![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradept[This Year's December Days Theme is Community, and all the forms that it takes. If you have some suggestions about what communities I'm part of (or that you think I'm part of) that would be worth a look, let me know in the comments.]
One of the things that having a fair amount of curiosity produces is an interest in a lot of things. Very few of those curiosities and interests produce expertise of any sort, and especially not deep expertise in many of those things. Which can leave me conversant on a significant number of topics without having the ability to do in-depth materials, unless the person or people that I'm talking with have the expertise that I lack.
As the meme goes, "I have approximate knowledge of many things."
That interacts with some other elements of my personality (and several of the traumas related to my school days and the interactions of my undiagnosed self with the world outside) to fully commit to some things and embrace the period of time that will be marked by inability, failure, learning, trying, and developing what will be expertise or competence in a new skill or topic. And even with things that might be interesting or desirous to do a deep dive into, cognizance of the opinions of others on the matter and what they believe about the subject can mean downplaying the amount of time and effort being put in when talking about the subject with others. It takes a person of great fortitude to forge ahead with things without taking into account other people and how they might be affected by such things. (That does not necessarily mean that the person forging ahead is doing a right and moral thing, just that they have great fortitude to get what they want without giving a care about what others think or how others will be affected by what they're doing.)
And thus, I arrive at the community that I think a lot of people are part of, even if the specifics of it change here and there. They may not describe themselves as the [blank]-adjacent, but that's the feeling that comes with it. The people who have others that are very invested in things, and they're part of the community through osmosis and being supportive of those other people, but who don't necessarily take the plunge themselves. The people who are interested, but don't have the money, the space, or the time to fully engage in the hobby. The people who don't have the right connections to engage in the source material, or who have reservations about how the fandom seems to be acting, based on what they've seen through their other person, or through the public pronouncements around.
I can understand reluctance to engage in something interesting with the fervor and aims that someone would like to. The Internet is not always the most polite place, and whether you have a good experience on any given site has a lot to do with both what the moderation teams will be doing to enforce their norms, and what tools are available to users so they can enforce their own norms and curate an environment with less hostility toward them and their endeavors. Given that fandom still seems to be fighting ship wars, although in different-sounding language these days, and algorithms focused on "engagement" are always trying to find people who would prefer not to be around each other and throw them together so they'll both stay on the platform longer and deal with more ads, it's very much a risk to put anything out there where other people can see it.
As I mentioned in the last post, the rise in hypertext, social media sites, and other means of connection across the Web means that just about everyone who wants a platform to publish on can do so, and that also means that a whole lot of people feel equally as entitled to publish their opinions in someone else's space, regardless of whether it would be a social faux pas to do so, or whether the person who published the original thing actually wants such commentary. It may be a grumpy Fandom Old thing to say "the back button is your friend" and "Don't Like? Don't Read!" but those principles generally create a more harmonious atmosphere on things that are labors of love, rather than dumping entire screeds about how someone has to be a morally bankrupt person to even consider a ship, much less write any kind of fiction about it. Or that someone writing a different take than their preferred interpretation is an invitation to castigation and commentary about how they are clearly interpreting the text from the wrong perspective.
It's certainly not a welcoming feeling to have someone in your comment section talking about how there must be a giant plot hole in your work because a sea-witch that lied about what would break a contract couldn't possibly know how to enforce it, or the character who has to work through her own feelings of inadequacy and understand the perfect façade of someone else is just a front is "an annoying [blank]" and "has [ableist term] energy.", that an fannish interpretation of a work can't possibly be correct because it contradicts the canon, or the F/F work you have provided has insufficient completely different M/M content for my liking. All of which are comments I have received, even if some of them are not there any more, having been nuked as the response to such things.
In fairness, I've also received all kinds of very positive comments on my work, and how well they suited to the prompts, or how fun they are, or the enjoyment of getting things just right, so as with many things that someone might be adjacent to, there are plenty of people there who are more than happy to welcome new people, praise their work, help them along, and otherwise make a community a thriving and interesting place.
It's also possible that I'm much more into a community than adjacent, and I'm mostly fooling myself that I'm still adjacent to it. When I managed to finagle myself to an conference and present many years ago, when there was a Dreamwidth contingent there, I put my DW username on my badge, hoping that I could find the people who were there. I did, mostly by avoiding a collision and having the right person observe this, and then they took and introduced me to the rest of the Dreamwidth contingent present. Given that at the time I hadn't contributed any code to the project (still haven't), I thought I was adjacent to the project and all these running-the-business and programmer folks, but I got pulled in quickly and it was explained to me that without any code contributions, I was still part of Dreamwidth. One person there explained to me that I had been consistently helpful in Dreamwidth suggestions (and in LiveJournal suggestions before that), and so I was at least a known username from their perspective. For things that were a little more participation than just posting entries in my own space and comments in other places and spaces. Or possibly just for that. After all, in the latest news post announcing the December points bonus, heralding an price increase that will happen in 2025,![[staff profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png)
denise routinely thanks people who have stuck with Dreamwidth over the years and the people who have financially supported Dreamwidth-the-project and who are enthusiastic about Dreamwidth advocacy against unconstitutional restrictions and burdens on access to spaces like Dreamwidth. So perhaps there never really was an adjacency there, and that being a user of the service was enough. (And at that time, I think I had been supporting the site financially.)
What I was thinking, though, was that as merely a user, I wasn't part of the community of developers, programmers, and the "real," "important" people who handled Dreamwidth, because I wasn't making code contributions. (Perl is not a language I have learned, nor did I do wide-scale CSS or learn the S2 style systems, and Drewamwidth Perl is at least as cursed as BML and S2, I suspect.) Feeling adjacent can happen because of looking at other people in the community, who do wizardry and impressive feats, and thinking that they are the true members of the community, and the dabblers and the curious and the people who find other people's work and copy it or change a little bit of it or drop in a bit from somewhere else that makes something work are at best, adjacent to the people doing the real work of creation ex nihilo. More than a few of those people who I think of as the "real" people in a project, a fandom, a hobby, or otherwise, have explicitly said that the dabblers, the curious, the tinkerers, and the users are definitely part of their community. Sometimes in explicit defiance or contradiction to the people who think they're part of the community and are empowered to exclude others from it, usually based on their own prejudices about who "belongs" there. (Several of them would really appreciate people who can write effective and accurate documentation, whether they've ever explicitly articulated this thought or not.)
Doing December Days this year is a lot about the communities that I feel I am explicitly part of, but I also wanted to acknowledge the communities that I may not feel explicitly a part of, somewhat nebulously connected to, am vicariously experiencing through others, or that I feel like I don't have the basic requirements for entry, pay no attention to whatever it is that I've been creating or making that's definitely in this community, it's not good enough, not like those other people there who have been doing it for far longer and produce works of more detail and skill than I could ever hope to achieve, even with as much training and practice as those people have. The feeling of adjacency is often related to the feeling of competence, or the feeling of credentialing, or the feeling of belonging. If those elements are absent, or perceived absent, then someone is more likely to feel adjacent rather than a participant. And it's up to each community as to how much they want to be inclusive and welcoming to everyone, or set requirements about what must happen to gain entry, so that the purpose and discussion of the community isn't derailed by curious amateurs looking to perform their own brain surgery in non-sterile environments.
So if you feel adjacent to something, that's valid, although it may not be a belief shared by others. If someone else is feeling adjacent and you don't think they are, this is one of those situations where you have to listen carefully to what they're saying so that you can frame your counter-proposal in ways they will listen to and acknowledge, even if it may still take a journey for them to change their beliefs.
One of the things that having a fair amount of curiosity produces is an interest in a lot of things. Very few of those curiosities and interests produce expertise of any sort, and especially not deep expertise in many of those things. Which can leave me conversant on a significant number of topics without having the ability to do in-depth materials, unless the person or people that I'm talking with have the expertise that I lack.
As the meme goes, "I have approximate knowledge of many things."
That interacts with some other elements of my personality (and several of the traumas related to my school days and the interactions of my undiagnosed self with the world outside) to fully commit to some things and embrace the period of time that will be marked by inability, failure, learning, trying, and developing what will be expertise or competence in a new skill or topic. And even with things that might be interesting or desirous to do a deep dive into, cognizance of the opinions of others on the matter and what they believe about the subject can mean downplaying the amount of time and effort being put in when talking about the subject with others. It takes a person of great fortitude to forge ahead with things without taking into account other people and how they might be affected by such things. (That does not necessarily mean that the person forging ahead is doing a right and moral thing, just that they have great fortitude to get what they want without giving a care about what others think or how others will be affected by what they're doing.)
And thus, I arrive at the community that I think a lot of people are part of, even if the specifics of it change here and there. They may not describe themselves as the [blank]-adjacent, but that's the feeling that comes with it. The people who have others that are very invested in things, and they're part of the community through osmosis and being supportive of those other people, but who don't necessarily take the plunge themselves. The people who are interested, but don't have the money, the space, or the time to fully engage in the hobby. The people who don't have the right connections to engage in the source material, or who have reservations about how the fandom seems to be acting, based on what they've seen through their other person, or through the public pronouncements around.
I can understand reluctance to engage in something interesting with the fervor and aims that someone would like to. The Internet is not always the most polite place, and whether you have a good experience on any given site has a lot to do with both what the moderation teams will be doing to enforce their norms, and what tools are available to users so they can enforce their own norms and curate an environment with less hostility toward them and their endeavors. Given that fandom still seems to be fighting ship wars, although in different-sounding language these days, and algorithms focused on "engagement" are always trying to find people who would prefer not to be around each other and throw them together so they'll both stay on the platform longer and deal with more ads, it's very much a risk to put anything out there where other people can see it.
As I mentioned in the last post, the rise in hypertext, social media sites, and other means of connection across the Web means that just about everyone who wants a platform to publish on can do so, and that also means that a whole lot of people feel equally as entitled to publish their opinions in someone else's space, regardless of whether it would be a social faux pas to do so, or whether the person who published the original thing actually wants such commentary. It may be a grumpy Fandom Old thing to say "the back button is your friend" and "Don't Like? Don't Read!" but those principles generally create a more harmonious atmosphere on things that are labors of love, rather than dumping entire screeds about how someone has to be a morally bankrupt person to even consider a ship, much less write any kind of fiction about it. Or that someone writing a different take than their preferred interpretation is an invitation to castigation and commentary about how they are clearly interpreting the text from the wrong perspective.
It's certainly not a welcoming feeling to have someone in your comment section talking about how there must be a giant plot hole in your work because a sea-witch that lied about what would break a contract couldn't possibly know how to enforce it, or the character who has to work through her own feelings of inadequacy and understand the perfect façade of someone else is just a front is "an annoying [blank]" and "has [ableist term] energy.", that an fannish interpretation of a work can't possibly be correct because it contradicts the canon, or the F/F work you have provided has insufficient completely different M/M content for my liking. All of which are comments I have received, even if some of them are not there any more, having been nuked as the response to such things.
In fairness, I've also received all kinds of very positive comments on my work, and how well they suited to the prompts, or how fun they are, or the enjoyment of getting things just right, so as with many things that someone might be adjacent to, there are plenty of people there who are more than happy to welcome new people, praise their work, help them along, and otherwise make a community a thriving and interesting place.
It's also possible that I'm much more into a community than adjacent, and I'm mostly fooling myself that I'm still adjacent to it. When I managed to finagle myself to an conference and present many years ago, when there was a Dreamwidth contingent there, I put my DW username on my badge, hoping that I could find the people who were there. I did, mostly by avoiding a collision and having the right person observe this, and then they took and introduced me to the rest of the Dreamwidth contingent present. Given that at the time I hadn't contributed any code to the project (still haven't), I thought I was adjacent to the project and all these running-the-business and programmer folks, but I got pulled in quickly and it was explained to me that without any code contributions, I was still part of Dreamwidth. One person there explained to me that I had been consistently helpful in Dreamwidth suggestions (and in LiveJournal suggestions before that), and so I was at least a known username from their perspective. For things that were a little more participation than just posting entries in my own space and comments in other places and spaces. Or possibly just for that. After all, in the latest news post announcing the December points bonus, heralding an price increase that will happen in 2025,
denise routinely thanks people who have stuck with Dreamwidth over the years and the people who have financially supported Dreamwidth-the-project and who are enthusiastic about Dreamwidth advocacy against unconstitutional restrictions and burdens on access to spaces like Dreamwidth. So perhaps there never really was an adjacency there, and that being a user of the service was enough. (And at that time, I think I had been supporting the site financially.)What I was thinking, though, was that as merely a user, I wasn't part of the community of developers, programmers, and the "real," "important" people who handled Dreamwidth, because I wasn't making code contributions. (Perl is not a language I have learned, nor did I do wide-scale CSS or learn the S2 style systems, and Drewamwidth Perl is at least as cursed as BML and S2, I suspect.) Feeling adjacent can happen because of looking at other people in the community, who do wizardry and impressive feats, and thinking that they are the true members of the community, and the dabblers and the curious and the people who find other people's work and copy it or change a little bit of it or drop in a bit from somewhere else that makes something work are at best, adjacent to the people doing the real work of creation ex nihilo. More than a few of those people who I think of as the "real" people in a project, a fandom, a hobby, or otherwise, have explicitly said that the dabblers, the curious, the tinkerers, and the users are definitely part of their community. Sometimes in explicit defiance or contradiction to the people who think they're part of the community and are empowered to exclude others from it, usually based on their own prejudices about who "belongs" there. (Several of them would really appreciate people who can write effective and accurate documentation, whether they've ever explicitly articulated this thought or not.)
Doing December Days this year is a lot about the communities that I feel I am explicitly part of, but I also wanted to acknowledge the communities that I may not feel explicitly a part of, somewhat nebulously connected to, am vicariously experiencing through others, or that I feel like I don't have the basic requirements for entry, pay no attention to whatever it is that I've been creating or making that's definitely in this community, it's not good enough, not like those other people there who have been doing it for far longer and produce works of more detail and skill than I could ever hope to achieve, even with as much training and practice as those people have. The feeling of adjacency is often related to the feeling of competence, or the feeling of credentialing, or the feeling of belonging. If those elements are absent, or perceived absent, then someone is more likely to feel adjacent rather than a participant. And it's up to each community as to how much they want to be inclusive and welcoming to everyone, or set requirements about what must happen to gain entry, so that the purpose and discussion of the community isn't derailed by curious amateurs looking to perform their own brain surgery in non-sterile environments.
So if you feel adjacent to something, that's valid, although it may not be a belief shared by others. If someone else is feeling adjacent and you don't think they are, this is one of those situations where you have to listen carefully to what they're saying so that you can frame your counter-proposal in ways they will listen to and acknowledge, even if it may still take a journey for them to change their beliefs.
