Interesting Links for 08-01-2023

[andrewducker]

1. The Power of Indulging Your Weird, Offbeat Obsessions

(tags:obsession science research advice viaPatrickHadfield )

2. Trigger warnings for innate parts of people's lives are not a good idea

(tags:triggerwarnings minorities )

Comments

[altamira16]

That second link is very interesting and gets at the heart of the arguments over Mastodon CW culture.

[jack]

I feel like any worthwhile communication principles, like content warnings, if they become at all accepted, have worthwhile uses and accumulate a cruft of simplifications, and people lashing out when they're hurt in ways that request impossible things of people, and people wilfully-ignorantly or wilfully misusing them to push what they want. And it can be a challenge to unravel what's useful and what isn't.

I feel like people instinctively want "content warnings" (or "safe spaces") to come with a standard version that's universally correct, but many things don't work like that. It's worth having a generally accepted standard for "what CW are worthwhile in wider society", but different communities and micro-communities and individual blogs are likely to have their own standards too. Some things are useful for tag for everyone because most people find it somewhat disturbing. Some things are only practical to tag if you expect particular people to benefit from it.

Sometimes needs are incompatible and we need to balance them as best we can. The example of "can't add a warning around everything that's a central part of my identity" is a good one. But there can be still be variation: someone's blog or small community might say "I've no problem with people who exercise regularly but for me it triggers distress about weight loss, so please don't talk about it *here*". If someone has a religion that's primarily defined by bigotry, I might want them to warn for it in more circumstances than someone who has another religion.

I also think that this could be improved with technical capabilities. E.g. have a separate way of displaying "content tags that this post/tweet/story is ABOUT" and "content tags that this post/tweet/story contains in passing". Where maybe the first are displayed prominently to everyone, and the second are available if you want them but aren't the first thing you see. Somewhat separating "some people find this difficut" from "this is bad". So that it's possible to tag things you know SOME people find distressing to read, without making the first thing everyone sees a big list of terrible things. And so it would be easy for people to configure their reader so there's some things they don't see at all, or only if they really want to, and other things they might get a warning of. Which is just as relevant for things other than triggers: e.g. I muted some words because I was fed up of seeing some tweets, and I want nudity to be behind a cut in case I'm reading somewhere other people can see over my shoulder.

[calimac]

On the one hand, putting trigger warnings on anything that's likely to bother anybody is purely impactical.

Thought on that line: are spoiler alerts a form of trigger warning? What's being triggered is different than what's normally marked by such warnings, but it functions in the same way: warning people off something they might not want to cast their eyes upon, lest it have a negative effect on their mental functioning.

On the other hand, the answer of "if you don't want to see it, just avoid forums where it's likely to come up" is far too glib. How do you know where it's likely to come up? And the avoiding can cripple your life. My unwillingness to sell my soul to Mark Zuckerberg keeps me off FB where much of life is going on these days.

On that line of glibness, people have told me that if I don't like the Jackson movies, just avoid them. How the heck am I supposed to do that? I'd have to stop reading you; they come up occasionally. I'd have to drop out of all Tolkien discussion, because I don't know of any labeled "no movie talk here." I'd even have to quit my job editing a Tolkien journal, because while we don't publish movie stuff (mostly: we've got an article in the next issue comparing a specific technical aspect in the book and movies), without knowing the movies I wouldn't be able to be on the alert for movie assumptions seeping into discussions of the book.

[fub]

Being able to insulate yourself from bigotry (which is what the call for CWs around lived experiences of racism is) is a privileged position. We must always prioritise the safety of marginalised people over the comfort of privileged people.
I feel so strongly about this, that I made that a rule on my Mastodon server.

[yalovetz]

Personally, as a disabled person, I do want content warnings on discussions of ableism and disablism. I encounter those things too often in my day-to-day life and want to have some agency/choice in how I encounter them in spaces that are supposed to be for social interaction and leisure. Same for things like homophobia, transphobia, and queerphobia generally. It's why, for the last few years, Mastodon was the only social media space that I felt able to engage with on a regular basis. It has changed in recent months, following the influx from Twitter, and it's reaching a point where I no longer feel comfortable using it any more, so I don't know if it will remain sustainable. As others said upthread, if people are not content warning their stuff, it means I need to keep myself out of that space, which means I bear the burden of not really having any social spaces online that I feel comfortable in. Maybe that's no great loss. I do still dip in and read Dreamwidth, I just don't have the energy to post.