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

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Poptimists was kind of meant as a stopgap before that particular Hacienda gets built

I guess this is part of my frustration, itching for the Hacienda! But then you might always enjoy hanging out in the smaller clubs with your friends more anyway -- I wonder if it's even possible to have it both ways (part of the angst).

0% (0 votes) poptimist consensus

I think this is a good thing, and presents (perhaps) another paradox, which is how do you "explode" a conversation full of people who disagree with each other (in productive ways)...in my own experience it makes more sense letting people kind of stumble in as they see fit, looking for other clubs and people who don't usually go to clubs to try one out and get hooked. But it also keeps things a bit nomadic as a few people pine for the Big Place that'll somehow combine all the best elements of all the little places (and, subsequently, bring in new people).

And there's another question, which is how can we be sure that the people who are even remotely interested are going to be more interested with a Bigger Place? There's no way I could have the interests I have and not eventually find, say, ILM (and there was no way for me, having found ILM, not to find Poptimists). Where are these missing people, anyway?