Personal Update and Blog/Racialicious Comparison

Last week was really exhausting. I need another vacation! My weekends are becoming an extension of the working week... and this is mainly my own fault, since I really need to organize them better.

Sunny has a 101-degree fever this morning. Guy had to pick him up from school yesterday because he had a sore throat, but then his throat quickly got better, so Guy took him right back to school. Last night Sunny's appetite didn't suffer: he ate a huge pork chop, with sides of couscous and grilled asparagus with cheese on top, then some grapes for dessert. It's hard to know how to handle Sunny being sick because 1) he's ridiculously healthy and 2) he's sort of a hypochondriac. In all the time we've had him he's been sick exactly once, and that lasted less than a day. I think he has a very powerful immune system, so when gets sick, the symptoms are light, and go away quickly. Because he's so dramatic, he doesn't exactly lie, but he does exaggerate his symptoms greatly. All kids do this to some extent, but Sunny does seem a bit extreme. His friend J has a much more stoic approach to illness and injury. On the other hand, because Sunny's so energetic and restless, I think he gets up and moves around when he really should be relaxing...

I just hope he doesn't have the swine flu, or the regular flu, for that matter. I've been watching the news and calling our pediatrician to find out when I can get him the vaccine, but I don't have a date yet.

Right now, his cousin (Guy's sister's daughter) is visiting, and they're hanging out on the couch, watching Voltron and playing Legos together. They'd be out running around if Sunny was feeling better.

I just noticed comments from Sarah (hi!) saying, among other things, that I sound a lot different at this blog than I do at Racialicious, where I comment frequently and guest-post occasionally. I haven't thought about it that much, but that's right. I'm much more of a hard-ass at Racialicious, ha ha! It's a good jump-off point for talking about online communities in general, though.

I really don't like using terms such as "safe space" and "triggering" on the internet because I think they're infantilizing. But what I observe is sort of a continuum of environments. The parameters include the following:

1) Who are the members who will interact with you?
2) Who are the members who read what you say, but will not interact with you?
-- For anything posted publicly, 1) is unpredictable and 2) is REALLY unpredictable, and much larger than 1).
3) What's your degree of hard control over who will interact with you? If you're a moderator of a group, you can kick another member out. If you run a blog, you can delete comments. If you're on a forum, you could use the "ignore" feature on someone.
4) What's your degree of soft control (level of respect in you, or your peer group) when it comes to who will interact with you? If you tell someone they're being offensive, are they likely to listen to you and stop? Can you marshal support? If you have a whole posse of people and they all tell that person to stop, will they listen?
5) What is the range of opinions permissible in the environment? Is your perspective inside that range, outside that range or on the edge?
6) What do you want to get from the environment? Concrete bits of useful information? Psychological validation and a sense of human contact? Entertainment and light humor? Establishing lasting links with new people? Revenge? A sense of power over others? With these last two, we're getting into troll territory, although they're negative tendencies that can surface in absolutely anyone.
7) What do you want to give to the environment? Do you think you have anything of valuable to impart, and do you want to educate others? If so, you need to tailor your message to the audience (so we go back to 1 and 2).
8) What is the cost to you of participating in the environment? This is crucial. Navigating all these elements is hard. Just when you think you understand one of them, something changes. You get disappointed, angry, you feel like no one is listening to you, you thought you were in a "safe space" but someone attacks you, someone you thought was your ally disagrees with you strongly, you feel betrayed, you feel unwanted, you feel like you have to maintain a false face and hide your true self in order to gain acceptance, or you become disappointed in yourself because you engaged in negative behavior out of anger... internet drama takes a toll. Sometimes you want to be in an environment, but it's just too damaging, and you're better off turning your back. Sometimes the cost is very high, but what you're learning/getting is so valuable that you need to stay.

Though people will often say "I just want to express myself", it's never as simple as that. Unless your expression is totally private, "self-expression" will have a social element.

When it comes to 1) and 2) for this blog, I agonize a lot. I control my interactive audience by limiting comments to people with Google accounts. This means most of the people who interact here also have Google blogs. They're more invested in leaving substantive comments. So I almost never get drive-by comments. The trade-off is that I lose out on substantive comments by people who aren't registered and don't feel like registering. For 2), I removed this blog from Google listings for a while, then a few months ago I put it back on, and just now, I took it back off again. I do NOT want people who know me personally surfing in on key words. Especially my mom and dad. I'm very close to my mother. We work on certain projects together, we see each other every other day, but one of the reasons I don't talk about her much on this blog is that I don't want to put down key words that would lead her here, because she's internet-savvy and on more social media than I am! Partly because we're so close, I want to maintain certain barriers so I don't feel smothered. My dad is the opposite of my mom: he's an intensely private person. I am also protecting Sunny's identity and that of his biological and foster family. I have a lot of reasons to want to maintain anonymity.

My control over this blog isn't total, in the soft sense. I care about what other people think. The feelings of regular readers and commenters do factor when I'm writing a post. It's not the number one factor, but it's in there. Number 5 -- the range of permissible opinions -- is also difficult, because I'm blogging at the intersection of some practically incongruous communities. What's held as standard and inarguable inside one community might be totally outside the envelope at another. I flatter myself that in this respect, I'm quite honest, I don't censor myself and I don't avoid controversies. I put that opinion out there and I also analyze why it's outside the envelope to begin with. I've already talked a lot about what I've gotten from being part of a blog community (great, life-changing advice and support) and what I want to give back (more of the same). The emotional cost of running this blog mostly has to do with anonymity-agonizing... other than that, it's very low.

When it comes to Racialicious, all of these factors are different. A lot more people read there, and a lot more people read there that will never comment, but are still very important because what they read there might change their opinions. I don't have any hard control there, but I have a degree of soft control, because I've been hanging out there so long that I've built up respect. When it comes to the range of opinions, I'm mostly on the inside. So although there's a lot of tussling and heated debate that go on, the emotional cost to me is fairly low, because I feel like I'm arguing from a position of greater strength. Plus, there are a lot of posts on topics I have little experience on -- e.g. Native American identity, Islam -- and on those, I'm a member of the passive audience, learning but not necessarily interacting.

I used to participate in more online communities, but I don't have the time for a wide range. And when I analyze the emotional cost, it's often too high. There are a few communities I've participated in where I just wanted very concrete bits of information, in which I made sure to have a race- and gender-neutral handle, and got in and got out again right away. Because otherwise I would have been harassed and it would have been horrible. A few months ago I got burned when I was in a certain community and complained (in what I thought was a mild and reasonable way) about a racist Asian joke and about twenty members just piled on me. Race card, PC, no sense of humor, Asians are all doctors or lawyers anyway, blah blah blah. I walked around for a day in real life while fuming, and that wasn't healthy. Arguing a case in a hostile environment can do a lot of good (remembering, again, the passive audience) but it comes at a high emotional cost.

I don't think I'm really saying anything different at Racialicious, but I am talking about different aspects of the same things, and in different ways. I also let loose my evil sense of humor a bit more over there.

Update: by the time I finished typing this up, Sunny seems to have recovered... he's full of beans again, and playing some kind of high-volume racing game with his cousin.