Thoughts on exclusion and culture (amy's REAL post)

[Amy Z]

(Whoops, I hit send before I was done.  Individual-emails-receivers, 
delete the previous; digest-receivers, ignore the previous.  AZ)



David, thanks for the fantastic essay, which may not have been
accessible to everyone but was extremely clarifying for me. ;-) I
think the duelling metaphors explain a lot of what is going on.

> I think in the long run we should try to leave these metaphors
> behind, and consider how our actions as posters affect readers of
> all kinds. That's an easy ideal to aim for, and a hard one to
> achieve, if only because we know so little of the contexts into
> which our words are going. Even simple rules of thumb for
> politeness are more local than we realise, and fool us on the
global
> internet.

Yes, so what I am about to say is deliberately naive:

I would like to see politeness be the deciding factor in decisions
about what is and is not acceptable on the list.

David has explicated how it is that people may legitimately reach
opposite conclusions about TBAY's politeness. One conclusion is that
it's polite to allow it because it's some people's best way to
explain their theories, and after all, we're all at a party and
expected to wander to whatever discussion we find interesting and 
accessible.  Another is that it's polite to exclude it because it's 
impenetrable to some people, and after all, we're all at a seminar 
and the speaker's supposed to be addressing us all. So appeals to 
politeness will not resolve the Gordian knot of TBAY.

However, they may resolve the meta-issue of how to talk about TBAY.
One way to form some common ground of politeness even when very
different metaphors shape people's assumptions is to *assume
goodwill.* What dismays me in the current conversation is not the
conflict of needs on the list, nor the conflict in interpretations of
what happens with TBAY, but the quickness to assume that others are
trying to exclude one. No social situation can remain friendly
without a basic assumption, on the part of most participants, that
most participants are acting out of good intentions. Please, if
someone is posting in a style you find inaccessible, or if someone is
pressing you to stop posting in a style you like, consider before you
raise an angry protest that his/her motivation is probably not to 
persecute you, but just to have things on the list go a way that is 
comfortable and enjoyable for him/her. (Probably. It's just possible 
that he/she is an utter bastard who's here at the party/seminar 
purely to make your life miserable. :P )

> I suppose the main conclusion is that all this is a matter for list
> members, not list administrators.

Now, this I don't follow. It *might* be something that is best left
to the natural evolutions of culture, or then again it *might* be
best if the administrators make the call. Or there could be a vote
by the entire membership of the list; or the members could give their
2 Knuts 'til they're tired of it and then the admins could weigh the
points raised and make the decision; or we could declare that anarchy
will be the new policy, erase the Humongous Bigfile, and let the list
turn into all-TBAY-all-the-time, a group for annotated scholarly
essays, a shipping channel, a general discussion group that's allowed
to drift off the topic of HP and never return, you name it.

Whoever makes any such decision, there will be a certain
arbitrariness to the final ruling. English has been deemed the
language of the list and those who cannot comfortably carry on a
conversation in English are urged to find a list in a different
language. Netspeak (of the "hahahhaha, ur the graetest, Davew@!
hey, im a lunarulz fan, ru12?" variety) has been disallowed. Off-
topic chatter has been moved to OTChatter. These decisions don't
mean that English is the best language in the world, that you can't
have a good discussion in netspeak, or that a list can't thrive with
a high percentage of OT posts. Rather, they mean that a list can't be 
all things at once, and so HPfGU is (for now) a list for people who 
know English, prefer to converse with standard grammar and spelling, 
and want to carry on their HP-related conversation in one place and 
their other conversations in another.  Those who want a different 
kind of list are free to go elsewhere.  (IOW, this may be a party, a 
seminar, or something completely different, but it is not a gulag.  
Furthermore, it exists within a larger community in which anyone can 
form a list about almost anything and guided by almost any set of 
rules.  So the ultimate answer to "I hate the rules on this list," 
after due discussion of said rules, is "okay, form another list, and 
vaya con dios."  This isn't a kissoff--it's just an acknowledgement 
that no list can please everyone.)

Or, to expand somewhat on one such decision: Filks have been deemed
permissible, fanfiction not. It seems to me that that is a logical
division, based on bandwidth (filkers can be allowed to run wild and
they'll still take up only a fraction of a percent of list volume)
and the overall resources of the fandom (there are 5,012,366 HP
fanfiction websites, so why turn HPfGU, which has its own useful
niche, into a general fanfic group?). One could easily argue that
filks should be banned from the list ("it's a discussion group, damn
it!") or that fanfic should be allowed ("it's a legitimate way to
explore theories about HP, damn it!"), and people have argued both,
and the admins have wrestled with the questions and finally
said, "Right, you can argue for all different approaches, but you
can't use them all in one place and so here on HPfGU it's gonna go
like this."

So, anyway, could you say more about what you mean by "a matter for
list members, not administrators"?

Amy Z
who speaks American and therefore doesn't know what the verb "major" 
means, outside of "I majored in Harry Potter Studies, with a minor in 
Lord of the Rings"