http://cheyennecheyenne.tumblr.com/post/151127246428/ive-been-reading-this-thread-on-reddit
I… wish I could agree, but I’m honestly not sure I can. Because yes, you can “criticize something” without saying “there oughta be a law.”
But what does criticizing mean? What ends is it designed to achieve? Very often, no one knows. And if they do know, they tend to parse to getting someone disgraced or making it difficult for someone to make money, which… well, a lot of people don’t have issues with those things, but I kinda do, because I don’t think people are one thing they did.
If there oughta be a law, then it’s clear what your end goal is, and you know whether you’re achieving it or not. You also know how far along you are, because even if your law has not been passed yet, you have things happen along the way like legislators sponsoring it. You know what challenges are occurring and whether they’re minor wording – everyone agrees this is a good idea but they don’t agree on how it should look – or whether you’re facing a serious uphill battle.
With “you can criticize a thing,” okay. You wrote a blog post. Now what do you want to happen? Are you looking for your post to go viral? Are you looking for a formal apology from a content creator? (Are there particular formulaic elements you require in the apology, such that if they are not included the apology is a “fauxpology?” Does the person you want the apology from know this?) Are you looking for a firing? Are you looking for an especially intelligent hatedom that impresses people with its incisiveness?
Etc. “Liberal feminism” gets lambasted all the time, but at least “liberal feminism” is clear about what it is looking for.
This kind of thing is actually the stuff I think looks reasonable at first and is actually a tumblrism (or better said a neo-Marxist impossible project regardless of platform), not the other way around.
The “main point” is usually cultural influence, isn’t it? When you start talking, especially through a medium like tumblr, the hope is that other people will become infected with your preferred memetic viruses and start to think along lines that you find valuable. Hearts and minds. You know, the thing that authors in most contexts usually say that they want to do.
“Concrete” “practical” results (apologies, firings, policy changes) are very secondary.
Which doesn’t render the project frivolous. Cultural change drives pretty much everything else, at the root level. Once hearts and minds have been altered, everything else falls fast and easily. We’ve seen a whole lot of that in the last couple of decades.
(…which I guess all translates to things like “looking for your post to go viral” and “an especially intelligent hatedom that impresses people.” But both of those formulations seem unfair. Even more than politics, idea-building is the long slow boring of hard boards. The grunt work of writing essays and sharing thoughts is endless. It’s a good thing that so many of us seem to find it intrinsically rewarding.)
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To be clear: this is all a meta-point about the nature of conversation. Not an attempt to speak up for feminist media criticism specifically, which, well, at the very least it’s definitely not my project.
But it’s not like there’s no point to discourse contributions unless you can walk away with a trophy.
Eh I think you are descending into vagueness with this reply (Ra Ra Ra). I read @fierceawakening as saying “What does success with a post look like?” We can all say “we are trying to change the discourse” but what sort of measurable effects does that really mean? And once that goal is set, people can ask “is the thing that offended me really worth the reaction I am working to implement?” A law is at least a willingness to take a stand and say “this is the effect I want, and their offense is worthy of it.”
Who knows what you’re getting when you try to change hearts and minds. 99% of the time you’ll get nothing, but even when you’re successful… maybe you’ve worked up a mob and the offender’s house gets burned down. Was that what you wanted? What if some of your allies did want the mobfire, but you didn’t, but your posts were more viral than theirs… who takes responsibility for the mob?
“Who knows what you’re getting?” We all do, in the broad sense. We’ve seen with our own eyes what it means for the world to become different in response to ideological/cultural shifts amongst the population.
…which is not to say that every tumblr post is a calculated attempt to Move the Discourse by X%, or some such nonsense. We talk because we’re humans and we’re driven to talk, because our version of community-building and social grooming involves communication, because we’re trying to build personal reputations as thinkers, because the Muse is a Harsh Mistress, etc. etc., whatever. If you’re trying to break it down psychologically, it’s gonna be that kind of thing the vast majority of the time, and it’s a bit (ahem) anti-human to sneer because the communications involved aren’t built to produce Specific Concrete Outputs.
But even from the perspective of wanting Specific Concrete Outputs, in the long run, idea-dissemination matters more than anything [human].
If you really want a specific example to talk about, look at gay rights. There have been lots of concrete gay-rights triumphs along the way, and many of them have mattered a lot to people – firings, apologies, legislative acts, court decisions – but none of them has mattered a thousandth as much as creating a society where homosexuality is generally considered normal and acceptable. Without that, everything else is irrelevant or impossible; with it, everything else is trivial or unnecessary. And the concrete triumphs did in fact play their part in shifting Hearts and Minds, but at least as much (probably much more) was done by the endless stream of communications on the topic, media depictions and writings and personal conversations, on and on and on.
It’s really hard to trace a shift like that back to One Movie, let alone One Blog Post. It all dissolves into a sea of “cultural influence.” If you’re trying to be a revolutionary sage, that fact really sucks. For everyone else it doesn’t matter. When you contribute, you’re part of the grand historical process. You can’t trace the particular effects of your particular contribution: who cares?
(And…yes…if you’re contributing to a World Where More People Think Like You, that will entail contributing to a World Where More Angry Mobs Think Like You, and More Abusers Think Like You, and More Internet Jerks Think Like You, etc. Which is tragic. And if you’re personally responsible for setting off a mob or something, very tragic. But this seems like a necessary epiphenomenon of doing literally anything cultural.)
Call it vague if you want, but I strongly object. Cultural influence is as worthy an endeavor as anything. Making a thinker feel guilty for not having a Policy Outcome in mind is not only unkind but actively counterproductive.