Community, Pseudonymity, and Sewing Blogs

As an aspiring sewist (I guess “seamstress” seems too old-fashioned, though I like it, and “sewer” clearly doesn’t work), I also read garment sewing blogs. Which are tremendously helpful fonts of advice and inspiration for sewing, but for thinking, offer an interesting counterpoint to discussions about pseudonymity and academic blogging.

Like academic blogs, there are many many women blogging about sewing (just one man I read regularly). Most of them have a bit of a persona, but also use a real first name, rarely last names. They post full-on pictures of themselves all the time, and sometimes their children—you have to, you can’t blog about garment sewing without posting pictures to show off, or ask for fitting advice as a garment is in progress. Garments might be shown on a dressform, but that is less common. (I might actually use my sewing blog if I had a good picture-posting workflow).

They are usually open about what city they are in, and sometimes people have meetups. (On the other hand, they are not findable as professors are—-that is, knowing a first name and city does not generally enable me to show up outside their office, as would be the case with most professors. A few people do specify their jobs.)

The content, unlike pseudonymous academic blogs, is pretty exclusively focused. The expectation is that blogs are dedicated to sewing—people will sometimes apologize for the occasional post that is not about sewing or clothes. A few of them have other blogs, but not very many.

Some other participant-observation notes:

• The blog community seems to be an extension of the Pattern Review community, which does forums, classes, and contests as well as reviewing and selling patterns. A “pattern review” discusses making a garment in detail, and people often post their pattern reviews both on the PR site and as a blog post.
• Garment sewing blogs also overlap and intermingle with the vintage clothing blogs, and general fashion/style blogs. They don’t overlap with the mommy bloggers that much, that I can tell.
• The community is very international. Many more bloggers and commenters from England, Australia and New Zealand, but also continental Europe and Asia and a few people using Google Translate to automatically blog in two languages.
• There’s also a significant number of black American women (a contrast with the mommy blogs, I believe).
• Most of them are on Blogger—very few on WordPress—and they make heavy use of the Follower option in Blogger, tending to do giveaways when follower count hits 100, 200, etc, and keeping the widget in the sidebar.
• Community interaction is pretty strong. Sometimes people just do random giveaways. Expert sewists often lead sew-alongs, where everyone buys the same pattern and works on the same project while the leader does instructional posts over a few weeks or months. Tutorials are common.
• There are a lot of regular commenters with Blogger profiles who Follow blogs but do not have a blog themselves.
• Comments are almost invariably positive compliments (this is difficult for me, as I tend to comment to debate rather than to agree).
• I much more frequently run into blogs that disallow anonymous comments and have the name/url option turned off (which generally means I don’t comment much, especially since I don’t have a proper google account for my sewing identity, and thus don’t Follow any blogs).

PS. Sewing is going quite well. Just over a year after starting, I successfully made myself a flattering and attractive semi-formal silk dress for a gala weekend before last. I am very proud.

 

Community vs. Audience: A Tangent on the Recent Pseudonymity Thing

The guest post at Tenured Radical linked to Kevin Levin, a Civil War scholar and blogger, talking about his own blogging quite a while back.

The mistake that people make is in thinking about social media as a way to build community. Some of you who have been around for a while know that not too long ago I was fixated with creating a Civil War Memory community. At one point or another I included Google Friend Connect and even a widget for the Civil War Memory Facebook page in the sidebar. Somehow I envisioned readers connecting with one another and continuing discussions in various online spaces. I now see this as completely misguided. There are no Online communities; in fact, it demeans the very concept of community.

In the end, social media affords the user the opportunity to build an AUDIENCE.

He gets excellent pushback from the commenters on this, and follows up:

I guess I would like to know what the difference is between a couple of people whining about my site and a community of interest or even a more robust notion of community. In the end I don’t see myself as fostering a community or taking part in one. Again, I see my readers as an audience, but an audience that I can interact with in different ways.

I find this really interesting—and admittedly, somewhat bizarre—in part because I started this blog not to get an audience, but to join a community. The blog was largely a home to give my comments elsewhere some context, to make me an identifiable and contactable character while I was out and about on the web. Readers are always conceived of as people who followed me “home” because I wrote a comment they found appealing—because that’s exactly how I read blogs.

For a counterpoint to Levin’s view, we can check out Ta-Nehisi Coates and a cute piece in The Economist. If you don’t read TNC, he’s known around the blogosphere for having good discussion in the comments, especially on tricky subjects like race. I don’t participate in the Open Threads over there, but if I remember correctly, the creation of the Open Threads, or at least doing them every day instead of intermittently, was a request from commenters to open a space to build community among people they enjoyed talking with. And they just held a meet-up, and are planning more.

The Economist piece focuses on unintended communities, with some nice quotations:

It’s somewhat like ignoring the vegetable drawer of your fridge for a year, then opening it to find a bunch of very grateful sentient tomatoes busily working on their third opera.

I have an unposted draft that claims people want to join cults—Apple, aerobics, football fans, bullying, etc. That’s a bit too snarky. But forming a community strikes me as a natural tendency of most of the people I run into online these days.

 

Two Comments on Pseudonymity I Want to Remember

Re: Katrina Gulliver at Tenured Radical, yadda yadda yadda. There’s discussion there, or check out Not of General Interest, Another Damned Medievalist, and Dr. Crazy for more excellent commentary.

Jonathan Dresner’s comment at Another Damned Medievalist’s:

One of the downsides of the internet, and this goes way back before facebook, is the way in which it collapses your activities – personal, professional, political – into equally visible and interlocking things. Whereas our lives offline are segmented and our identities situational in ways that we rarely question until the boundaries of communities get collapsed somehow.

That exactly explains the main reason why I am pseudonymous. It’s the only way to resist that collapsing, which I see as a perversion of normality.
New Kid on the Hallway, at Dr. Crazy’s place:

I think one of the things that’s at play here is how difficult it is to distinguish “work” from “non-work” in academia. That is, like you, Dr. Crazy, I never wrote in any sustained way about my academic field (teaching, yes, teaching medieval history, sometimes, struggling with research in general, yes, but not actually about the subject of my research). But I wrote a lot about being an academic because I *was* an academic, and being an academic takes up a whole lot of one’s life. It’s not one of those jobs you leave at work when you get home. (Plus, being on the tenure-track is unlike almost any other kind of job.) So I think that there’s one kind of academic-life-blogging that is really life blogging, but because academia TAKES OVER your life, that kind of life blogging entails talking about academia quite a lot. And because it’s about academia, some readers assume it’s also professional blogging, and bring professional expectations to the experience. But such blogging is *not* a professional document.

I think New Kid nailed it. I was trying to figure out how to express that.

 

Notable Quotations: Michael Chabon on Writing

Michael Chabon after a week guest-blogging at Ta-Nehisi Coates:

Novelist time is reptile time; novelists tend to be ruminant and brooding, nursers of ancient grievances, second-guessers, Tuesday afternoon quarterbacks, retrospectators, endlessly, like slumping hitters, studying the film of their old whiffs. You find novelists going over and over the same ground in their novels—TNC was talking about Gatsby last week, Fitzgerald’s a prime example—configuring and reconfiguring the same little set of preoccupations, haunted by missed opportunities. That may be because getting a novel written, or a bunch of novels, means that you are going to miss a lot of opportunities, and so missing them is something you have to be not only willing but also equipped by genes and temperament to do. Blogging, I think, is largely about seizing opportunities, about pouncing, about grabbing hold of hours, events, days and nights as they are happening, sizing them up and putting them into play with language, like a juggler catching and working into his flow whatever the audience has in its pockets.

 

Brief PS re Psuedonymity

I’ve been using fake names since I started getting catcalled by men on the street (when was that? My only memory with a clear date attached: telling some man on the bus that I was eleven when I had turned twelve a month before. Note: by this point, I was familiar enough with the whole situation that I knew a minor lie was a good idea).

So why would it ever cross my mind to put my real name on the web?

(And re catcalling, check out this interesting post about a video game based on it)

Direct followup to this post, one in a series.

 

New Look

Actually, I went through a few new looks.

I was happy with my old theme, Ocean Mist, and may go back to it at some point, but wanted a bigger change than just a new header image.

Motion is beautiful, but I can’t inflict white-on-dark on anyone. I could just about read the white-on-teal, but it seemed hypocritical to stick with it.

I quite liked the dark blue Neat! theme (can’t find a link), especially the random little flowers, but it seemed to require me to bake the Prone to Laughter title into the custom header image—which is fine, that’s right about my level of photo-editing skill—but I couldn’t handle the thought of trying to figure out the perfect font to express Prone to Laughter. I dismissed Bueno as a theme option because it put Prone to Laughter in very blocky capitals that just didn’t match the words.

And although I’d put up with sans serif for ages, I really prefer to have the post text in a serif font, so I went looking for something that used serifs. There didn’t seem to be very many options.

So I went with Connections and a custom header: sulfur steaming from the ground in a valley I hiked over a mountain to get to.

By the way, for Blogger users: I get the sense you all have a lot more control over specific elements of a theme. WordPress.com is pick a theme and that’s what you get, with maybe a few elements customizable. To be honest, I prefer the Blogger themes (especially the blogrolls that re-order for recent posts), but I hate the way Blogger handles comments way more than I care about how the blog looks.

 

Is Anyone NOT Using RSS?

Because I haven’t blogged in forever, but I figure everyone uses an RSS reader by now, which takes the pressure off having something worthwhile to share at any point when people might click over. But, you know, I could try harder to actually finish draft posts if I know there’s a need.

 

Notable Quotations

I think there are people out there who see the internet as a way of employing the same old techniques of SHILL, SHILL, SHILL. A hundred years ago, they would have rolled up to you in a wagon, shouting about their tonic. Fifty years ago, they would have rolled their vacuum cleaners up to your door.

Maureen Johnson, “Manifesto“

 

Notable Quotations

Commenter PHB at Crooked Timber:

There are many different definitions of identity, not all of which make sense. I prefer the view that an identity is a set of assertions about yourself that you may lay claim to. So in a sense everyone only has one identity and has only ever had one ‘identity’. But in practice we expose different sets of claims depending on the circumstances. Nobody puts their membership in Alcoholics Anonymous on their CV.

In response to Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook:

“You have one identity,” he emphasized three times in a single interview with David Kirkpatrick in his book, “The Facebook Effect.” “The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly.” He adds: “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”

Huh. I’m concerned, naturally.

 

Of Privilege and Pseudonymity

Even in many anti-pseudonymity screeds, there seems be a general acceptance that putting one’s real name and picture online is a position of privilege that perhaps women and people of color might be excused from as vulnerable populations (I’m somewhat cynically reflecting these ideas, not endorsing them, here).

But I wonder if there is something else going on, that is not at all about vulnerability or fear, particularly as regards people of color (and I apologize if these are old ideas—I’ve don’t remember seeing them emphasized in the several discussions of pseudonymity that I’ve read):

For the Chinese-American who has always had a family name and a school name; for the Latino who easily flips between Spanish and English conversations at the same party; for the black female professor who only straightens her hair during the semester—an internet name may simply be a natural extension of the kind of code-switching they’ve been doing all their life. For them, there is nothing fake or unreal about adopting a particular persona.

By contrast, someone who has never had to practice constant contextual adaptation at such a level of self may feel less comfortable with the act of going by another name; they may feel that setting up a persona is an act of deceit, or a loss of part of self. For instance at Prof Hacker, Brian Croxall begins his endorsement of using real names with:

I try to be myself….What being myself online has meant to me has been achieved through using one username across most of the Internet and one avatar.

That’s what it means to him. For me being myself has rarely involved any sort of consistency in my daily life, regardless of the internet. I admit that I’m an extreme case. But the internet didn’t make me that way. I remember desperately wanting contact lenses in high school because while I was already “the smart kid”, I really did not want to be “the geek with glasses.” I love this bit from Rana because it so clearly shows how using a real name is disconnected from being oneself. Half the reason to begin using a variant online name was to signify female more clearly—in other words, to be more myself.

A single avatar? Let’s consider gendered norms for appearance. I was once given a (wholly ridiculous) dress code of “business elegant” for an academic celebration. For men, the range of clothes they might wear in that context was fairly tight—the main decision was whether to wear a full suit or just a jacket and pants. Women, trying to decide what clothes such a context required, showed up in everything from a casual skirt and tanktop to a long evening gown. On another day, they might have made a different choice. Many women also have a much greater range of hairstyles to experiment with, or have had at some point in their life. Women get makeovers. Thus, women rarely present an identical “avatar” in all contexts in real life. Why should they do so online?

I resist photographic avatars because I think they cannot help but lie to their audience. I don’t want to pick one moment, one attitude, to attach to everything I post online, when I may be writing happy, angry, pensive. My affinity for rivers and my love of a curve through the landscape, expressed in my current avatar, are far more fundamental to being myself than any fleeting facial expression.

 

I Hate Blogger Comments

• You have to open up a new window to post them. Sometimes you can bring the original post back for review (sans links, photos, or blocked-out quotations), but not always. So quoting is a big-ass hassle. And if you want to keep the page open to follow the discussion and check back for new comments, the window title is not-so-helpful.
• If you prefer to use a Name/URL for ID, you have to select that option and re-enter it every single time. WordPress.com with Firefox on a Mac usually has mine pre-entered.
• The comments only show a time posted, not a date. You have no clue whether a thread is dead or not, or how many days elapsed between comments.
• The captchas seem to expire if they sit there too long. So if you write a long comment, look up some links, think about it, re-read the other comments to respond to them, then it is invariably rejected on the first try. Sometimes technology actually does help dumb us down.
• Depending on how the comments are set up and how many times you failed the captcha, you might have to hit Back 6-7 times to review the original post after commenting.
• If you post a URL beginning with http://, WordPress automatically turns it into a clickable link. Blogger does not.

This is pretty much why I went for WordPress instead of Blogger, because I much preferred commenting on it (I will admit that templates in Blogger seem much more customizable, and I am envious of the blogrolls with excerpts of recent posts).

By the way, people using Blogger? Especially those of you with the cool icons? If you want, you can put your avatar into Gravatar.com and then it should show up on WordPress.com blogs too (and possibly other places). People using other systems who have been forced to create an annoying Blogger profile just to comment in certain places might also want to add their avatar to the profile.

Does anyone know how to make Firefox do a site search? Because some blogs don’t have search boxes.

And while I’m whining—to a number of faculty whom I shall not address directly, because none of us really have the right to complain about how other people run their blogs (which doesn’t stop me): seriously, your blog is very little different from mine, a mix of personal and academic posts addressing little controversial material or touchy issues that tend to draw haters and trolls. How is that you can’t allow anonymous comments or the Name/URL option and everyone has to sign in to comment, but I’m totally fine leaving mine wide open? Is my readership really substantially lower than yours? (I rarely check it, but it seems pretty low.) Are there trolls out there I just never see? Does WordPress.com actually do a better job on spam? What am I missing?

 

Notable Quotations

Rana knocks the anti-pseudonymity ball out of the park:

Finally, you write “I’d rather be able to connect what people say to who they are.” You know what? I find this to be a not-so-charmingly naive statement. “Who they are” is contingent on context and situation. What I write, here and elsewhere, is a far better measure of “who I am” than a formal title on a faculty website. In some contexts, “who I am” is a 39-year-old white woman who wears glasses. In others, “who I am” is “that blogger who writes about nature, photography and academia.” In others, I am “that yoga student who keeps drifting in and out of practice.” At times who I am is “pantheistic Unitarian Universalist who votes Green.”

If you Google my legal name, none of this information will come up. In fact, what will come up are references to about fifteen other people who share my name. On the other hand, if you Google my pseudonym, and read my blog – which I link to in all my comments on other people’s blogs – you will learn all these things.

In other words, my real name is a lousy tool for figuring out “who I am” – unless you are interested only in my degree and where I teach.

Context: First, Second. This one is from Third. My previous discussion, with links.

 

Seriously *Meta* Blogging

One of things that is interesting—probably only to me—is how I changed my sidebar as I continued blogging.

I started blogging in order to join a community. I was reading a lot of blogs—I occasionally commented, but it seemed wrong to be a consistent lurker without identifying myself or having a real personality. So I started a blog, and found I had more to say than I thought.

Anyhow, I think I started out with the Blogroll at the very top. “You don’t know who I am,” it said, “but these are the people who I read, and that tells you something.” A brief About was at the bottom.

Once I had enough posts, and had commented around a bunch with this link, I moved the Categories to the top. “Okay, you’ve situated me as an academic. Now here are the things I talk about.”

When I had been blogging a while, I put the About page linked at the top. “Okay, I have regular readers, who might be interested.” (except it says nothing, but oh well) The Blogroll comes next—”this is the community I belong to, more or less.” Then Categories—”I talk about a lot of stuff—check it out.”

Now I’ve put a Twitter feed at the very top, largely to refresh content for anyone who may be clicking by.

(The use of monthly archives is usually dependent on the template—if the template doesn’t let people page through individual posts, I add archives to allow back-reading.)

See also: The Bitter and the Sweet on “The Ethics of the Blogroll“

 

Microblogging

I am sort of using Twitter (currently it’s taking the place of Random Bullets of Grading), and have a little feed in the blog sidebar (which nicely relieves my pressure to blog every day. Actually, my pressure to blog every day died when I switched to RSS. Everyone should use RSS). WordPress.com only allows the regular RSS widget for the Twitter feed, so it’s not so pretty, but it’s functional.

So, I also opened up a twitter account for my alternate userid the same day as I set up the pronetolaughter account.

I posted a first message, and then absolutely nothing to either of them until a couple of weeks ago.

In the meantime, ProneToLaughter collected 8 followers, only one of whom I have heard of and have any clue why they might conceivably be interested in anything I have to say. Most of the rest were marketers. Alternate Userid has no followers, not even the marketers.

The only difference, I think, must be that ProneToLaughter has a website link (which aUserid didn’t until a couple weeks ago, when I went all crazy with it).

 

Metablog: Threaded Commenting

There’s a new Reply link at the bottom of each comment. If you use it, you get indented threaded commenting for things that are direct responses. Or ignore it, and just use the regular box. This is a new WordPress.com feature, so you’ll likely see it a bunch of places. I tried it out on the last post, but my comments are not such to require threading, so I may turn it off.

In announcing it, WP.com blog wrote:

To save you and your readers from scroll-finger strain, you can now break up comments into pages.

Uh, moving the mouse to click a next page link is WAY more straining than hitting the space bar. No one on a computer (as opposed to a phone) should be using finger-scroll for the web (and I wish many many other programs let me scroll by hitting the space bar, especially iPhoto and the iTunesStore. I can see that it wouldn’t work well in MS Word).