Strawman Poll

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Hello -- long time listener, first time caller. (I'll be posting a big mostly-American teenpop project thingy in a week or two, and then I will go back to lurking the comment threads.)


Here's a paragraph that I wrote to koganbot a couple days ago in the K-punk fallout (I was the blogger who moved K-punk to K-pathos with my K-patheticness), though my comments weren't about the post itself, which was more confusing than anything else (I'm sure he'd say the same of my posts -- I doubt either of us really does his homework).

This [angst] is well-covered territory. But it's really frustrating, especially as I'm approaching an academic program that's going to be much more time-and-mind-consuming in an unrelated field and probably won't be able to write for outside venues regularly. I just want to WANT to talk about this stuff. It shouldn't be *that* hard; I really love talking about it! But I feel like public discourse keeps finding its way to some kind of underground secret society sh1t that really rubs me the wrong way -- locked LJ posts and even LJ itself, which often feels like the catacombs of internet pop chat.

So a few questions that I'd like to elaborate on here:

(1) Is one of the appeals of Poptimists its unique sort of exclusivity? I'm relatively new to LJ (and rock crit/conversation in general, really), but one of my goals has always been to open up conversation and, frankly, get people to notice me. (In that sense, any publicity is good publicity, but any conversation isn't necessarily good conversation; tricky balance sometimes.)

(2) If others feel like they want to explode this conversation into the world, how do we do it? How do we send up flares? This relates to Frank's evolving DDR idea, but I'm asking in a more immediate sense: how do we (or, maybe with less angst, how ARE we) keep(ing) the conversation going and expanding?

(3) Do you feel the conversation needs to expand and grow to survive, or is that not what people take from the community -- and by that I mean, is it more of a comfort zone, a sort of conservative space that can occasionally, without ridicule/nastiness, entertain radical (or at least provocative to use a less loaded word) ideas? (Somewhat related: can it expand and grow and remain a comfort zone, or are public disses the equivalent of growing pains? I notice that the teenpop thread on ILM, for instance, has dwindled since a few posters defended -- and fairly successfully, I think -- the thread's existence to non-contributors.)

(4) Are these questions for the larger community, or for individual Poptimist members who have an interest in breaking out into the morass of pop-critdom writ large?

(5) Was it silly to post this on a Saturday night (US EST) when everyone's about to go on holiday?

Should add before/if there are comments that I've started visiting my LJ network and Poptimists first in my internet routine, and I really love the community here. I just wonder whether or not it has anywhere to go -- or if having no particular place to go is actually desirable to most members. I guess I'd call it a guilty pleasure, myself -- sometimes you wanna go where everyone knows your alias. But for all the collective insights and singular minds (& vice versa?) on display here, I'd also like more Poptimist writing to bully its way into more eyeballs, even if some eyeballs are less likely to actually read it carefully -- or at all -- than others.

Comments

IMO

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

I think poptimists has a heavy paradox about it, insofar as although there may be enthusiastic talk of things like the DDR, what holds people here and brings most of the glee/enthusiasm for talking about muzak, is the orgafun and polls. Everyone loves a good canon etc. Thus I'd conclude that 4) is probably both but with a lot of angst and a sudden bout of relief when a new NOW comes out.

Other thing is, a lot of the members have other places they write and poptimists is the place they harvest ideas and/or y'know, just come for the fun and because there are some ace people here.

Final problem with the idea of poptimist thortz exploding across the internets' collective eyeballs is that, as has been mentioned a lot post-Kpunkgate, there is 0% (0 votes) poptimist consensus; the polls demonstrate well the utter disparity in between not only our ideas of pop music but our ideas of good music around, in and beyond that. The Open was very interesting for that, to me, cus people have been producing the most extraordinary stuff. Not to mention that even in the cases of total agreement things like 'Umbrella,' there've been detractors. The nice thing about the community is we can all disagree and no one gets cross and calls anyone else a retard or at least if they do, you know it's limited to that discussion.

I'm not sure the membership is closed in any way but we do have our own language around here innit. Took me months to understand dubdobdee at all.

I nearly made the community my homepage awhile back but then I changed to Opera so it now sits happily on my ...whatever you call that thing with the 9 homepage options. :)

Good ol' LJ

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Agreed - I'd say 75% of poptimists members just like filling out polls and finding out about awesome new music. The other 25% also use it to explore their ideas further/defend Fergie to the death/find material for their latest column :-) but those 25% like ticking boxes just as much as anyone else. Hence the suitability of the LJ format. The threading is annoying but if you're that interested there's always the comment tracking option for each post (best invention evah!). BUT those 75%/25% aren't static - the idea-explorers may be having a busy day at work and just need some poll-ticking escapism, or one comment by a casual ticker may feature a great point regarding Chart Dance 94-96 which starts off a whole new thread.

Technically speaking we do moderate who joins, but all this means is I'll have a look at your user info and see if there are Any Bands At All on your interests list (or are friends with someone already on poptimists), if not I'll click through to your journal and see if you mention music somewhere. And that's only to stop people posting spam on the community or getting antsy about mp3 posts - non-members can still comment to their heart's content!