, to be clear, also should not be considered to beunder any obligation to out the writer’s intentions, let alone outright his plot development, in advance of the writer doing so himself), he is the editor. He is a servant to the story being told, and occasionally its master should he have something constructive to add to the writer’s process.
But one thing the storyteller — be he writer or editor — is not subject to is the whim of fandom. He is not at their beck and call, and just because this storyteller or that one might be gracious enough to give over some of their time to engage with a fandom during a story’s telling doesn’t mean free reign to assault him with demands to subvert that telling by outing meaning, endings, or what happens next.
Nestled amongst the nooks and crannies of this anti-storytelling entitlement are all the related agonies of fans insisting that the storyteller must not only know, not only respect, the vagaries of each and every permutation (hyperbole to underscore the point) of what this or that faction of fandom might potentially wig out and/or be concerned about, but, worse yet (frequently implicit, and occasionally explicit, in that insistence) must absolutely make sure that the stories he tells never tramples upon them, or, apparently, else.
No storyteller should ever be seen as being so obligated. Not by fandom, and hopefully not by themselves.
It reminds me, in tone to be sure if not in the specific issues or demands at hand, of the sort of crazy-making nonsense that drove me out of covering local politics, and if Scott Allie hopes to maintain his sanity as a storyteller going forward, I humbly suggest he stay away from any such Q&A sessions in the future.
There is only one thing he and any other storyteller should be obligated to understand about fandom (and I mean this in the sense that they owe this obligation to themselves, not to anyone else), and that is this: fandom, for all of its delight and wonder (and having founded a fandom event that in four years has raised over $300,000 for charity, I’m in no way a stranger to its delights and wonders) is bursting at regular and particular seams with people who either do not understand storytelling and do not seek to, or who simply do not care.
Steer clear, and just set to the task of telling story. Those of us who get it, get it. Those of us who can be made to get it, will get it eventually. The rest, they are just lost to us — ultimately, I’d argue, in many ways lost to themselves — and will not stop until you’ve given them the opportunity to drive you completely mad.
Literate Cities Survey Still Illiterate
KGW News has a short burst on this year’s rankings of literate cities, and it reminds me that I complained two years ago about the survey’s criteria and methodology.
The last two elements on the [Internet Resources] list are “Number of unique visitors per capita to a city’s internet version newspaper” and “Number of webpage views per capita to a city’s internet version newspaper”. (No mention of any other Internet content as a criteria for literacy.)
As any literate Oregonian knows, traffic to OregonLive could hardly be considered a proper gauge of Portland’s literacy. So, we know at least one category in this study has an entirely faulty construction.
It occurs to me this time around that the other flaw in the survey’s criteria is that it is entirely about consumption, leaving aside any consideration of creation. No survey of levels of blogosphere activity. No mention of zine production. Even in the realm of consumption, there’s no discussion of attendance at literary events, be they part of national campaigns (e.g. author’s book tours) or part of the local scene (e.g. storytelling events).
All of this seems to be a rather unfortunately illiterate reading of what it means to be literate, whether as a person or a city.
It doesn’t especially matter to me where Portland ranks on such a list. What matters is that local news departments keep blindly regurgitating a survey on literacy that doesn’t actually represent the literacy of the localities they serve — a “cut and paste” approach to reporting which itself then doesn’t serve a literate understanding of the story on the part of their readers and viewers.
So much illiteracy surrounding an alleged survey of municipal literacy. That few seem to notice the irony arguably might undercut the reported results.
Update: It should be noted that the survey does include magazine and journal publication, and so in one small regard it considers creation in addition to consumption. But the criteria arguably is too limited for it to truly reflect the full level of local literacy.
Twitter’s Engineers Gone Wild
Back in August, Twitter outlined their proposed solution for institutionalizing the “retweet”. The company received a good amount of criticism over the direction they had chosen to take, mostly due to that direction completely delegitimizing the way in which Twitter’s users actual engage in retweeting.
Last week, Twitter began a limited rollout of their retweet function, and already it’s clear from early chatter that Twitter took into account absolutely none of the criticism it received in August. Shortly, then, Twitter itself and then various third-party applications will present users with a retweet function that suffers from at least two major flaws.
- No comment. Currently, users frequently add a comment of their own to something they retweet. At the very least, this helps mediate against Twitter becoming a sea of duplicate tweets. More than that, users often retweet something in order to argue against it, something the new Twitter retweet function disregards completely and renders impossible. Twitter is rescinding the ability of its users to provide context for comments and links they pass along to others.
- I don’t follow. In the new retweet feature, retweets will appear in a user’s timeline as if they came from the originator even if the user doesn’t follow that originator, with some sort of indication as to who amongst the people you follow retweeted it. In other words, users in essence will be seeing tweets in their timeline from people they don’t follow.
Regarding that second flaw: Once upon a time, Twitter removed a feature wherein a user could display to their followers all of the replies they sent, even if a given follower did not also follow to person to whom the user was replying. According to Twitter, users were “confused” by this behavior. (It’s more likely that the reason was to limit use of system resources, a constant problem with the service. But apparently Twitter found it easier to publicly blame the alleged stupidity of its users.)
Somehow, it seems, Twitter would have us believe that users were confused by seeing tweets from people they follow, merely because they were directed to people they did not follow, but at the same time would have us believe that users will not be confused by seeing tweets that themselves, from almost all appearances, are from people they don’t follow.
All of this seems as if Twitter’s engineers decided they had an awesome new idea, and everyone was so in love with their spirited engineering prowess that they simply didn’t give a shit about how their users actually used retweeting as a conversational tool.
More likely, there is some specific reason why Twitter has decided that retweeting ought to be conducted in a manner that places an artificial restriction upon how one references and discusses the comments of another. Some reason that Twitter simply isn’t telling us. Which itself is an artificial limitation on conversation.
Much as Twitter fed us horseshit when explaining why they disabled a useful feature regarding how a user’s replies were displayed to their followers, they appear to be feeding us horseshit on retweets.
Any decision made by the provider of a popular service will be met with some resistance, or at least criticism. Ultimately, that shows how strongly users have come to feel about that service.
But when decisions are made which change the ways the service is used, especially in a manner which devalues the service, the resistance only is made worse when the explanations given obviously don’t pass the smell test.
In the end, for as long as Twitter itself and any third-party tools permit it, I will be making no use of Twitter’s imposition of conversational retweet restrictions. Hopefully, makers of third-party tools will give us a choice between the longstanding real solution created by the users themselves and Twitter’s engineering “solution” in search of a problem to solve.
On Being Wright And Wrong
One of the two best things I read all weekend was the dead-on defense of criticism offered by Maureen Ryan of The Chicago Tribune after Brad Wright, executive producer of Stargate Universe, publicly took her to task for her comments about the show.
It’s interesting to me that Wright appears to chide Ryan for reviewing unfinished versions of at least two episodes of the series, considering that what Ryan reviewed were screener copies provided to her by Syfy. It’s likely safe to say that Wright would withhold such chiding where it concerns any critic who gave his show good reviews based upon screener copies. It is equally safe, then, to dismiss this particular portion of Wright’s response.
Also interesting is that while Wright tries to paint Ryan as having an “axe to grind” against the franchise and therefore in essence engaging in nothing more than cheap shots against his show, Wright himself ends his missive by taking an entirely unnecessary shot against ABC’s remake of V.
… fortunately there are enough viewers and reviewers who think ‘SGU’ is neither boring, poorly plotted, or sexist to keep us on the air long after ‘V’ is just a letter in the alphabet again.”
So, while Ryan goes on in detail to demonstrate not having an “axe to grind”, Wright himself merely demonstrates either that he’s a hypocrite or is suffering a bout of psychological projection. Ryan, at least, is offering pure opinion. Wright’s out of place attempt at slighting V is just the petulance of his commercial self-interest lashing out.
What’s more, if Wright truly believes what he says there, in the final sentence of his missive, one is left to wonder why he bothered to post it in the first place. His argument appears to be that negative criticism of his series is irrelevant, since he and the network are satisfied with the public’s response to the show. But if that’s the case, why respond to Ryan at all?
“If you think the fact that the show has gotten decent ratings makes my opinion and the opinions of other disappointed viewers invalid,” responds Ryan, “well, you’re welcome to that belief.” That this is true precisely is what outs Wright’s response to criticism of his show as little more than an attempt to discredit any negative opinion about it as someone who must have an “axe to grind”.
In the end, Wright’s subtle tantrum is nothing more than a gambit to delegitimize criticism, and a hypocritical and poorly thought out one at that.
Stargate Universe has been a disappointment, and that’s coming from someone who only ever viewed the first two series as a kind of scifi candy. They at least had the virtue of not really pretending to be otherwise. Universe, however, was sold for months as a more complex and character driven drama, and at that it’s fallen almost completely flat.
I read Ryan’s methodical response to Wright, as it turned out, while catching up on the two most recent episodes of the series. On their own merits (or, rather, lack thereof), I’d already decided to remove the show from my Hulu queue when I was finished.
Thanks to Wright’s misplaced attack upon criticism, I found the motivation to not wait even that long.
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