Recognition and Values

FS has highlighted that recognition of other participants plays a role in understanding

communal values of the fandom. For instance, Baym notes that welcoming new members is an important factor in creating the ethic of friendliness in soap opera fandoms (Baym 2000). In a more hostile example, the label ‘drooler’ – used on the R.E.M fan forum Murmurs to label participants who focus on physical attributes of the band – is used to highlight (by contrast) the forum’s valuing of ‘intellectual’ debate (Bennett 2013). I therefore examine how forms of recognition discussed in the previous section reveal values distinctive to, and shared across, the different subfora.

In general the relationship between recognition and communal behaviour across the subfora was closer to the ‘droolers’ example – certain types of behaviour were deemed unwelcome, and are responded to with criticism. Box 5.4 shows illustrative examples.

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Box 5.4 Recognising Participants in Criticisms

(1) User1: [username1] will always stick to their speculation as if it was proven fact […] [he/she] ignores data when it does not support the argument he/she is putting forward. Of course, since [username1] does not argue for the joy of academic discussion, but just to create mischief, he/she does not care if he/she is correct or not.

User2: That's why I used to think [username1] was a sock puppet of [username2].

SkepticsSTM Primitive humans caused widespread animal extinctions, Aug 2015 (2) Your previous explanation was beyond handwavy and spurious. It's also frustrating that

your last thread was about how control loops were the best way to model evolution, and now you're saying that you can/should only apply control loops towards modeling individual organisms behaviors, of a very specific sort. One has to wonder where the goalposts will be shifted to next.

XKCDScience Is Control a Common Property of All Life, Dec 2015 (3) [Your] misunderstanding [was] shared by the last person who came here asking about GR

[General Relativity] and then getting frustrated with people misunderstanding questions I apologize for initially reacting as if your level of knowledge was closer to hers than to, say, [username]'s.

XKCDScience Acceleration Near A Black Hole, Apr 2013

Extracts (1) and (2) negatively referenced behaviour that other members had exhibited over previous discussions. In (1) recognition of another participant was used to criticise their approach to debating. The first accusation – a refusal to change views in the face of evidence – was a recurring criticism across many of the most antagonistic discussions on the subfora, including SkepticsSTM Monty Hall Redux (Oct-Nov 2015) and IFLScience How

To Argue With Anti-Vaxxers (Aug 2015). “Sock puppet” in (1) is online jargon for multiple

accounts secretly run by one user. This implies that both of the referred-to users behaved in a similar manner and were probably run by one person to “create mischief”. In (2) the participant criticised the poster for unclear argumentation, using a previous thread to highlight the poster’s lack of consistency. Failure to argue clearly – in particular using technical terminology in a confusing fashion – often provoked frustration from other

participants. The SkepticsSTM threads Show Me Scientism (Sep 2015), Monty Hall Redux (Oct-Nov 2015), and Axioms of Science (Dec 2015), as well as XKCDScience Is Control a

Common Property (Dec 2015) consisted largely of participants criticising unclear

argumentation. Extract (3) shows one of the less common occasions in which a participant – an expert on General Relativity – was recognised in a manner which highlighted rather than

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attacked credibility. Nonetheless, this reference was still used in conjunction with criticising “the last person who came here” for their lack of knowledge and patience, and in a wider context of questioning the credibility of another participant. While, as noted from Box 5.3, interviewees recognised others for more positive aspects such as expertise or skill, in threads such positive recognition was not expressed as explicitly as criticisms. Such criticisms indicate that the communal values of the subfora revolved around encouraging well-argued points, based on evidence rather than stubborn commitments or desire to antagonise.

Across all the subfora it was extremely common to see these values expressed in relation to the idea of scientific consensus. I use ‘scientific consensus’ to refer to views seen to be held by a majority of mainstream scientists. We have already seen, in section 5.1.1, how

participants expressed hostility towards non-mainstream views, such as beliefs that vaccines are dangerous. For further examples see Box 5.5.

Box 5.5 Values and Scientific Consensus

(1) You are being downvoted because you are making extraordinary claims and not backing it up with even a hint of evidence […] Oh, shit I just saw your sentence "We don't need sugar to live". That pretty much invalidates any insight you might think you have into modern human nutrition.

r/EverythingScience The Food Babe Blogger, Apr 2015 (2) I'm not so much angry as frustrated. You seem to be putting a lot more energy into

proposing this whatever this is, and not so much on learning […] I don't feel inclined to copy-paste wikipedia's biology articles and so on. A certain degree of basic learning sort of falls on ya before questioning the basic underpinnings of any field.

XKCDScience Is Control a Common Property, Dec 2015 (3) You reject strictly empirical science and, for that reason alone, you’re rejecting the Big

Bang Theory without properly characterizing it. It’s not that the steady state theory is particularly plausible; it’s that you have some great need to reject the big bang theory and empirical science itself.

SkepticsSTM IMAP, Apr 2015 (4) Who is this "we" you refer to? You are a solo "woo" troll, promoting "Ra" the fake alien,

invented by three people on LSD, through seances, using incense sticks, candles and a bible. You are neither a critical thinker, nor a skeptic. You are the exact opposite.

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Extract 1 criticised the fellow participant for making “extraordinary claims” (which run counter to scientific consensus about nutrition) without evidence. A particularly extreme example of a counter-consensus view – “we don’t need sugar to live” – was used as reason to

“invalidate” any further contribution from the participant. Similarly in (2) the participant was criticised for ignorance of consensus knowledge in biology, emphasised by the repetition in “basic learning… of basic underpinnings”, and the argument that they could acquire the knowledge from Wikipedia articles. Note that the expressed source of frustration was not simply ignorance, but rather the lack of personal effort to engage with relevant scientific consensus. In extract (3) the participant was accused of being committed to Steady State theory – an alternative to the much more widely accepted Big Bang theory – for reasons of personal bias. Extract (4) associates “woo” – a label for non-mainstream views77 _{– with}

references to a “fake alien”, the spiritualist practice of “seances”, the countercultural paraphernalia of incense and drugs, and the religious image of a bible. These are images which often connote pseudo-scientific or anti-scientific movements (Kaiser 2011), and were used here in a hostile fashion. The participant was also referred to as a “troll”, suggesting that their non-mainstream beliefs were proposed purely to antagonise; the opening “who is this ‘we’ you refer to” framed these criticisms as excluding the participant from the

community.

These examples were not criticising others for being straightforwardly wrong about scientific consensus. When participants simply corrected perceived misunderstandings, they

generally did so with little relatively little hostility. On XKCDScience there were repeated threads by the same participant, which expressed lengthy and extremely non-standard understandings of physics – for example, that energy can possess its own energy ([username] Talks About Trains, June 2014 - Feb 2016; Gravity Wave Musings by

[username], Nov 2015 - March 2016). However this participant also displayed gratitude to

fellow participants and a willingness to change their mind. They were met with strong disagreement and some jokes at their expense, but not subject to the same levels of anger and/or ridicule as participants who were seen as entrenched in non-consensus views (Is

Control a Common Property, Dec 2015; Biology: Evolution, March 2015; The Battery That Isn’t A Battery, Jan 2011). Anger was provoked by a combination of going against perceived

scientific consensus and doing so in manner which suggested an unwillingness to change one’s mind, or to engage with evidence which might develop understanding.

77 This label also appeared in references to a “Woo-ster” on SkepticsSTM Gravitational Waves

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I shall henceforth refer to the Respect Scientific Consensus (RSC) Norm to describe this behaviour of sanctioning participants who were seen as not respecting scientific consensus. I shall also use ‘non-RSC’ to refer to views or behaviours which were perceived to

contravene this norm. The term ‘norm’ has been used in various ways across different social scientific disciplines, including STS (Merton 1942; Mitroff 1974). Here I refer to norms in the sense used by Fan Studies scholars: behaviours that are common and expected within a particular group (Bennett 2011). Unlike rules, which are explicitly codified and enforced by authority figures, norms are implicit and encouraged by the collective behaviour of fellow participants.

Scientific consensus is often seen within STS as playing an informational role, ensuring people agree on empirically well-evidenced claims (Evans and Durant 1995). However the anger and ridicule expressed in the above examples suggests that disagreement was not simply informational. Rather, emotional responses played a role in creating an unwelcome environment for such claims (and perceived characteristics of the claimants). This should not be seen simply as a process of excluding certain views, but also the construction of a ‘scientific’ type of person. FS scholars have argued that “emotional investment in anti- fandom78 _{is significant to the construction of fan identity” (Theodoropoulou 2007, 317). In}

other words, responses to ‘anti-fans’ or ‘non-normative participants’ construct (through contrast) the expected norms, values, and characteristics of a fandom. This shall be explored further in the next section.