When does something become an “attack” online?
Serious question.
Let’s say that two people, Jane and Cait, are both authors.
Jane says something that involves Cait, only she uses a word incorrectly. Cait responds that, hey, that word used that way and applied to me in that context is offensive. And Cait’s right.
Why is Cait then accused of “attacking” Jane?
After all, these are words, the tools of both of their craft. Is not their increased understanding of them in both of their interests?
Wouldn’t one typically expect Jane to apologize for using a word incorrectly and hurting Cait’s feelings by doing so?
A More Complex Example
Let’s take a more complex variant of the above.
Sarah hears Jane say something that involves Cait, using a word incorrectly. Sarah understands it to mean the common meaning of the word. She writes about it, but doesn’t name Jane.
Ken reads Sarah’s comment, then says something about it where Cait hears. Cait responds that, hey, that word used that way and applied to me in that context is offensive. And Cait’s right.
Then Sarah says I wrote that, and the person who said it is Jane. While Sarah misunderstood part of what happened, what she did not misunderstand was the word.
And there’s a huge pile-on, in the middle of which Jane reveals that she hadn’t used the word the way Sarah, Cait, and Ken understood it to be used (i.e., the way it is commonly used), and that Jane was using the word in a non-standard way.
- Ken apologizes.
- Cait apologizes.
- Sarah apologizes.
- While Jane accepts all of their apologies, she does not herself apologize.
Yet, were it not for what Jane said, and others’ over-reading of the intended meaning because of Jane’s misuse of the word, none of this would have happened.
Substitute names as appropriate, and you have the skeletal structure of what happened 1-2 days ago.
Abusing the Word “Attack”
When you use the word “attack,” you absolve yourself and the people you see as your allies of apologizing or behaving well.
I’m considering removing anyone who uses the word in a non-physical sense from all my social media. I’ve been guilty of this in the past, too, and I know it’s a hard habit to break.
Instead, try to consider what actually happened in that moment without characterizing it, either to yourself or to others, as an attack.
Criticizing Content Is Not Criticizing the Speaker
Often I see “attack” used for criticizing the content of what someone said as opposed to criticizing the person.
I totally get how it can be hard to separate the two, especially when it happens to you. Been there, made that mistake. However, it’s one I’d expect writers to be, on average, less likely to make given the prevalence of Clarion-style critiquing.
Us vs. Them
I incorporate by reference this brilliant post from Jim C. Hines.
If I have information that will clarify a situation, regardless of whether or not I like the person it helps and also regardless of what it will cost me in so-called friends, I will bring it up. Principles before personalities. (Am I perfect at this? No, of course not. I also don’t seek things out, so I can and do miss such opportunities.)
Also, if I’m in contact with you, there is something I admire about you. I’ve been friendly with very contradictory sets of people, and I’m able to accept that everyone’s a mix of good and bad—and hold that complexity in my head.
If you’re one of my contacts, I don’t expect you to like everyone else. I don’t expect you to understand what I see in other people.
Connotation of Unprovoked
“Attack” used this way also carries the connotation of “unprovoked.”
If, instead, we look at the events above as a misunderstanding and clarification, rather than an “attack,” we can learn from it.
You know, build a community rather than destroy it.
Just a thought.
The Header Image Background
The header image background is a photo I took of the battering surface of an M60 Patton tank. It seemed an appropriate choice.
I can tell this situation has meant a lot to you. You’ve given it great thought. I commend you for the time and care you’ve extended to others in expressing your views.
I wish my world was so clear. Actually, no, I’m glad I’ve come to a certain peace with the muddier parts of my life.
What term would you use to describe a tweet or comment lobbed in someone’s direction that was written solely to provoke or hurt or put a person/group on the defensive? There’s a lot of that in some corners of the blogosphere. Not everyone out there has intentions like yours.
Apologies can be tricky, especially if I anticipate one and it’s not forthcoming. That can be for a lot of reasons. Instead of pondering the possibilities, I usually go find something delightful to do.
As for the “Us vs Them” discussion, my response comes from Tom Lehrer:
” I’m sure we all agree that we ought to love one another and I know there are people in the world that do not love their fellow human beings and I hate people like that.” I say it for myself more than for anyone else because I know if I lose my sense of humor, I’m toast.
Solely to hurt or provoke is an attack, but things are seldom that clear.
“Jane says something that involves Cait, only she uses a word incorrectly. Cait responds that, hey, that word used that way and applied to me in that context is offensive. And Cait’s right.”
Cait might be right, but in this hypothetical you strongly imply that Cait said this to Jane directly.
But in the real on line scenario (and to hide behind a hypothetical is really not very honest) you did not go up to Jane and say “hey, you used a word that upset me”. Instead you went to the internet.
Furthermore, what actually happened is much more like the following hypothetical in which Cait hears Jane say something, doesn’t bother to check it, and goes up to Z and says “oooh, did you hear what X said about Y?” knowing that Z will circulate it, and stands back and waits for fireworks.
Furthermore in UK law then if Jane did not use the word she was held to use, and was therefore defamed, a legal term, she had the right to defend herself. She has no duty to apologise.
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And that is why you have no moral high ground.
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Blaming the victim, as you have tried to do here, is really very unpleasant. You made a mistake. You made a bad one. You can recover from that but not if you try to write the narrative as “poor me”.
I realize you think I’m part of some crazy cabal, but I’m not. I had zero expectation that this would go further than the comment I made. That people sometimes listen to me is actually quite a new thing.
Kari has said she used the word “slash.” I would generally expect a Brit who’s got a Ph.D. from a first-tier university and is a pro in our field to use vocabulary in the commonly-accepted way. Which she did not.
I didn’t go up to Kari and ask for several reasons:
Also, standing and talking to people is a privilege I don’t have, in case you missed my mention of mobility impairment.
My moral high ground, let me show you it:
I would never have been on a panel in front of an audience and spoken of fanfic, slash or otherwise, of two generally loathed people in the field. To me, that’s just not done.
Had Kari Sperring not done so, none of this would have happened.
That is what I believe she owes an apology for. I’m not expecting it, obviously. The victim narrative is ever so much more alluring.
I’d like you to consider how you would have felt had you been paired in such a panel that occurred somewhere far away, say Australia, and it got back to you.
(Edit: reordered last two paragraphs to make it clearer.)
Prof. Mendlesohn, Deirdre is generally the thoughtful person in our family, and I’m the blunt Scandinavian, so please understand that I’m voicing my own view, here (in blunt Scandinavian capacity).
Point primo: I was at Dysprosium, too, and saw about half that panel’s audience (those who got the references, I gather) boggle in distaste at Dr Sperring’s off topic jibe, which IMO was pretty tacky in addition to being irrelevant to the panel. I myself didn’t bother to mention it on the Internet because, even though it was the one jarringly ‘off’ note on an otherwise worthwhile panel, I don’t have time for that sort of soap opera.
However, if I had, if (e.g.) I had posted in a blog comment a good-faith recollection of what Dr Sperring said during said panel, I’d have not felt any moral obligation to consult her before doing so, neither on account of being ‘upset’ nor for any other reason. Not even if my recollection of the tacky statement was slightly wrong in an innocuous and not at all malicious way, such as remembering it being ‘someone should write slash’ instead of the actual ‘someone wrote slash’.
In the real world, nobody has a moral obligation to check in advance before quoting someone.
Point secondo: If you think quoting someone as having said ‘someone should write slash’ instead of the actual ‘someone wrote slash’ qualifies as libel under UK defamation law, then you have greatly misunderstood UK defamation law, and should consult your solicitor rather than merely hanging around with a (sorry, I’m a blunt Scandinavian) posse of out-of-control loons who like to threaten people with tort actions.
Point terzo: Your supposition that Deirdre could reasonably expect a huge emotional Internet blowup, not to mention imputing to her the intent to cause one, is severely ahistorical, which is tempting the gods of irony, coming as it does from an academic historian such as your esteemed self. Check your timeline and dramatis personae: You will find that the blowup was proximately caused by other people entirely, and you are seeking to gratuitously moralise in entirely the wrong place. Especially since everyone has apologised, even people whose misdeeds if any were at most venal, such as Deirdre.
Point quarto: Hey, ignore this opinion if you wish, but you and Liz W. and Dr Sperring and good ol’ reliably off-kilter Ann S. come across like you-all have been drinking a bit too deeply from the crazy sauce, and need to go dry out somewhere. Deirdre didn’t speak or act in any hostile fashion at any time during this teapot-sized battle, and you-lot treating her that way make you look like a small tribe of nutters (in my arrogant opinion).
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
Anyone who knows me well, as I daresay my husband does, knows that I generally won’t plan my way out of a paper bag. It’s not that I can’t plan, it’s that I’m six-sigma P on the Myers-Briggs scale. To translate, this means my preference for not planning is very, very, very strong.
Case in point: at Eastercon, we stayed at the nearby Radisson solely and only for the reason that I didn’t make the hotel reservations soon enough to stay at the convention hotel—despite having received several notices about hotel space filling up. And, in fact, travel is one of the very few things where I concede that Plans Must Be Made.
It also means that, when traveling around the world in 2013, I wasn’t overly bothered by the fact that my return flights home were not yet booked (I had a flight booked, but it did not meet the new constraints my boss and I had agreed upon for when I’d return). I had faith that something would work out. And it did.
What I don’t do is plan how to use people as pawns. I get that history is full of people who do exactly that.
Rick, I must say I found your comment entertaining and on point.
For someone who has seen all of this as it developed (i.e. someone like me), it’s rather obvious that almost everyone acted in good faith, up to the point where Ms Sperring started to play the victim rather than address her conduct and clear up the misunderstanding created by her misuse of the word “slash”.
Ms Sperring made her insulting and blatantly inappropriate comment sound even worse by her selection of words. Some information was lost/slightly distorted on the way to BS, but BS reacted in a completely appropriate manner to what was presented to her. Even if Deirdre had reported Ms Sperring’s comments verbatim, BS would have been well without her right to react as she did.
Had Ms Sperring simply said: “I apologised for having used ‘slash’ in an unconventional manner and the pain this has caused,” everyone else would still have apologised for their part in the misunderstanding (since they have already done so while Ms Sperring and her acolytes have acted like assholes) and would have moved on.
Off course, most sensible people would also have realised that even without the “slash”, Ms Sperring’s comments were still highly inappropriate, and would have apologised for them too. Clearly, Kari “I didn’t get a PhD to be called Ms” Sperring is not one of those people.
The end of that middle paragraph should have read: “… BS would have been well WITHIN her right to react as she did.”
Thank you very much.
To be clear, I did not hear/see Kari Sperring say anything that indicated she preferred Dr. as a title. I just realized after the fact that I may have been unintentionally rude in trying to be more formal and polite. I felt that changing her title from Ms. to Dr. in my post won’t change the fact that it’s already been widely read. Had I realized it five minutes after posting, that would have been a different thing. I annotate rather than re-write existing pieces, and thus have done so.
As to everything else: yes, exactly that.
Thank you for your comments. The whole farrago came across as deeply weird, to this observer.
A brief comment about personal titles, which Deirdre has also addressed elsethread. My initial comments on the then-ongoing blowup referred to ‘Ms Sperring’ (as does yours). Shortly after that, something jogged my memory that she’s an academic and has a doctorate, so I good-naturedly changed all subsequent reference to ‘Dr Sperring’.
Sometimes, I’ve seen a person who’s been addressed (or referred to) as Ms or Mr object, react as if it were disrespectful, and insist that ‘Dr’ (or ‘Prof’) should have been used instead. (To be clear, there is no reason to think Dr Sperring specifically feels this way. I’m merely reminded of others who’ve reacted this way in the past.)
In the British culture of my youth (in Hong Kong), you showed basic respect to strangers or casual acquaintances in a tone of respectful formality — avoiding the excessive California-like familiarity of saying ‘Bob’/”Alice’ or ‘Bob Smith’/’Alice Jones’ — by defaulting to referring to them as Mr Smith or Mrs Jones (updated today to Ms Jones), unless/until invited to be more familiar.
So, in recent postings, after initially copying someone elses’ usage and saying ‘Kari’, in retrospect this seemed far too California on my part, and I remembered to back off to a proper distance accorded strangers and say ‘Ms Sperring’. But sometimes this act of courtesy and respectful personal distance gets misconstrued as professional disrespect. So, some days you can’t win. Moral, if any: It’s best not to rush to an assumption of malice or disrespect. The other person might even be doing his or her best to evince the very opposite.
[1] ‘Kari’ is a very Scandinavian given name I’ve always quite liked, FWIW. But the Brits generally can’t be bothered to pronounce it correctly. Should be like ‘kahh-ree’. But, let’s face it, the Brits can’t even pronounce Marylebone. Or Featherstonehaugh, Cholmondeley, etc. (Americans, for their part, can’t be bothered to pronounce Thor correctly. Should be like ‘tor’.)
In my case, the omission of Sperring’s title was very much on purpose as a way of having a little laugh at people like her who seem to take higher studies a little too seriously for my taste. I figured that as a PhD myself, I could make the joke.
I saw Sperring make a comment on twitter that was similar to my gibe (“I didn’t get a PhD to be called Ms”). At the time, I interpreted it as a reply to Deirdre’s post explaining her side of the tempest in the teapot (where she used Ms for everyone). Sperring also mentioned something along the lines of “women’s academic accomplishments being too often dismissed/going unrecognised”. Although I have no doubt it’s an important issue worthy of attention, it seemed rather out of place in the context (although to be fair, I may have misinterpreted the context. My apologies if that’s the case, but since Sperring locked her twitter account, I can’t make verifications).
I agree with you that a lot of the interpretation about how much of an offense it is to omit someone’s title is probably related to culture. Where I’m from, those kinds of titles are only used in formal occasions (academic presentations, etc.) or systematically used by medical doctors. In college, as undergraduate students, we never called our professors “professor” or “doctor” (and even less so as graduate students). It was always M or Ms.
Where I’m from, unless someone is clearly of an older generation, 30 seconds of introductions are usually all that is needed to get everyone on a first name basis. On the other hand, I’ve been to France for my work and people there seemed to take the use of proper titles much more seriously. The whole time I was there, I felt like I could cause a diplomatic incident by forgetting to call my new colleagues “doctor”.
For my part, I’ve never used my PhD to get called “doctor”. Apart from my friends and I poking fun at each other and the craziness of academia, the only time I was ever called “doctor” seriously was in the minutes following my successful thesis defense. I don’t even sign my work emails with “PhD”. I’ve always felt that doing so (in my culture) would just been seen as showing off, since there is no way to do my work with some solid academic studies, and people already know I must have them since otherwise I wouldn’t have gotten the job in the first place. In any case, people just assume I have a PhD, even if in theory I could do my job with just a master’s. Off course, being a man, my experience may differs from the experience of others in my field.
Anon from Sidelines, you certainly should be permitted to make that joke.
FWIW, I was told by a boss at work, a couple of years ago, that I could get in trouble with Human Resources (ex-Personnel Dept.) for telling one of my favourite gags in work context — that ‘my Tante Bjorg always warned me to never trust Scandinavians’. (‘Tante’ is the Scandinavian-language word for aunt, and ‘Bjorg’ is an extremely Scandinavian name. And, yes, I did have a Tante Bjorg, born like the rest of my father’s clan in Kristiansund, Norway.) I said ‘Really?’, i.e., are we living in an irony-forbidden zone? Really, said he. I followed his sound if sad advice.
Anyway, I most certainly concur with Dr Sperring that ‘women’s academic accomplishments being too often dismissed/going unrecognised’. I attempt to highlight them when reasonable and possible (in my short period of 39 years as a card-carrying[1] feminist. Of course, expecting people to unfailingly know and state that you have a doctorate, well, I wish that were possible, but it’s not going to happen.
Aside: During a kaffeeklatsch Deirdre and I attended with Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden at the first North American Discworld Convention in Phoenix, I casually dropped that joke into conversation, and Teresa, née Nielsen, seemed to find it profoundly unfunny and gave me a deeply disapproving look. Pity, that.
[1] Referring in part to my National Organization for Women membership, having joined that group upon attaining adulthood. Which does not stop some people from recently declaring me ‘not a feminist’ on grounds of insufficient ideological zeal and insufficient adoption of whatever is the approved coded language du jour — even though my NOW card it typically about twice as old as those so decreeing.
Women’s academic accomplishments are often dismissed or unrecognized; a Ph.D. is certainly an accomplishment.
Using a title of Ms. doesn’t dismiss that accomplishment in any way, however.
I’m still boggling at the idea that a feminist considers Ms. a slight in some way.
Okay then.
::backs away slowly::
Ah, the Internet. Where I sometimes feel more pressure to frame my arguments carefully with 400 footnotes explaining exactly what I mean to say and don’t mean to say and which of the many meanings possible I want to use then I did writing University papers.
Yep, exactly.
And some of this is indeed culture differences in parts of the Internet. While I’ve always considered it silly to expect people to clear things through you before linking to or posting about you, I also try to ask in contexts where I am the significantly more powerful party.
Which, I was in the audience on this one. So: not.
I’m sorry it blew up like this, with anger overwhelming any good points. Flame wars get recast as justified more than fair. When did ‘flame war’ fall out of common use? They still happen.
I’m reminded of the great monologue about rationalizations in The Big Chill: