the sorrow of my favorite absence

[sciatrix]

...but wow, having been spending so much time over on MeFi, I really miss the whisperspace of favorites. (I'm stealing that concept off of greywash, who had a really interesting piece about it last week.) Here's her on the whisperspace of Tumblr tags:

What the tag whisperspace on Tumblr gave me, essentially, was a way of signaling a break between "this is the media-absorption experience I want you to have of this content" (a thing of which I am incredibly aware, in the specific case of fiction); and "also, fuuuuuuuuck I'm a moron, I totally posted this by accident, which is a thing that signals a sort of touching incompetence on my part that you may find amusing/endearing/cringingly tragic, depending on our social relationship."

In other words: I think a lot of what I miss about tag whisperspace was that it was a clear and intuitive way of signalling a break between the part of a social media post that is media and the part of a social media post that is social.

For those of you on my feed who aren't familiar with the way communication works on Metafilter, basically everyone has accounts and all the discussion happens on topic-centered posts in a nonthreaded chronological format. (It is wonderful. No one is ever going to fuck with my chronological read of threads.) There are no in-line images, no icons, no tags, and usernames only appear at the bottom of the text, so you only see who has written something after you've read it. (Well, ideally, anyway. Especially if they're long-winded, like me.)

But you can hit a little button at the bottom of any post or comment and it will say "you favorited this comment!" And you can see who favorited any given comment--lurkers cannot post or interact in any way, you have to have an account with a login to do anything--and if you follow how many favorites you've gotten for this or that post, you also see a list of everyone who has favorited that comment and when. (Here's an example from a recent comment of mine, which happened to be about Dreamwidth and how much I'm enjoying coming back here.) And anyone reading can see how many favorites any given comment has, right next to the username.

I actually really love this because it is a form of whisperspace communication: it's a part of the conversation that allows those direct social communications to happen totally distinct from the textual conversation itself. It lets community stand besides someone who has made a difficult comment or who is grieving; it helps people "read the room;" and most of all it lets me build the kinds of friendships that don't really require shyer people to come out and talk that much. It lets me, who is a loud person who will talk the ears off a donkey, say "hey! I'm glad you said that!" without actually saying so and derailing things.

Of course, people being people, there is also a strong contingent who think favorites are a popularity contest--and in some ways, they are!--and who think they twist discussion norms to hurt each other. (And there are people who claim to use favorites like bookmarks, kind of like LJ or DW memories/favorites, but I have never understood this arcane concept. I use mine as a medium of communication, which is I think very common.)

But I haven't mentioned the thing I use the favorites for that makes me love them best of all: the ability to do the equivalent of smiling, nodding, and projecting thank you for saying that in a rough conversation, especially one where I'm concerned the other person thinks I'm angrier than I actually am. The ability to try to smooth over a certain amount of conflict by sending affiliative communication over the line, even while I'm still in conflict, and to be able to receive that behavior too. I think it helps people drop defenses and talk to one another, because you can build norms of saying "oh, thank you for saying this!" in a way that lets lurkers participate but also encourages long-form, in-depth conversations and focus. It's very nice.

I'm pretty sure that it's not a high priority here, but it's definitely something I'm wistfully thinking about today.

Comments

[wellthisisnice]

A problem with tags as whisperspace in Tumblr that i encounter often is the use of Tag Viewer (part of the XKit browser extension), which is very common and disrupts that use of tags as social asides only to be seen by followers.

And i mean as in, a practical problem: I often use conversational tags as whisperspace, and sometimes even my organizational tags function in that way (like when i use the tag #witchcraft for chemical experiments and other cool stuff) with the assumption that only people that follow me will see them. However, because of Tag Viewer, i've had on multiple ocassions people come at me for my tag choice, because they didn't know the context, they didn't know that my fangirl tag is about fandom in general, or that when i talk about "our community" i mean the ace community, or that i tagged that username in this art post because it was related to their stories, not because i believed them to be the author. And so on and so forth.

[sciatrix]

Oh, absolutely. It takes a little more effort, but it can be done, and if you're interested in a conversation, putting in a little more effort to hear the whispers people are passing to each other isn't so bad. Which has interesting implications for eavesdroppers, and makes me think about the intended audience for whisperspace. Whispers are quiet for a reason: you're minimizing who "overhears" you, and you're aiming them at people who are near by and actively listening, but that doesn't mean that someone who is listening very hard might not hear... which might be neutral, bad, or good for the speaker, depending. Note that almost all of these typographical quirks that set off whisperspace make the text slightly harder to read and require a little bit of extra effort, like quietly focusing on and listening to someone who is literally whispering. (The only exception is all-lowercase communication, which is something I primarily see on MeFi and I think denotes sarcasm or silliness or just extreme informality as much as anything else.)

I've been thinking about whisperspace and other very quiet signals in my capacity as a biologist working in animal communication today, as I try and organize my notes to tackle a study of social context and the quiet chirps and squeaks and whistles that my mice make. (More from me on sensory modalities here.) The Internet is different from other modalities of communication, though, in that interested people can actually upregulate their receptive power--that is, if you're interested in what people are saying to one another in the tags, you can use XKit or another browser to help minimize the effort it takes you to pick up those communications, or you can go to the trouble of increasing the font size, or or or. Which the intended recipients of the conversation can also do, but which also requires a little bit of extra effort. It's something I can't really work out existing in other modalities and forms of communication.

(Except maybe smell, I guess, where you could upregulate your receptor densities for a particular compound to perceive it at lower densities. Smell is also probably the least chronologically sensitive sensory modality I can think of, come to that, but it's also the hardest for me to wrap my head around. Probably why it's terminally understudied, I guess.)

DW Personal Tags as Whisperspace

[jesse_the_k]

I've wobbled between freighted tags, like "witchcraft" for chemistry, and straightforward ones. When I encounter "witchcraft" on a post re: chemical experiments or cooking, I would be delighted!

Recently I've tried to harmonize my tags (nine hundred seven!) and been brutally reminded of my inability to remember what clever!me was on about 10 years ago.