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Eruonen
Half-elven
May 24 2022, 1:21am
Post #1 of 10
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Anybody interested in a read through of The Children of Hurin? It has been a long time.
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ElanorTX
Tol Eressea
May 26 2022, 10:35am
Post #2 of 10
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See noWizardme's thread from May 1st
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I think people are interested in doing something, but that this is not the best time for a lengthy structured discussion. Of course, I'm willing to be proven wrong.
ElanorTX
"I shall not wholly fail if anything can still grow fair in days to come."
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noWizardme
Half-elven
May 26 2022, 3:54pm
Post #3 of 10
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I'd wait until people calm down about the TV show
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Quick c.v.: As many of you will remember, I was a major contributor to both the organisation and writing of read-throughs 2013-16, and sometimes sole organiser. After that I ran, or at least started, some rather less successful Reading Room projects (they petered out quickly and weren't much fun). The people with whom I collaborated most intensively to get those things done are mostly no longer active here. So it is possible that I'm the only greybeard who knows what is being asked for when a read-through is mooted. I mention all this because it gives me the credentials to say the following.
In brief, I think that: read-throughs are hard, ongoing, collaborative work between a core group of volunteers who are not easy to find or retain. They also require an all-hands-on-deck effort whereby many people pitch in occasionally, and also form an aencouraging and appreciative audience. Therefore, they can only thrive in a positive atmosphere, which I do not think we have currently, and will not have until people tire of quarrelling about the TV series.
Read-throughs are a big team effort, needing enough group good will to keep going every week for months (or over a year if you want to do LOTR again). Contributors are hard to find. Doing the organisation of it and writing careful, well-researched, or deeply-thought-out posts will always take serious effort, and that time and effort is one major disincentive to getting people to contribute. We cannot do much about people who do not have the time or other resources to help. At best we can all try to make contributions here appreciated and rewarding, and to re-inforce that simpler contributions are valued too. But some members will never have the time or self-confidence to do it, or will always think they lack the knowledge or other skills. Nobody has to contribute, or justify why they do not. Everybody here is a volunteer, and anyway there are nowadays many other places to emit online opinions about Tolkien. For me, the unique thing this board has is the potential for my post to spark a discussion that is far better, broader, and far more interesting, than anything I could ever have managed alone. I do not think I would get that reward if I set up as a Tolkien commentator or 'influencer' on one of the commercial social media platforms.
So I think - and a large number of DM exchanges with people I was trying to persuade to write for previous projects backs this up - that it is the spirit of the place that matters. That is, it works well if someone's OP is replied to (rather than just passively consumed) and if people expand on its scope, or rebut the point politely (having first shown that they did, in fact understand what the point was). I don't think we ever made this guide "How to Disagree" and article in the Reading Room constitution, but it would make a good one, anyway.
It is also imporant that:"there is the internet truth that good comments encourage other good comments, and bad comments encourage other bad comments"
David Allen Green QC, whose 'Law and Policy Blog' may be too political to link to?
What puts people off contributing to projects or contributing at all - again my experience and a lot of DMing potential read-through contributors- is the worry that they will get negative, tiring, upsetting and exasperating responses. And of course there has always been some of that: somebody's bad day, somebody misunderstanding something, the anxious, precise, nerdy personalities many of us have, or perhaps just some people seeking attention, or to annoy, control or manipulate others. And some people just seem to think they are wearing the Pants of Ultimate Rightness such that whatever they happen to think is Right because they think it (or becaue their favoured authority figure thinks it), and there is therefore some Rule that they do not have to explain their reasoning, and yet May Not Be Argued With, By Order. Probably in block capitals, which I shall not utter here. (In reality they do not have any pants!! )
In the end it does not matter why someone is behaving in a way that causes me not to feel like working on projects - the effect is the same regardless of their intention, psychology, state of mind or other factors I cannot know. All I can do is to do what I can assume good intent, until someone wears that down by being serially annoying...
Dilution is the solution to pollution, and so while negative behaviour is tiring and annoying, it's the overall balance that counts: several positive collaborators to one negative and we're probably OK. It's also quite irrelevant, in terms of the toxic effect socially, whether someone set out to be offensive, or achieved it thoughtlessly or are reckless about their reputation. Whatever causes the offense, quite understandably people look at the overall tone of the boards to judge whether they are going to be treated nicely, have their work consumed passively without any feedback, or be 'rewarded' by someone who appears to be trying to pick a fight with them.
This is a problem for each of us Registered Users to solve. Admins have the power of censorship, used reluctantly, and only publiclly visible post-facto: after someone has been offensive (often serially offensive) and much of the harm has already been done. But even if everything had to be screened by an Admin pre-publication, Admins cannot also write everything, or ensure what the reaction to something is, or whether it gets any reaction at all. So it up to us Registered Users to respond to someone's contribution positively if we can. And any project continues only of that is adequate reward for the efforts people have made, in the sole, absolute and subjective view of the people deciding whether to contribute anything more. (That is, it does not matter whatsoever if someone else thinks I should do more for less.)
I gave up organising projects when it became too difficult and time-consuming to persuade people to collaborate, and what I wrote was read (judging by the 'views' statistics) but didn't stimulate the sort of back-and-forth discussion I like. Back then, negative responses were not the main issue.
Since then? Nobody can have missed the quarrelsomeness of some discussions - especially on the ROP board - of late. I am looking at that and deciding the mood of the community is too combatitive and negative to be compatible with any intensely collaborative project such as a read-through.
Clearly we can have a thoughtful, civil and evidence-based discussion in the Reading Room right now, I thought 'Epic Pooh' went very well, and thank you again everyone. But a book-sized read-through requires a core group of maybe half-a-dozen as well as all-hands-on-deck to contribute sometimes. This is because of the effort required every week for months in terms of:
- recruiting people to write OPs
- careful writing of the OP (Thoughtful replies-to-replies can take significant thinking and writing effort too.)
- shepherding the discussion - replying to those who have contributed so that their contribution has been understood and valued, and keeping the discussion open by introducing further 'hooks' where appropriate.
- patience with our more challenging members (whether that is defusing situations before they become admin-worthy bust-ups by which time someone is often upset already; or not being baited by someone who appears to be trolling)
So: for an old-style read-through to start now, you need to find maybe half-a-dozen people with the time, self-confidence and other skills to run a read-through. And then: how would you persuade them that it is currently worth the bother?
In short, the kinds of user behaviour needed to run a read-through (in my opinion and experience) are the exact opposite of what is routine on social media now, and is too often apparent on the ROP board, with some overspills ot other boards. It does not surprise me that people are reluctant to commit to projects in the current circumstances. I can't blame them: I'm not going to.
It was before my time, but I believe we have been here before ("The Purist Wars"?) and people did eventually calm down, or lose interest in fights? I suspect that ignoring and getting on with something else is the only viable strategy. People who are enjoying (or otherwise need, or can't stop themselves from getting into) bad tempers and fights are going to get into a bad tempered fight with anyone who suggests they are bad tempered. (Anyone who does respond angrily to this will nicely illustrate my point -- thank you in advance  )
Of course, I would also love to be wrong about this, and have no objection to being disagreed with calmly. Or, the positive way to rebut me would be to set up a working project: a read-through or something entirely new. I would be delighted by any successes you have and might be able to join in on an occasional basis.
But my suggestion is that any projects will need to wait until we have more traffic and one-off discussions in the Reading Room, and have established that we haven't lost the art of intelligent discussion and healthy disagreement. A group of 'Regulars' who collaborate well together might then be the quorum to get something going. Of course, when I say we "need to wait", passive waiting won't achieve anything. Positive contributions to one-off discussions will do rather more, and I'd encourage everyone to make them whenever possible.
~~~~~~
(This post was edited by noWizardme on May 26 2022, 4:07pm)
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squire
Half-elven
May 30 2022, 2:49pm
Post #4 of 10
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Good thoughts and timely - almost too timely
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What I mean by my qualifier "almost too timely" is that your critique of the Reading Room Question* is strongly informed by the ongoing discussions we've been seeing in the 'Rings of Power' message board. Thus you sensibly suggest that one of the problems with a Reading Room discussion series is that potential participants are being scared off by the prospect of unhelpful or even trolling responses to their hard work in preparing discussion posts.
I agree that the more politicized tone of Tolkien fandom in recent years adds to the difficulty of conducting a message-board style discussion. But I would say that far more than that, the Reading Room is suffering from a simple lack of attendance. We just don't have the critical mass of, as you put it: a smaller number who will put some hours into preparing a good discussion series of posts, and a much larger number who will read the posts, out of whom will emerge a good-sized number of thoughtful and interested responses that, themselves, may well take some time to compose.
You, unfortunately, caught the brunt of the downturn in attendance in the mid 2010s during your stalwart term as Mayor of the Reading Room, and it can't have been much fun for you.
I've asked myself numerous times why the one book-oriented message board should have taken a hit in attendance and interest on what is definitely a movie-oriented fan site like TORn. As they endlessly said during various Movie-board arguments, if you don't like the movies, there will always be the books. Well, yes. But, it remains true that after participating in two or three full-length discussions of The Lord of the Rings and/or The Hobbit and The Silmarillion, your average book-fan is liable to move on rather than rehash for a third or fourth time an increasingly repetitious set of topics and thoughts. And this has always been what happened here in the Reading Room. Participants from the early 2000s faded away in the late 2000s; those who dove in during the late 2000s faded away in the early 2010s; and those found the Room in the early 2010s ... um, well, I mean ....
Actually, it was about then that new blood as it were became increasingly scarce. And I've concluded that the reason is really not to do with either the books' eternal appeal, or the tone, intimidation-quotient, and house style of this forum. The reason, I think, is because the internet itself has moved past this message-board format.
Let's face it, Tolkien fandom is not on TORn proper anymore - it's on TORn's page in Facebook, along with dozens of other social-media sites that are a heck of a lot more user-friendly for posting images and clips and memes, etc. You know what they say: "Once you've hit INSERT, html's {img} seems INERT."
And, of course, ease of use is going to attract a larger and more general crowd; and a larger and more general crowd, even on well-moderated social media pages, is going to include more difficult folk and increase the kinds of behaviors your post today has been analyzing; and some of that has leaked back onto TORn's more inaccessible boards. But I do think it's not politics or a more sensitive Tolkien commentariat that has brought the Reading Room's tradition of read-throughs down. It's just the outdated technology.
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*The Reading Room Question is, traditionally, "Whither the Reading Room?" It has been invoked numerous times as one read-through discussion approached its end and members were asked to suggest what the group should read and discuss next. Almost inevitably the resulting threads considered the declining number of RR posters and responses in the later 2000s and across the whole 2010 decade. Often enough the dreaded topic of the "intimidating" nature of the Room would raise its resentful head, whereby more casual or less devoted fans of the books would confess they were scared off, or "intimidated" by the high-level tone and content of some of the posts on this board. Politics, as we now debate them, had nothing to do with this, but it was often thought to be a crippling feature of the board.
squire online:
RR Discussions: The Valaquenta, A Shortcut to Mushrooms, and Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit
Lights! Action! Discuss on the Movie board!: 'A Journey in the Dark'. and 'Designing The Two Towers'.
Archive: All the TORn Reading Room Book Discussions (including the 1st BotR Discussion!) and Footerama: "Tolkien would have LOVED it!"
Dr. Squire introduces the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: A Reader's Diary
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ElanorTX
Tol Eressea
May 30 2022, 5:51pm
Post #5 of 10
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Let's face it, Tolkien fandom is not on TORn proper anymore - it's on TORn's page on Facebook, along with dozens of other social-media sites that are a heck of a lot more user-friendly for posting images and clips and memes, etc. You know what they say: "Once you've hit INSERT, HTML's {img} seems INERT."
And, of course, ease of use is going to attract a larger and more general crowd; and a larger and more general crowd, even on well-moderated social media pages, is going to include more difficult folk and increase the kinds of behaviors your post today has been analyzing; and some of that has leaked back onto TORn's more inaccessible boards. But I do think it's not politics or a more sensitive Tolkien commentariat that has brought the Reading Room's tradition of read-throughs down. It's just the outdated technology.
__________________
"I shall not wholly fail if anything can still grow fair in days to come."
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Eldy
Tol Eressea
May 30 2022, 6:01pm
Post #6 of 10
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I think you're correct about the much diminished role of message boards in online culture. There have been some similar observations about decreased activity made in the ROP board recently, blaming the decline on TORn supposedly selling its soul for politics. But as you point out, this is part of a much larger trend than just this site. Some broader context might be helpful (or maybe I just like the sound of my own voice too much).
For most of the 1990s, online Tolkien discussion was centered on the Usenet newsgroups alt.fan.tolkien and rec.arts.books.tolkien, which had an overlapping membership and were effectively a single community. Their web presence is still online, as are records of their own chapter by chapter read-throughs in the early 2000s. But by then, the center of gravity of fandom had already shifted to web-based forums—message boards—which started cropping up in large numbers in 1999. This shift was inextricably linked to the official confirmation of the PJ films the year before (they began filming in late 1999), but this roughly coincided with message boards as a whole coming into their own. The pioneering Ultimate Bulletin Board software was introduced in 1997, and the long ubiquitous vBulletin and phpBB both began in 2000.
Tolkien fandom was never as forum-centric as a lot of video game and science fiction fandoms, but there was a huge wave of Tolkien forums founded between 1999 and 2003, coinciding with the films. But the pace of new forums being founded fell off precipitously after The Return of the King, and most of the successful forums of the mid-2000s, such as The Hall of Fire (currently the most active surviving Tolkien message board by my best estimate), were founded by members of older sites. There was a far smaller wave of forums inspired by the Hobbit trilogy, but only one of them ever reached a six-figure post count, and just two others barely crept past the five-figure mark. (Full disclosure: I used to own the six-figure forum.)
This isn't to blame TH; the much more zeitgeist-y Game of Thrones, which remained in the public eye over a much longer span of time, spawned no successful message boards at all, though it did drive traffic to the preexisting A Forum of Ice and Fire. TORn played a similar role during the Hobbit years, as the only LOTR-era site to successful rebrand itself and capitalize on the renewed attention of a fresh Middle-earth trilogy. This made TORn the largest forum in our fandom for most of the 2010s, until activity everywhere fell off so much that minor fluctuations could rewrite the rankings. Troels Forchhammer, who used to blog for the Tolkien Society website and has been around long enough to witness the decline of both Usenet and message boards, estimated in 2017 that Facebook groups had eclipsed forums, and that date more or less aligns with my own observations.
Since then, those of us on message boards have been a legacy part of Tolkien fandom. I've participated in Facebook discussions on Tolkien and other topics, and I find it a nearly intolerable format for serious conversation. I find Reddit marginally better, and I've read (and sometimes joined in) plenty of good discussions on subreddits like r/tolkienfans. They, too, have organized group read-alongs of various Tolkien books. For my part, I find scheduled read-throughs too stressful to consistently participate in, though I think it's encouraging this tradition hasn't disappeared.
I don't mean to be nothing but doom and gloom. I myself am only recently returned to traditional message boards after a self-imposed exile of sorts, and I've had a lot of really interesting, mentally stimulating discussions so far this year, mostly on TORn. Just like AFT and RABT didn't die out until many years after Usenet lost its primacy, message boards are not useless just because they aren't as popular as they used to be. While I think it's sad how many communities have disappeared, this to some extent benefits the sites that still hold on, as remaining fans consolidate into the few places you can still consistently find good discussions. (This is also true on a larger scale: a small number of pan-fandom forums have actually grown over the past decade.)
However, much of the remaining activity is driven by non-Tolkien conversations. TORn is something of an exception to this generalization, but even here, taking away the recurring Fiesta Friday thread would be a huge blow to the site. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, though. People keep returning to "defunct" mediums of discussion because they're invested in the communities, and I believe communities are stronger when people have the chance to get to know each other beyond the scope of the topic that brought them together. That's an advantage traditional forums still have over Reddit, where discussion is atomized across a vast number of topic-specific subreddits. The message board format may well die out entirely someday, but unlike Usenet, we still have something that successor formats haven't replicated. So I, for one, am happy to keep coming back, even if things will never be like they were in the old days.
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Silvered-glass
Lorien
May 30 2022, 7:41pm
Post #7 of 10
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It's just the outdated technology. I very much disagree about that. It is an issue of cultural degeneration and diminishing computer literacy. It doesn't help that registering a forum account has become harder than ever because of the spambots.
I for one will never have a Facebook account. I registered here because this place seemed to have the most active Tolkien book discussions in a sensible format, though it isn't much.
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ElanorTX
Tol Eressea
May 31 2022, 1:14am
Post #8 of 10
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Pesky hands, she has.
For RR I really can't imagine a better format for long, scholarly discussions. Fiesta Friday is such a community-builder for those who participate -- we even know the names of one another's pets.
Where I had meant to go with my incomplete post was to ask for suggestions about the most worthy sites to investigate. Best Return on Investment, or Value for Money, as JRRT would not say.
ElanorTX
"I shall not wholly fail if anything can still grow fair in days to come."
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Eldy
Tol Eressea
May 31 2022, 5:02pm
Post #9 of 10
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Where I had meant to go with my incomplete post was to ask for suggestions about the most worthy sites to investigate. Best Return on Investment, or Value for Money, as JRRT would not say.
Unfortunately, there aren't many places left where one can easily and consistently find high-level Tolkien discussions, since very few communities have the critical mass, to use squire's term, even for topic-specific discussions, much less structured read-throughs. Among traditional message boards, TORn remains one of the larger ones, especially if disregarding off-topic subforums, and the quality of posts in the Reading Room continues to compare favorably to other boards. But to find more active communities (which, inevitably, have a lower average post quality), one should probably look to some of the larger Tolkien Facebook groups—the Tolkien Society group is probably the unofficial flagship, and TORn has one as well—or subreddits. r/tolkienfans and r/lotr are, I think the two biggest book-centric ones; the former had higher quality discussions when I was semi-active on Reddit. It used to be easy to find really interesting Tolkien Lore posts on tumblr, but there isn't a centralized hub, and I no longer check regularly enough to know which individuals are still active. There are also some large-ish Tolkien Discord servers, including one sponsored by TORn, but I find chat servers harder to jump into as a newcomer, and it's not the best medium for long, thought-out messages.
(This post was edited by Eldy on May 31 2022, 5:04pm)
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Eruonen
Half-elven
Jun 8 2022, 2:09am
Post #10 of 10
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I might do what I did before with LOTR - just read and post my thoughts on every chapter
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and if anyone wants to add their comments feel free. I tend to go at a chapter or two a week speed depending on the content. I have no interest in trying to recruit contributors for the reasons posters have stated, Plus, the book is short enough that it will go fairly quickly.
I may be old fashioned but I appreciate this bulletin board format over Facebook. You can provide specific topic areas and threads.
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