»CL6:-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- »CL0: Objectivity & Passivity »CL6:-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Written by »CL5:Darkhawk »CL6:of »CL5:IRIS »CL1:Have you read Wades article in this mag about objectivity yet? As he wrote about something I wanted to write about too, I will just go ahead and write more of the same.. Ehrr no, not quite, but it will be about the same topic. »CL8:I wanted to write about objectivity and negativity, but I will just skip some things and mainly focus on interpretations of objectivity.»CL1: I will expand my article idea into another article I wanted to write, after seeing how many people in the scene react to something that is both akin to, and developed, out of this topic. First off, however, I want to add to Wades writing about objectivity. »CL7:He has clearly defined one instance of it, the 'neutral, observing stance' version, and told you that this version in diskmag writing is a thing that should only rarely, if ever, be sought, certainly not in reviews.»CL1: Many people have this habit of crying 'subjectivity' when the writer writes something negative, and 'objectivity' when he writes something positive (especially if it is about them, their production, or similar), so that 'objectivity' for them, is to express oneself nicely/inoffensively, not negatively, about a given topic. While this is not the true definition of the term, we might humour this a bit. »CL8:Try to imagine a scene review in this vein, taken to the extreme. What would it consist of? I was tempted to do such a review this time, but laziness got the better of me.»CL1: However, it would consist of listings. Listings of effects, of the number of colours, of the screen mode used, of the amount of bytes in it, the amount of articles, the amount of lines of code, the amount of 'whatever'. »CL7:It would consist of a description of musical style (jazz, funk, techno, whenever such phrasing would be unambiguous to people), of the names of those who did it, of tedious, matter-of-fact statements about the things on the screen (e.g. 'Now we see a so-called Metaball, on a 256 colour screen.'»CL1: etc.. Infact much like Azzaro's own review in the last EC), and lastly, if the reviewer wanted to add a bit of spice, he could write about how other people have received the production, moreover, he would have to do this truthfully. Would this be a good article? Well, it would have many things speaking against it, it would fail to capture the reader, and it would fail to express the opinion of the author, who might have some deep things to write about it. After all, philosophy, creativity and inherent understanding of a text, of its intrinsic value (or lack thereof), does not come through a cold, clinical analysis of it, infact one will very often not get any good view of a given thing, by such means. »CL8:Dissecting things without regard to the meaning inside never produces a good result. However, I am carried away here.»CL1: I am very much in agreement with Wade on this topic, but I wanted to elaborate too. What some people call 'objectivity' is 'to talk nicely and not negatively', others understand it as 'being a neutral observer, only writing about that, which you can directly observe, without interpreting'. »CL7:Both methods are quite clearly wrong, when one wants to write an article , and it shows the word-ly confusion we can have.»CL1: Different minds, different ways of interpreting words. Also, in the 'real' world, objectivity is neither of these two things anymore. Yes, the latter has been the ideal of the Newtonian science for a long time, and is quite inherent in our western way of thinking, although it has been largely abandoned too. Without commenting too much on this aspect however, I can safely state that the cultural/humanistic sciences do not operate with that interpretation of objectivity, and those sciences, if you should not have guessed already, are the basis for modern article writing that is not purely natural science (physics, chemistry, etc.). »CL8:That view on objectivity is more along the lines of 'looking at all relevant aspects of a given thing, and making the relevant comments and links'.»CL1: 'Relevant' here means using one's knowledge and experience when looking at the aspect in full, noticing and describing things according to that knowledge. If there is anyone left reading this by now, I guess it is time to concretise what I have written, with some examples. Consider a professor in English and a farmer being asked to describe Shakespeare's 'Macbeth' according to each of the 3 interpretations of 'objectivity' I have given. The first interpretation was actually a kind of subjectivism,»CL7: but it is very prevalent in the scene, that is, always writing as many nice things as possible, or at least not writing the negative things, or, being very gentle with it, if it cannot be helped. »CL1:The second was the 'purely neutral/passive view, devoid of interpretation', and the third was the 'interpretation using available understanding & experience, starting from a neutral standing point'. In the first case, the professor would be full of praise for the work, so much praise that he need not criticize at all (and admittedly, it is hard for such a professor not to be positive about most of Shakespeare's works), while the poor farmer would have his trouble understanding the play, but if he managed to grasp the meaning of most of the words, he would gain an impression about the play, and likely find it jolly and interesting (»CL8:more so if he could just view the play, instead of reading it»CL1:). He would not quite grasp the real meanings behind the text, the subtleties, or indeed, the overall theme maybe, but he would likely enjoy it, and if not, he can excuse himself and say he was too inept. Both would not have to be negative, after all, Shakespeare is such a nice fellow, he tries hard, and one should not discourage those few who try hard by actually criticizing them, no no.. »CL7:In the second (and maybe most interesting, since this might be held as a goal for serious journalism by some editors) interpretation of objectivity, the two 'reviewers' are actually on close to even grounds,»CL1: as the knowledge of the professor of the actual contents of the book is subjective and extraneous. The professor and the farmer would both describe the book as so-and-so thick, of having this amount of pages, of having this layout, this cover, of consisting of black marks written on white paper, of weighing so-and-so, etc. They could both do a somewhat precise review, according to this criteria. This would be like a scene musician and a random, not very musical person, reviewing the same piece of music. They would both be equally good at it, with that criteria. »CL8:Lastly, and here is the conclusion, and the be-all-end-all thing for this discussion about objectivity in articles,»CL1: when reviewing the book according to the 3rd interpretation of objectivity, you would get an extensive, likely brilliant, highly academic and thoroughly extensive and enlightening review of 'MacBeth' from the professor, while the farmer (yes, I know, I am being cruel to farmers, it is just for illustration, eheh) would fall terribly short of the goal of providing a reasonable review, because he has not had the training, nor the inclination for this particular review, infact the farmer would not even begin to understand the intricacies of the play, or the new words Shakespeare introduces in it. However, the professor would do a review as it should be. He has the education for this review (though he would not have it for a review of crop-rotation, just to be fair), and he has the expertise to point out good and bad things about it. »CL7:Of course, you will have to bear in mind that the opinion of the professor might not be easily accessible, that is, understandable, and it might also be biased, but it would still be objective according to the 3rd interpretation,»CL1: unless the professor has personal feelings of hatred towards Shakespeare (always forced to read him before going to bed, beaten on the head with a Shakespeare book by his father, etc.), because he is judged able to make a professional estimate of the worth of the play (ok ok, maybe he is a boring dork, and does not appreciate this sort of intricacies, but you get my meaning). Others might of course disagree, but calling his opinion 'subjective' and not 'objective', would be an error. »CL8:Phew.. Somewhere into this article, I asked myself why I was writing this, and making the article so inaccessible to people, but I guess I just wanted to cut loose, so probably only 50% fellow editors and die-hard masochists are with me now.»CL1: I do hope you got my point though, it is wider and more general than you might think. For now, Wade's and my own article have hopefully demonstrated that we need this way of reviewing and looking at things, otherwise we would be cold, boring machines , or ignorant, boring, back-clappers. »CL7:What the scene needs, is not this kind of *passivity* in opinions or deeds.»CL1: The scene needs a little more bite, a little more honesty, and certainly it does not benefit from handling everything like it is fragile and might break if one says something 'not-so-flattering' about it. This will stifle our scene, make it devoid of values and meaning, and this is actually rather important. So important that I, after having established the preliminaries, will deal with this topic in the next article. For now, remember that cold objectivity, or uncritical back-clapping leads to passivity and non-caring in the scene, certainly not to a brighter and more objective way of things.. »PIC:5.iff»