survey!fail catchup

So I have gotten out my temper tantrum and have returned to my usual state of rationality.

If you have no idea what Survey!Fail is, courtesy of elfwreck, linkspam one, linkspam two and linkspam three will give you a million posts on what is going on, and a lot of them are really fun, and some of them are very technical, and some made me wikipedia and learn about phrenology, which is about skull measurements to determine personality. Which you know, seriously, I don't even know at this point what the hell I am reading, but one day, I am going to go on Jeopardy and kick ass because of the sheer amount of random information I am picking up.

If you want it shorter and in a single layman entry, however, my comm of choice is Unfunny Business, which has like, everything.

So. Two links courtesy of jonquil:

Neurology For Beginners by neededalj, who has been critical in debunking a lot of what was going around about what this survey was doing.

Psychology for Beginners by sabrina_il, which debunks what psychology can do right now and what it can't.

My Random Comments After Reading Five Million Entries or Something Like That

I am still feeling stroppy, so I'm skipping commentary, which luckily, cannot possibly be missed since there's tons of it out there. I just kind of want to, you know, tell a story and not be reminded that in fandom, the act of posting fiction is part of an ongoing realtime study examining why on earth I'm doing such a thing and everything that could possibly, possibly mean.

And you know, I want a pony, too. Give me a few days and I will totally be over it.

Comments

[ranalore.livejournal.com]

My reaction to SurveyFail has been twofold, and similar to yours. First, there's the fury of yet more outsiders pushing into my space and demanding, "Explain your art to us or we will explain it for you! Only explain it to us in terms that justify the way we've already decided it works!" Then there's the fury of anyone, fellow fan or outsider, stating, "I know your motivations better than you do, and I will not listen to anything you say that contradicts me!" To use an example that's been on my mind since links to SurveyFail started popping up, a few years back, old school Kirk/Spock BNF Leslie Fish joined FCA-L. Shortly after joining, she attempted to put forth a Grand Unified Slash Theory that universalized her own reasons for writing Kirk/Spock to apply to anyone writing slash in any fandom. I was one of the people who scoffed at the theory, because those reasons did not and never had applied to me (and still don't), and for some fandoms, those reasons never could apply (this was before Torchwood, but after both versions of Queer As Folk, so assumed heterosexuality of the characters was already not universal, for example). When told the theory conflicted with other people's experience and motivations, though, Fish asserted that her years in fandom made her more qualified to determine why fans did things than those fans' self-awareness. While the disagreement eventually caused her to shut up about the subject, I don't think she ever stopped believing she was right and we were all deluding ourselves.

I don't mind having my work examined and discussed in conjunction with looking at various fannish trends. After over twenty years in fandom, I've certainly done enough self-examination and communal observation to have a few theories of my own. However, I've also seen and analyzed enough to know fandom is too diverse for any kind of Grand Unified Theory, and it really pisses me off when people continue to try coming up with one. All that tells me is they're not paying enough attention and certainly aren't qualified to do what they're trying to do, or they'd never try it. It only makes it worse that people putting forth Grand Unified Theories consistently dismiss evidence that conflicts with the theory, rather than adapting the theory (or admitting that no theory is broad enough to address the entirety of fannish experience and thought processes).