U.S.-centric policy and international tropers

(Twice I posted this on the wrong thread, and then on the wrong subboard, because I'm largely unfamiliar with the layout of the forums and their subboards. My apologies — I was always much more of a troper and far less of a forums user, and it shows.) Wall of text to follow. I've had days to think about this. I hope none of it is Flame Bait, but I really can't be certain if it is or not, so I'll just try to be as honest and sincere as I can be.

Until just now, I've actually been staying away from TV Tropes for days. The entire wiki has now become enormously stressful to deal with right now, because of the recent chaos and the culture politics. I needed to restore my sanity, and that meant taking a complete hiatus, even from visiting articles. I hear recently that there have been some alternatives to TV Tropes popping up, with variations of scope and quality. I can't really get too excited about those either.

What I always liked about TV Tropes was its semi-casual mixture of frankness and good faith in a context that made no assumptions about country or demographics. It's a lot easier to do things in a respect-differences live-and-let-live context that isn't tied to any one country's standards. That way, you could be from any unspecified country, and you could assume any other use could be from any unspecified country, and you could be equals for it. Different places have different standards, and different is not automatically superior or inferior — it's just different, and worthy of respect. And when people are required to treat one another with respect on a civil basis, this facilitates a system that promotes mutual understanding and good faith.

One thing practically any of my non-American friends can agree on, is that one of the most offensive way to treat a non-American, is to demand they conform to American cultural expectations in their dealings. This sours the atmosphere by (a) Binding you to a community standard you have little or no understanding or interest in, and (b) Treating your own standards as inferior or irrelevant to that of Americans.

As it's been said, it would be bad to conform to a standard that puts all women in burqas. This is invoked as one of the benefits of applying "freer" American standards. The problem is that even American standards can feel like a burqa to someone else who would be entirely reasonable in feeling that way. Rather than judging topics and works by an intentionally narrow cultural standard, it would seem better to agree on a simpler baseline that virtually the entire world can agree on. The rest can be tolerated as good faith international diversity, unless there is really strong indication it's not acting in good faith with the baseline rules. That way, there's room for people from practically anywhere to abide by this baseline and still be treated in good faith when you randomly encounter them.

Now, as an example, let's address age of consent, before which it is often considered inappropriate to sensualize a person in photography or sexualize them in art or writing. A baseline international rule for this could be like...prepubescent people are not objects of audience lust. The age of consent in countries around the world varies on average wildly between 12 and 19 (or vaguely "puberty"), with virtually none younger than that. Historically this often had less to do with individual civil liberties, and more about practical observations of society.

As a consideration of background, it used to be more common for children to have arranged marriages, and be married as teenagers. This made the child's own consent less relevant than that of their parents.

For societies that aimed older (such as 16), this actually used to be the age most human beings started puberty, and this tended to match up with common cultural judgments of mental maturity as well, such that there was little distinction between the two. The age started skewing younger with the advent of widely available modern nutrition. I hit puberty at 10, and though I had already started to physically mature, the greater cultural concern would have been my mental maturity, which would not yet have caught up.

Another issue is contextually acceptable ephebophilia as distinct from globally taboo pedophilia — in some countries ephebophilia is pretty taboo, and in other countries people would think you strange if you never thought about it. I once even told Japanese friends that I never considered shota attractive — surprisingly, a lot of them reacted, "Why not?" Reasonable people can disagree over whether or not it is right, but there's a difference between this and accepting that it may have a well-adjusted tradition or lack thereof in another country that is different from your own.

Now, countries that did evolve with a consideration of individual civil liberties, often took all these practical precedents into consideration in some form or another. Only a few countries, like Japan, had no minimum age of consent until only a decade or two ago, when it adopted a nationwide minimum legal age of 13.

The above consideration can be applied to any issue where national standards may significantly differ — depictions of violence, nudity, gender roles and equality, intimate relationships, LGBT people, religious blasphemy, etc., etc.

When you have international users from any two given places whose particular standards may differ, it may be easy to judge the other as too permissive, or too reactionary. One needs to step back a moment and consider fundamental questions. Are they acting in good faith? Is there a legitimate cultural basis in this when it comes to the user, the work or the audience? Are their actions within the simpler baseline rules? On may argue that teenage editors don't have the appropriate faculties to do this, but I don't really think this is a valid excuse — it's a matter of fundamental international standards of respect vs. insular assumptions, and even teenagers have the capacity to respect other human beings.

You see, when your only consideration is "I disapprove of that by my standards, and mine are more important than yours wherever I go", it's incredibly alienating. This is even more amplified when the standard being applied is American, as American culture has an acquired international reputation (deserved or not) for national powertripping coupled with extreme cultural narcissism. It's not to say that all Americans act in such a way or that having a fervent love of one's country is a bad thing, but this is an acquired cultural reputation in the mixed company of civil international people. See, Eagle Land type B isn't actually always an unrealistic stereotype to a lot of non-Americans — a term I have often heard for this in my life, is "walking talking American flag". "I disapprove of that — that's not how we do things in America." If you want to start a Flame War, act just like this and one will start very quickly. And when you assert such an attitude on a wiki-wide basis, what you get is...all hell breaking loose like it has been. I already know quite a few troper friends who will not consider using TV Tropes with the new rules in place, because the problem isn't as poisonous as its cure.

So, as you can see, it has less to do with the content rules, and more with how you treat and welcome your visitors of diverse origins. TV Tropes worked as long as it was vaguely international. Now that TV Tropes is specifically American in its dealings, it will keep leaving a painfully sour taste in people's mouths. I understand that there are certain realpolitik considerations of applicable laws and providers in the country of location, and of having to deal with the drama of Google Ad Sense or Pay Pal or what have you. But if it's a matter of "I own it, I'm an American, and I didn't want the site to become like this," you should step back and consider the broader international scope, and the implications of cultural posturing on a policy level.

One thing that TV Tropes could have done, is provide a periodically-updated downloadable archive of the wiki's article sources and page images. I actually brought this up before, a year or two ago, and the issue was raised that this may be an impractical bandwidth burden. Fine, Bit Torrent it if you have to. Just make it available. It is Creative Commons content, after all. Its downloadability should not be unnecessarily bottlenecked to just a small handful of people who may not consider it a priority. TV Tropes is bigger than its users, and even bigger than it's administrators. It's a literary movement — one that accumulated a very large diverse base up until now. The fact that other TV Tropes clones have been recently sprouting up like mushrooms is evidence of this, from the very moment users were afraid TV Tropes itself may have been jumping the shark as an organized website.

Thank you. That was a lot to ponder on.

Well, the rub is that the majority of fictional works have come out of or have been influenced by the cultures of either the U.S. or Japan, giving those two the greatest "market share", so to speak.

While it's nice to say that we prefer to try to be unbiased about cultural influences, there's going to be a built-in bias based on the history of fiction. As long as we don't let it color our perceptions of differing works (and defining exactly what that means is always going to be shaky ground), we'll continue to be reliable as a wiki.

I will admit it is an area I think we do need to be more cautious in. Proclaiming "we don't care about X country's standards" (and yes, this has happened) is probably not the best M.O. for handling this, given those standards do play a role in what works get produced there.

Here's the thing - the shift in terms of what kind of policies TV Tropes goes forth with are not due to cultural pandering on the part of any number of American tropers. It's not that a couple of extremely influential tropers said "let's do this American-style." It's not that a huge host of tropers said "let's do this American-style."

No, the problem is that advertisers have told the wiki, "unless you hold yourself to these American-style content restrictions, we will pull all of our funding from you." And said dollars were necessary for the wiki's continual existence.

It's not a question of whether we want a distinctly American-flavored wiki versus a more international-flavored wiki. It's a question of whether we want an American-flavored wiki or no wiki at all. I know it's alienating to folks outside of the US (well, maybe not as much to Canada, since there are similar cultural mores there), and I personally care not for the necessity of it.

But we do what we must to survive. I would encourage you to participate in trying to keep the wiki have as much international flavor as possible instead of bemoaning its increasingly American slant. Perhaps the day will come in which the standards will be less aggressively American, perhaps not. But just complaining about it (and putting the blame on people who are merely trying to solve a wiki-level existential problem rather than the ones who created said problem) is not helping anyone.

@Totemic - Why should we care about X Country's standards?

The burqa argument might be well-worn at this point, but if we're going to pick one country to favor on media standards, we have to stick to it. We can't say "Oh, we're going to go on American, European, Japanese, Australian (which is basically European), and Indian standards, but those Muslim Middle Eastern countries are just too prudish for us." The only way to circumvent the whole thing is to go back to no standards at all, which is obviously not happening.

edited 4th May '12 5:56:33 AM by Martello

Because trying to analyze a work (and yes, while what we do here is not analysis in the conventional and traditional senses, it is still analysis) while ignoring the standards of the culture and people producing said works is a bit of stone boat; it's not nearly as useful as we could be. I'd like us to be useful.

Personally, I don't think this is as big a problem as Gilgameshkun does. We've done a fairly good job in this area; I'm just pointing out we can do better. (I'm more worried about the disconnect between troper/reader demographics and the general population demographics, but that's a whole different can of worms.)

edited 4th May '12 6:13:58 AM by TotemicHero

Way I see it, all moral values are subjective, and no two people are going to have identical values. So when you've got a wiki getting input from thousands of different people, either you've got to have one person or group of people laying down standards for the wiki, or you just have to let everyone express their values as they see fit.

Of course, most places on the wiki, value judgements aren't really appropriate anyway.

We make value judgements all the time on the wiki. Rule Of Cautious Editing Judgement, Conversation In The Main Page, Example Indentation — on every page I examine, I look at the quality of the writing and the compliance with our standards.

Of course, we're talking about something a bit more than that in terms of the content policy, but that is explicitly a case of having multiple overlapping and incompatible standards and having to choose one that (a) represents as many tropers as possible, (b) serves the financial needs of the wiki.

Nobody is stopping anyone from making the Japanese version of TV Tropes if you feel that Japanese culture is being oppressed by the application of U.S. standards. It's a free Internet, go crazy.

Well, the term value judgment means different things to different people. The most common meaning, as per Wikipedia, is to refer to the opinion of one person, based on their moral and cultural beliefs.

The Wikipedia article in question.

So we need to establish what we're talking about when we say "this is a value judgment".

I thought it was obvious from context, but I was talking about moral value judgements.

I know. The problem is that the wiki's audience is so diverse that on any given subject you'll have a wide range of moral standards being applied. We have to pick one, and it happens that we're picking one that the majority of tropers (and staff) will at least be familiar with if not always share. This wiki is based in the U.S., is sponsored by ads from a U.S. company, and is run by an American. C'est la vie.

That was my point: either everybody gets to impose their own, personal values in what they contribute, or someone takes charge of the collective project and tells people to play by their values or go home; this wiki's administrators have chosen the latter approach.

There cannot be a universal standard because all the regional standards contradict each other. We have to come with our standard. This is going to influenced by the fact that a distinct majority of the readership are culturally Western European.

Oh, and I'm a Bahamaian citizen. Just born in America. The standards we are shooting for are not just American, they apply in most of the countries outside of the Mid East and Japan.

edited 4th May '12 9:52:28 AM by FastEddie

Hey! I'm not culturally western european! I'm an Amurican!

I think Eddie hit the nail on the head there. Values Dissonance makes it impossible to mold the standard to be appropriate for every culture, so we're picking the one that applies to most of the tropers and staff. It's inevitably going to not gel with the stances of people from other cultures, but the alternative isn't doable.

I think the main problem here is that these Western standards aren't exactly all that consistent themselves. Likely, neither are any other culture's, really. There's a definite gap between what's supposed to be acceptable in theory and what actually is. (Hence my main concern I mentioned above.)

A good example would be the classic Aerosmith song "Walk This Way", whose lyrics really push the edge of our content guidelines. (See for yourself.) Given that they are one of the most influential and recognized American bands out there, I didn't bother flagging them, as many of their songs are openly played on the radio, including that one.

It's a song about the singer's exploits in high school. He even mentions in one line that he's in high school while this is happening.

That's not against our content policies.

That said, a lot of people parse things badly all the time and mainstream media can be really weird at times.

Well, high school in the U.S. can start for people as young as 14. Hence why that song is a borderline thing.

But yeah, in my experience (I do live in the U.S.), the majority of people here care even less about these things then we do. (I shudder at what they likely think of genuine full-blown Moral Guardians.) Of course, the majority of people are not readers of TV Tropes, although I would think we would want for that to someday be the case.

^ Yes, kids' sexual escapades with other kids does not cross any lines. It's kids and adults. Or porn. Not sex of any kind.

I know this is off-topic, but I had no idea that Walk This Way had intelligible words beyond 'walk this way' and 'gimme a kiss like this'. Though I'm not exactly surprised about its content, given that you can play Hall and Oates' 'Rich Girl' uncensored on classic radio.

In any case, I do feel that there are some users who have been a bit insensitive to other cultural mores during these issues, but there are also people who have perceived some sort of cultural backlash being Wiki-sanctioned when none exists. I definitely remember someone, upon a certain work being eliminated for having masturbating pandas, claiming that we were against furries. No, we're just against masturbating pandas. At the same time, I felt that certain Euroshlock films were not being fairly treated solely because of the tenets of the film genre. I'm not above the argument. No one is. We all have biases against certain media. It's a tricky rope to try and balance oneself on, and honestly, I do think that the P5/The Fast One are doing a pretty good job of trying to be as sensitive to these issues as possible.

"Well, the rub is that the majority of fictional works have come out of or have been influenced by the cultures of either the U.S. or Japan, giving those two the greatest "market share", so to speak."

That's just downright not true.

How is that possibly not true? It may be true that most of the works documented here are actually produced in the US or Japan. The softened claim that most are influenced by those countries seems uncontroversial.

There are plenty of works from other cultures that we don't cover extensively because we don't have a lot of tropers from those cultures. They are welcome here, of course. We've had a recent surge in Korean works, for example, and I know there are some tropers who like to write about Telenovelas.

edited 4th May '12 1:31:56 PM by Fighteer

How about fictional works written before the US? It's a pretty young country.

We got some Small Reference Pools up in this thread, yo.

edited 4th May '12 3:10:39 PM by Iaculus

Considered that. I imagine most works articles are about stuff made in the last few hundred years. Only a couple categories even existed before the recent past.

edited 4th May '12 3:30:57 PM by rodneyAnonymous

I'm hearing a lot of talk of having to be accepting of all culture's norms and what-not, and recent changes enforcing an American-centric view...

Wasn't the recent change just to stop TV Tropes from being a guide for pro-pedophile works and outright porn? I don't exactly see enforcing that one standard of decency being oppressive to other cultures. Or is this a slippery slope argument?