Standards of Failure

Posted on September 1, 2003 in Blogging

Now and then I get an email from some articulate new comer who finds her or his self thoroughly beffuddled by the web, mainly by the apparent contradictions in peoples’ behavior and the degree to which people war over silly little things. The law of the playground seems to be the rule: if you get the biggest crowd shouting, you get to be right.

By this measure, I am a failure. There’s no regular Pax Nortona crew to yell down folks who attack me. Elsewhere online, I don’t make the big numbers: My online writing practice group has peaked for the time being at three people. The same holds true for the Ecotone photography group and for the last topic, which was “Chaos”, I was the only one to submit his photographs. But judging from the discussion –where we actively talked about what Chaos means — I succeeded in getting at least one person to rethink her or his views on what chaos means. But only one. So I failed.

Sometimes I see that something could be done, so I walk in and I do it, regardless of whether I get paid or not. My websites and my blogs have never netted me enough to live on. There’s another standard by which I have failed. I’ve sunk more money into this than I have got out. Nevertheless, I have heard the screams of people who think that because I do that it’s an attempt to take over, to make my million, to impose my “One True Path” on them. By that standard, too, I have failed, because I haven’t really sought to do that.

I never wanted to be a guru. I encourage and I do. That’s my weblogging raison d’etre. Simply to make things appear from the keyboard and the camera, to put them on my screen, to tell others who are attempting the same to keep at it. As I work through the Writer’s Book of Days with Andrea and Tracy, I don’t feel compelled to check in to see that they are “doing it right”. I trust that in their own way, they will find the topics helpful. If they don’t help — if they instigate Andrea and Tracy to do something else that they’d rather be doing — that’s fine with me. I’ve failed by one reckoning. But Andrea and Tracy have found success.

In groups, I am easily shouted down because I have found that compromising with people can be tiresome and spirit-wrecking. Too much organization kills, too: if called upon to administrate, I find myself transmogrified into a robot who can no longer dance.

I’m writing this, in part, because I am catching heat for “imposing” my view of things — in this case, photography — on others. They say it’s my tone of voice that’s the problem, that I don’t allow others to speak their mind. Which is funny, because the place where this is happening is a wiki where all you have to do is edit the page and your thoughts become part of the record.

Maybe what they really want is my silence?

All this carving of empires that goes on gets tiresome. The only grounds that I have felt fit to stand on are the ones that that I have written myself. When people didn’t like the way I ran City of the Silent and said “I’m leaving to do it right”, I said “Good. We need more variety of views. We need your voice. The world is better served by diversity.” Yet I have seen movement after movement form on the web, attempting to unite one faction or another, attempting to push the InterNet in a specific direction. I’ve joined them, believing that maybe this time things will be different, but I pretty much see the same stuff. The originators get worried when you suggest a new angle on the topic or the running of the group. Defensiveness starts. They point at me — the troublemaker. I shut up, do my thing, and in about two to three months, someone comes around to the part of the group that I have been participating in and accuses me of not listening, of not respecting “the community”.

“The community?” I ask. “Hell, I’m part of the community, too.” And if I am smart, I just get back to work.