Controversy and the Collaborative Literary Blog

Abstract

Controversy and the Collaborative Literary Blog James Tadd Adcox (bio) “On August 5th, Jimmy Chen, one of the regular contributors to HTMLGIANT.com, published “Internet persona afflictions” on the site. The post consisted of a Venn diagram, created by Chen, grouping primarily small-press authors into categories including “Esoteric,” “Academic,” “Douche,” and “Menstrual.” It was a controversial post. Several commenters, including author Kate Zambreno (whom Chen had placed in the “Menstrual” circle), and Chen’s fellow HTMLGIANT contributor Roxane Gay accused the post of being misogynistic. One anonymous commenter wrote, This is stupid and you’re being a bully idiot. If you don’t understand why, you need to do some serious introspection, esp. re: the menstrual stuff (oh my god! I’m calling you out on being misogynist! Someone call me a bitch, quick!) The bully idiocy of this will remain true even though a million people will jump on me for saying it and for being anonymous (don’t feel up to being mocked on the internet. Oh my god, someone call me a coward, quick!) The bully idiocy will remain true past all that and most of us who don’t regularly tickle HTMLGIANT’s balls will all continue to know it. HTMLGIANT is a collaborative literary blog, one of the largest and most active on the Internet. There are a host of others, including Big Other, We Who Are About to Die, Plumb, and (though it’s been infrequently active recently) Trick with a Knife. Whereas a post at these other collaborative blogs might garner five or ten or (much more rarely) fifty or more comments, it’s rare that HTMLGIANT goes a week without at least one post receiving a hundred or more. Unique visitors average around 65,000 a month. A sort of community has grown up around HTMLGIANT. Commenters’ screen names and personalities become familiar even when one doesn’t know the person said names are attached to. The posts most likely to generate over one hundred comments are, of course, the controversial ones. Roxane Gay, one of the contributors to HTMLGIANT (and one of the commenters who wrote to say that she found the “Internet persona afflictions” post sexist), identifies several such controversial posts, including a previous Jimmy Chen post on Zelda Fitzgerald, as “significant moments in the evolution of the site…posts that generated a lot of contentious discussion about matters of difference and reflected some of the site’s growing pains.” The controversial posts can often lead to quite aggressive arguments in the comments, which in turn can make some people less willing to comment. According to HTMLGIANT contributor Mike Kitchell, “The ‘comment culture’ at Giant is really weird, because I feel like there’s a huge readership (that stats attest to), but very few regular commenters any more. To be honest I feel like a lot of the more troll-y/assholeish commenters scare some people away.” Part of the value of HTMLGIANT lies in this anarchy. Referring on her blog to the Zelda Fitzgerald post, Kate Zambreno has said, “I now am uneasy going over to HTML Giant, or at least commenting there, because I feel sometimes things get sweaty boy locker room in there, that when I am witness to it I have to play some hard-nosed feminist ideologue that I am not. That’s no fun.” Nonetheless, all of the site contributors I spoke with identified various controversial posts as the primary moments of significance in the site’s past, although Jimmy Chen argues that the response to such posts has resulted in “a kind of boring and ultimately condescending responsibility to be socially more aware.” What is the value of a space like HTMLGIANT? Literary authors have traditionally worked in “schools” or other restricted economies before (hopefully) becoming established in the wider culture. Such groups are by their nature somewhat cliquish, with correspondence between members being either in person, through letters, or in small- circulation journals—restricted, but also more or less invisible spaces. Unlike these restricted but invisible spaces, HTMLGIANT is public. And, if it’s less restricted, in the sense that anyone can add to the comments section of a post, its...