Full of rage!

[brigdh]

A friend of mine is working to set up an archaeology blog, a sort of vaguely professional thing, but readable to anyone interested. Today we had a meeting with anyone thinking about contributing. My thoughts:



First, we had the regular problem of meetings, which are solid evidence of how it is never, ever productive to talk about anything in large groups. In this particular instance, it took the form of spending half an hour arguing about whether it was appropriate for the mission statement to include the word "provide", or if that was setting up too much of a dichotomy between the writers of the blog and potential readers.

Again, WHARRGARBL.

Then, we proceeded to spend essentially the entire rest of the time arguing over using real names versus screen names. The argument included gems such as "real names are self-serving!" "Screen names are friendlier, while people will be off-put by real names!" "How about we use real names on half the site and screen names on the other half? This is somehow a logical compromise!" "If we use real names, the university will be responsible for all content, even if we don't mention it!" "Real names are elitist!" "Having some people use real names and some screen names is unorganized!"

WHARRGARBL.

WHARRGARBL. WHARRGARBL. WHARRGARBL.

I... Seriously. I think I was perhaps the only person in the room who had ever heard of that new-fangled, complicated world, the internet. Which kind of makes me want to kill things. Why would you come to a meeting about the internet when your sole function is to ask stupid question, get into debates you know nothing about, cause difficulties, change topics randomly whenever a new questions occurs you, and go on and on with your personal opinions which have never met so much as a Angelfire homepage from 1998?

WHARRGARBL!

Comments

[rm.livejournal.com]

Makes you wish you could go back to helping out in schools, I bet.

[hazard-us.livejournal.com]

I had the same issues with my DAR Chapter. Finally the junior board members just told the older, non-computer-y ladies to leave it to us and that if they had any questions, come directly to us. Is there anyway you can just...take over? Or is it too much work for one person?

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Alas, no. It's not really a situation where I can take it away from the guy whose idea it was. Though it's very tempting to try!

[call-me-ishmael.livejournal.com]

Ahaha, I've heard similar debates in cultural anthropology just as frustrating about people over-analyzing everything, but never had to be so close to one. I sympathize. People really need to learn that there's no pleasing everyone and it's impossible to be completely culturally/politically correct.
(This, I think, is why I loved my ornery, curmudgeon anthropology professor the best. He didn't try to save anyone's feelings, he offended everybody instead.)

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

It is so annoying! At least I was expecting the over-analysis of how to phrase things, so while that was incredibly boring, it wasn't a surprise. The completely and total ignorance of how real names versus screen names function on the internet was a shock, though. How do you get a roomful of 20-somethings, none of which seem to have ever seen a blog?

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

Wow.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

At least the ranting made me feel better! :)

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

I'm glad!

[p-zeitgeist.livejournal.com]

Ah, the special hell that is meetings. I do not know why they're always like that, but they are. Always. For values of "always" that include Senate committee hearings, where the principals have entire staffs to see that they have at least the opportunity to understand what they're going to be meeting about, and meetings of executive committees of little volunteer-run organizations, and everything in between. Horribly, education and formal intelligence level of the participants does not appear to make any difference to the inevitable and horrid experience.

(Oddly, the one exception I've ever found in my life is meetings among lawyers in high-flying firms. Those more or less stay on point, and when they don't the byways are one or more of interesting, useful, or hysterically funny. But this is the only context in which I've ever seen this particular magic happen.)

But in any event, I feel, and feel for, your rage. I have experienced it on many occasions myself: it's both why I long ago gave up any ideas I might have had of active participation in politics and why I grew up to be paradoxically ridiculously good at running meetings.

The latter is the only thing that helps -- if you run the damn things yourself, you'll be in a position to force people to stay on track and to shut down an area of discussion when its usefulness has been exhausted. If you have to do any more of this, I recommend it as a tactic. That, or ensuring the job is given to some other similarly-minded person.

Meetings. We hates them, precious, we hates them, we hates them forever.

[rm.livejournal.com]

This reminds me of the Rule for Meetings.

The Rule for Meetings is that they must be conducted with everyone standing. You'd be amazed how much faster people get over their shit and come to a consensus.