Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

The examples of non-feedback motives in my last post were not meant to
be exhaustive. Lori and Mike gave some better examples of motives, to wit,
some people post just to be read and some people post for emotional sharing.

Mike’s essay led me to wonder whether emotional feedback counts as feedback proper. I was surprised to find that I’ve been in
fandom so long I’d forgotten that our usage of the term feedback is rather
unusual. It can be found in business English (which might be better called
corporate slang), but not in Webster’s:

feedback n. (1920)
1 : the return to the input of a part of the output of a machine, system,
or process (as for producing changes in an electronic circuit that improve
performance or in an automatic control device that provide self-corrective
action)
2 a : the partial reversion of the effects of a process to its source or to a
preceding stage
b : the transmission of evaluative or corrective information
to the original or controlling source about an action, event, or process;
also: the information so transmitted
- Merriam-Webster OnLine

I’m not looking for correction. Although I wouldn’t mind improvement and
I never object to constructive criticism, becoming a better writer
has not been my goal in writing fanfic. So on a deeper level than just rah-rah
email, I’m not in it for the feedback. Or rather, I provide all the
feedback I need - I fix what I want fixed, and I leave broken what I like broken.
(Said-bookisms, anyone?)

I get the most feedback, in the 1920 sense of the word, from my hit
tracker. I would have no idea how many
people were reading my fic on the web without the sneaky little perl script that
logs visitors, and I’ll never know what my readership on ASC is, between the
newsgroup proper, the mirror mailing list, the Trekiverse archive and Google
Groups. Hits are just a “partial reversion”, they’re nothing like a corrective
process. I put my stories on line before I started tracking, so I’m not
in it for the hits.

Then again, rah-rah email is just positive feedback, too. I’ve said in the
past that you can tell a lot from positive feedback - from what people say they
liked, even if they’re too nice or controversy-aversive to say what they didn’t
like.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 21st, 2002 at 3:48 pm and is filed under Meta. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.