Why are people who are so gung-ho about media morality on here also so incredibly inconsistent about it on here? Itâs like âhey donât even *mention* xyz game or show or whatever but several of my main interests are things that are even more egregiousâ. Iâm not a fan of anything with that rep in the first place but itâs always been really silly to me.
Because I donât think itâs a position that is reached systematically or scientifically (I think this is true of a lot of positions people hold - again Iâm including myself in this). Itâs hard to systematically figure out what your principles are. Nevermind the fact that there are irreconcilable contradictions embedded within these principles. But that aspect is less interesting to me, because I suspect that itâs not actually about the show/movie/actor/etc at all a lot of the time, but rather that mass media provides a set of common and mutually intelligible terms and modes of understanding for people to interact with strangers on the internet.Â
This is going to sound like an insane tangent but I promise itâs relevant lol: I had to read Benedict Andersonâs Imagined Communities for a course recently where he talks about the emergence of national consciousness and identity in Europe through the invention of the printing press. The production of texts meant to be read by many people is much easier to achieve when language is standardised (this is prior to mass standard education), and so to print something âin Germanâ requires a social agreement about what the German language âis,â something he argues wasnât really a thing in Europe prior to this point in history. So while many people across vast distances may speak many different local dialects that are all roughly âGerman,â they now all read a singular, standardised âGerman language.â Anderson argues that this produces an experience of âsimultaneous timeâ across space, where you now feel a sudden connection to anyone who also âreads Germanâ despite them being complete strangers and people whom you will never meet. This is part of his argument of how national consciousness gets cultivated, and allows people to articulate a common identity and set of goals with others whom they share no other bond with (Andersonâs definition of nationalism being âan imagined political communityâ - imagined in the sense of socially constructed and produced, not as in fake).
And Iâm talking about this because I think a similar thing is happening here, but re: mass media. I use the term âmassâ media in the sense that it is consumed by mass amounts of people through industrialised telecommunications technology such as internet, television, and radio (and we can include celebrities as mass media here for the sake of convenience). And the internet is an interesting place because you are constantly interacting with an incomprehensibly large volume of strangers, and often these interactions are not in your control (harassment, people âbarging intoâ your mentions or replies, people lurking your blog, etc). In order for this to not be completely overwhelming, even in a relatively niche space like âfandom,â you need some shared set of terms to navigate around.
I think this is what leads to the emergence of the terminology of âpro vs anti,â a universal set of discursive terms that cuts across all of fandom space that allows you to position yourself in relation to a large amount of people you donât know. It acts as a sorting and filtering mechanism (âproshippers DNIâ), it acts as a declaration of belief that can be intelligible to many other people (âfiction affects realityâ - an objectively vacuous phrase that is nonetheless freighted with a lot of social meaning to anyone within fandom), and it allows you to âengage in fandomâ broadly as an online social terrain, allowing you to move from one fandom to another yet retain common terminology to communicate with others. Everyone knows that each fandom has their own set of âlocalâ community terms, which takes time and energy to learn and requires you to likewise learn the social stakes of each of those terms. Sorry to bring up Supernatural but as an example, you can read someoneâs entire orientation towards the show based on whether they spell Castielâs name as âCasâ (destiel shipper) or âCassâ (wincestie/bronly/J2er) + all the attendant opinions that come with those positions. But that takes a long time to learn, and itâs hard, and it requires you to declare a lot of your own positions re: the local context of a given show or video game, but the pro vs anti divide is universal and therefore extremely helpful in social navigation.
So, much like pro vs anti, I think when people say âDNI if you like irredeemable mediaâ and then you go on their blog and theyâre like, shipping South Park characters together, I think staking these moral positions re: mass media has less to do with any deeper principled convictions regarding the moral impact of art or how one should relate to it, but rather that you are engaging in a common discursive terrain that allows you to navigate a basically infinite sea of strangers in order to rapidly locate a common community of people. Again Harry Potter is instructive here - it was popular for a while for terfs to put Hogwarts Houses in their bio, particularly if they are crypto terfs. The âcommon terrainâ of transphobia in online spaces being used here is mass media - if I say Potterheads DNI on my Homestuck blog, Iâm not really staking my position on the moral consumption of media, Iâm signalling my political allegiances via the common language of mass media. This is perhaps why these stakes are so bafflingly inconsistent, because mass media is serving as a proxy for articulating political positions (which can likewise be inconsistent) as a result of the fact that they are much easier shorthands to communicate belief than outright stating your ideological commitments. Nobody knows what neoliberal means, or socialism means, or white supremacy or cissexualism or capitalism or imperialism or blah blah blah, because these are not part of the common terminology of fandom spaces, so declaring your positions using these terms will not get you very far. but people know that Harry Potter = transphobia, so potterheads dni!Â
