thefourthvine | Poll and Miscellany

Three things, almost entirely content free. (But one of them is a poll! There will be clicking, and that's always fun, right?)

I swear I will have actual content in this LJ again. Eventually. In the meantime -

Remember the poll? Um, this one? Thanks to everyone who took it, by the way, and I am slowly working my way through the comments, because they are meaty and thought-filled and fun. And I'm knee-deep in meta about it, but it's taken a strange turn. So I'm hoping that some of you will do my a favor, and run a poll like this one:

[Poll #831564]

Basically, I want you to ask your friends what archetype they think you are. (I've alphabetized the archetypes to make finding them easier.) And while you're here, please do pick mine; I'm truly curious to see if there's a difference between how I see myself and how others see me. (In this sense only. I'm not crazy.)

Sadly, I don't have bribes to offer. But if you do run a poll like this, and you also drop me a link in the comments here, I will be forever grateful. And you will be furthering the cause of meta. (I know, I know, it's not precisely ever fan's dream, but - stay with me, here, okay?)
This is driving me insane, so - okay. I collect what I call genderswapped songs. Although, really, I should call them ungenderswapped songs - the song is covered by a singer of a different sex than the original one, but no gendered element of the song is changed. I have one song by Cam Clarke, from Inside Out, which is a whole CD of songs just like this. (The one I have is Son of a Preacher Man.) And I cannot find the whole CD anywhere. Does anyone have a copy of this? Or know where I can get a copy of this? I am experiencing the anguish of the thwarted collector, and it is not pretty.
This is more of a bonus item; I found it interesting. If any of you watch AMVs - and if you don't, why not? - you might want to take a look at this AMV-related survey.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

is basically a measure of how much you talk about fandom in your lj and how long that other person has been reading your lj.

In part it is. And I expected that. But it also has done basically what I hoped it would do. (Plus some extra.)

With this, I was trying to work around a problem in the original poll, which I think of as the Rule of the Magpie. Even allowing for the way LJ encourages polyfannishness (and the way my friends list skews toward polyfannish types), there were too many magpies - and there were some people who picked magpie who I know well enough to be pretty sure that they aren't.

I have theories about why the magpie reigned supreme that basically boil down to the outside observer/internal observer thing. Sometimes, people see things about us before we see them in ourselves. One example of this (unrelated to the poll - I'm picking on her because I'm pretty sure won't mind being an example) is

musesfool. When she switched fandoms recently, it was immediately obvious to me. There was a sea change in her LJ posts, her fan fiction volume, content, and frequency, everything. But when I talked to her about it a week or two after that, she still hadn't processed the switch; a few days later, she did, and then she admitted she'd jumped fandoms. But there was a distinct lag - the observers could tell faster than she could.

Okay. I'm rambling. You don't need a wandering discussion of a small portion of the crap I'm chewing on about this right now. So, summary time.

Basically, I'm taking a parallax view of the question. Each of the points of view is flawed; one is flawed because we don't always see (or admit to ourselves) what our fannish behavior really is, and one is flawed because we don't tell our friends list everything that we think (and even if we do, it's not like they're always paying attention).

When you combine the views, you get a group of people who have more or less matching results, and a group of people who have highly variant ones.

So then I look at the variance and try to explain it (and try to talk to the person about it). And what I'm finding is that it breaks down into specific categories of things that observers are better at noticing and specific categories of things that subjects (um, bad term, but - you see what I mean) are better at noticing. Which is basically what I expected, but I wanted to see exactly what those categories were. (And I wanted better test subjects than I am; because I babbled about what archetypes I thought I was all over the comments of my previous poll, people taking the poll are likely to be very biased.)

What I didn't expect was that this would spread the way it has; I expected a handful of people to run the poll, at most. It appears to have gone sort of meme-shaped, which is surprising to me. (Also kind of cool. And it's fun, speaking as someone who has done the poll, to see how people class you.)

Which means that as I skip around LJ looking at the polls of friends and strangers, I'm also getting some interesting data for the other thing I'm writing about the previous poll, which is about how people take polls.

And, finally and unexpectedly, I'm learning that the polling-your-friends thing is really good at picking out people who don't fit any archetype at all. (Most people at least fall into three or so categories, but some people just don't fit anywhere.) They have a distinct appearance to their charts - this weird scatter of results. So now I'm also squinting at those people (and muttering "fantastic beasts" at them).

All in all, I've learned more than I hoped to.

Thanks for replying! And I actually do appreciate the rambling, because I originally found this incomprehensible (and a bit irritating, mostly because the poll appeared uncut all over my flist, but that's certainly not your fault) and now I understand that you are looking at a particular subset of people whose self-identification doesn't track with their outside identification, and why. And I find polls (usually) interesting.

Speaking of polls, I suspect that were I to ask people what my primary fandom is, people in one would choose the other, because I think that they would be personally biased against my babbling about whatever fandom they don't care for and therefore notice it more.

you are looking at a particular subset of people whose self-identification doesn't track with their outside identification, and why.

Yup, that's it. Only, you know, you put it more succinctly than I did.

I'm also now looking at a subset of things that other people are more likely to know about us than we are about ourselves.

And I'm getting distracted by looking at how people take polls; like, I've got a number for how many people don't check the headcount button (5%, roughly) and how many people don't follow the instructions for a given question (also roughly 5%, and probably for similar reasons).

I suspect that were I to ask people what my primary fandom is, people in one would choose the other, because I think that they would be personally biased against my babbling about whatever fandom they don't care for and therefore notice it more.

*head tilt*

Ooo, that's an interesting one. (I'd say it's currently dS, for the record, and I am in that fandom.) I wonder what results you would get. You could ask them how long they've been reading your LJ and what fandom(s) of yours they're interested in, and then you could see if it correlates. That would be excellent.

Poll and Miscellany

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