artists and art: I need better walls

[deborah]

For some time now, I have been unhappy about the thinning of the wall between authors and readers that has taken place in the blogosphere. I've never been able to pin down exactly why (except in little ways -- as a reviewer, I had to stop reading Scott Westerfeld's blog when he started posting gleefully about positive reviews he'd received from me). I've also found it frustrating when other people post mixed or negative reviews on their own blogs, which they immediately retract if the author shows up in the blog comments to ask why the review was negative. The sense the blogosphere gives us of all being friends makes it more difficult to fulfill the professional obligation of the reviewer: to advise people on where to spend their limited resources.

Now I have a non review-related example of how this thinning wall aggravates me. Will Shetterly's behavior online has made me feel uncomfortable about the fact that his Elsewhere is required reading in my class, because I don't want to give him the sales. This is clearly a ridiculous concern on my part. For one thing, I regularly support far more loathsome people with my purchases. Shetterly, on the other hand, was probably once a pretty well-meaning guy who has just reacted pretty badly to being told that his own history of hardship does not make him always right. But more important, much more important, the book is pedagogically important. It's a little-known precursor to the genre which would eventually spawn Wicked Lovely and Twilight. Giving Shetterly a few dollars in royalties (dollars he desperately needs; the man is filing for bankruptcy, not living large on ill-gotten gains, and unless I'm going to stop requiring Twilight I really just need to get over myself) is the necessary price to teach my students what I need them to know to understand the genre.

Still, it sticks in my craw. And it shouldn't, I should be able to keep the artist and the art separate in my head. It makes me sad that the blogosphere has made that more difficult for me.

ETA: A. helped me narrow down exactly what's making me uncomfortable here. It's not an artist being Wrong on the Internet; Orson Scott Card, for example, is Wrong on the Internet pretty much every time he opens his keyboard. It's this thinning of walls, this Internet-created feeling of fellowship which allows us to engage with each other in the same spaces. When Card is an ass, he's an ass in newspaper columns. When authors engage with their critics (not even critics of their books, but critics of their extratextual words) in the spaces populated by their fans and critics, I get uncomfortable. As A. pointed out, some of the people Shetterly is insulting, investigating, and posting rumors about could easily be my students or potential students. It's that which makes me uncomfortable, not his willful blindness to the legitimate concerns of people whose side he would like to think he is on.

Well, that, too.

Comments

[yendi]

I see that frustration, although I'm not sure that the blogosphere has so much thinned the wall as simply increased the number of points on the wall at which thinning could occur (to stretch the metaphor horribly out of shape). Certainly, back in "the old days," there was already an often-tiny divide between fans and authors (witness the folks, starting at least as early as Robert Bloch, who spent time on both sides of things), and there were regularly tales of folks acting in a boorish manner. The limits of technology, of course, meant that stories could only spread via word-of-mouth (at conventions or using traditional mail), and the sort of perfect storm of the Harlan Ellison/Connie Willis situation (relying on blogs, youtube, etc) certainly couldn't have spread the way it did if it had happened in 1970.

But the thinned walls aren't always a bad thing, either. One of the most important thing for fans to get over is the idea that authors are Golden Beings Who Should Be Put On Pedestals (or Villains Who Set Out to Piss Of Their Fans, alternatively). The folks who post negative reviews and back down are in the early stages of this, still treating authors as special celebrities. Once they get past this stage (and a number of them never will, of course -- see the current George Martin kerfuffle, or the Peter David/Daily Scans one), some of the dialogues that can occur within fandom as a result are not only phenomenal, but are accessible to thousands and preserved for years. The first still happened in the old fandom model, but the latter two are hugely strengthened by the internet. And I'm not sure many authors want to be on the pedestals; too many of them are fans at heart (Jo Walton's recent writings at Tor.com make for some of the best fan writing I've seen in years).

All of the above thoughts are just off-the-cuff rambling, of course. And there are a dozen or more other factors -- including the fact that, as you note, some authors often step a little too far off those pedestals. I commented in someone's LJ that WS was a prime example of an author I wish didn't blog, as I valued his previous books way too much to want to see him acting like an ass online. And although some authors had managed to create plenty of interpersonal havoc even before coming online (I certainly had a sense of the issues some folks had with OSC, Ellison, and Piers Anthony long before I got online or became a part of fandom), the web abets that hugely. But that strikes me as the second edge of its double-edged sword.

[deborah]

oh, in the long run it's probably for the best. But it's changing things, and change is always uncomfortable, you know? And of course, some of that discomfort is good. Just as fans need to learn that authors aren't Golden Beings Who &c &c, authors (and big-name publishers) need to learn that fans don't think of them as such, and that their word is just as challengable as anyone else's. If nothing else, it's a shakeup in the way things have always been done in F&SF fandom, where there always was this very thin wall but it was only available to the people who have the free time and spare income to go to cons, which rules out, well, most of us who read the books.

Even the story of the Harlan Ellison/Connie Willis situation, which required the Internet to spread, was still only available firsthand to people who were there. But the Internet allows authors and BNFs, just like the rest of us, to show their asses to everyone. Not just authors who have newspaper columns, but anybody with an Internet connection.

I wonder if what's actually changing is a way of looking at the relationship between the author and the fan? In the days before the Internet, most of the fans an author encountered would specifically be from that subgroup who have the money, time, and inclination to go to cons -- possibly a subgroup more inclined to the smiling and agreeing (and practically, a subgroup constrained in terms of race and class to something which is not at all IDIC). Now the Internet is making it easy for authors to interact with self-described fans from all kinds of demographics, fans they never would have met back in the old days, and we are all falling all over the place trying to work out the new rules.

[yendi]

*nod* I think that last paragraph sums up things nicely (and the ability to open up fandom is something that can't be overstated). And again, I see it cutting both ways -- authors for whom traveling to cons is impossible (for economic, geographic, or physical reasons) can use the internet as well.

[cnoocy]

To some extent the internet makes clear that those walls never existed in the first place. Authors, with rare exceptions, aren't secluded from the world. I worked with Pat Conroy's daughter in high school, and Robert Olen Butler's son was a roommate at summer camp. It's always been the case that one could find oneself in a social situation with an author, which can complicate one's relationship with their works. I think that distance looks like a wall because it makes someone less accessible, and the internet obliterates distance.

[deborah]

I know that authors have always been individuals, not secluded from the world (Steinbeck and Lee notwithstanding). But at the same time, the job of the reviewer and the job of the critic are both made much ea those two people aren't likely to find themselves in the middle of an argument with the author about the validity of the review or the analysis (and for neither the reviewer nor the critic is the primary customer the author). And as for fans, well, there is a certain happiness in mindless (or mindful!) fangirling, but that's fairly difficult to do when the distance between author-as-public-figure and author-as-fellow-human dissolves. Maybe that's a good thing.

[cnoocy]

Hm. Given that authors, critics, and reviewers tend to be from a leisure class, I think that the likelihood of author-critic and author-reviewer interactions hasn't suddenly exploded on a percentage basis, but I do think those interactions have become more accessible to people outside literary circles , because they happen in open forums rather than closed salons or the letters sections of lit mags.
Which brings up another issue with this democratization of criticism: because reviews and critiques can come from everywhere, rather than from a small selection of widely-read literary publications, authors may have less reticence about responding to them. It's probably a lot easier (psychologically) to hop on line and yell at a pseudonymous* internet critic than it is to write an angry letter to the New York Times about a bad review from Michiko Kakutani.

*Not to put down pseudonymity, but to contrast the effect of a pseudonym and a Big Name Critic on a hypothetical author.

[deborah]

exactly. They have become much more accessible. (Although, of course, the people who choose to engage with authors and publishers in social networking forms is a much smaller percentage of the reading public than we like to pretend, but even so, that community is now accessible to those who aren't part of the small-s salon society.)

I suspect you are right about reticence in response. But even beyond the less reticence about response, it means that the office of them hopping online and yelling at a friend of mine are much higher. The odds of me knowing a New York Times literary critic or smaller than the odds of me knowing somebody in an online social network who reads the same books that I do. And that's what's hurting me now: not that authors are being wanky, but that they are lashing out at people I consider friends, or people I respect and wish were my friends.

In some sense, it's just that old conflation of friendship and business, another example of the maxim that you shouldn't do business with your friends. If authors are people in my social circle then I can be angry at them just like I can be angry at anyone else in my social circle, which conflicts with my desires not to purchase things from people I'm angry at, and to see art out of the context of my personal feelings about the author.
y

[diceytillerman.livejournal.com]

as a reviewer, I had to stop reading Scott Westerfeld's blog when he started posting gleefully about positive reviews he'd received from me

That was you? I thought that was me. :D (It was me -- so it was both of us! Funny that we have the same author as the key turning point.)

I don't touch author blogs with a ten foot pole, unless it's someone with whom I am too close friends to be reviewing anyway. Partly because I felt dirty when I saw Westerfeld squee over a star I'd given him, and also because I know myself, and I know that seeing authors' feelings and vulnerability about my reviews -- heck, about any reviews -- will do no one any good.

Occasionally an author drops by my LJ to comment on something I've posted there about their work, but that's not reviewing, just blogging. Even that makes me feel funny, but with google alerts, I think it's here to stay.

I review for the sake of readers via acquisition librarians with limited budgets. Lather, rinse, repeat every ten minutes as needed.

[deborah]

you know, I almost wrote "I did this after dicey, because it happened to her before it happened to me, but then I didn't bother.

The thing is, for you and me, it's "not reviewing, just blogging". But one of the things about the blogosphere is that any blogger can be a reviewer, and lots of "amateur" reviewers write very high-quality reviews which are valuable to people making decisions about whether or not to buy a book. So for us, because we are also professional reviewers, it's not reviewing. But for the blogger-reviewer, it really is.

[diceytillerman.livejournal.com]

Hee, I'm just amused that we both reached the intersection of Westerfeld Road & Boundaryless Junction. It must be right in the middle of the map.

It's true about the reviewing/blogging distinction and nondistinction. Something I forget, too, is that I feel quite differently about an author stopping by my blog vs an author stopping by my blog and commenting on a post that's explicitly about their work. I'm not saying it's not their right -- it's the way things work -- but it makes me feel confused and muddy.

[alphacygni]

Citing Card as a contrasting example is interesting. He had his own online social network where he would pal around with a community of his fans, way back when. His "Hatrack River" net presence started as an America Online area and chat room in 1993. He was often in the chat room.

But Card is very consistent, and most people who read lots of his work are eventually confronted with deciding how to deal with his personal views. It doesn't sneak up on you.

[deborah]

Color me educated -- I didn't know about that. Most of the authors I know who are in social networks don't talk about their own books (e.g. on childlit) but I admit that I tend to avoid social networks are authors would talk about their own books, so there you go.

The problem with what's going on right now isn't the same as the problem with Card. He is, as you say, consistent in his political views. That's different from just being an ass. (And there are authors who are out there who are known for being asses, and about whom everyone is made happy when it turns out that Coke gets poured on them during a con. But as I said upstream, knowledge of author behavior used to be restricted to people who had the ability and inclination to go to cons.)

[robling-t.livejournal.com]

I've long thought that the trouble with the internet in general is that we humans have evolved to cope with maintaining a social network of at most a few dozen people, and all of a sudden we're trying to handle having all nearly 7 billion of us dumped into our heads at once; part of what the wall you speak of is about is separating out who we need to deal with in immediate terms, and we're not very good (yet?) at sorting out the signals coming in when so many more people appear to be on the inside of that wall. It will be... interesting to see how the generations growing up digital reach their accommodation to this issue, because I suspect that anyone who even vaguely remembers the Before Times is going to be facing one hell of a gap between their perceptions of the world. ("Mommy, you mean before the internet you had to use your legs to go to talk to people...?") Oh, the approaching Singularity sometimes makes me kinda glad I haven't got round to having kids... {sigh}

[deborah]

I think you are very right. Danah Boyd just had a really interesting post about researchers treating Internet "friend networks" academically as if they were the same thing as our off-line friend networks. a whole lot of people appear to be inside my wall when they are not even remotely inside what I would have called the wall 15 years ago.

[robling-t.livejournal.com]

Danah Boyd just had a really interesting post

Oo, link please?