Community: Confusing Unmarked Defaults

[hrj]

OK, this is meant to be a humorous essay, not any sort of whiny complaint. I know the two sometimes sound similar!

On facebook, on Twitter, somewhat less so on LiveJournal, I intersect with a number of clearly defined interest-communities. The sort that sometimes default to assuming that everyone listening to the conversation is coming from the same place and filling in the same assumptions.

When two contexts are significantly different, it's pretty easy to figure out which bin a particular posting falls in, what those assumed defaults are, and therefore how to interpret the message. For example, if a message pops up on my fb feed that says, "Just tried out my new broadsword and killed three out of four guys last night. Sweet!" I rarely have to consider more than a nano-second whether this is something that should be reported to legal authorities. (Answer: no.) Similarly if I see a tweet with the simple message, "I have a contract!" I can generally guess that a work of fiction is involved. (And then there are the postings like yesterday's fb query regarding my expertise involving dead bodies in freezers where the underlying context is, "I have some very strange friends.")

But where the contexts overlap a lot more, I often find myself filling in the wrong assumed details. This can be very disappointing. I can't tell you how many times I've seen a Tweet to the effect of, "Check out this great new book with [features that I really really like]" only to discover that I've assumed the wrong defaults and made the topic far more interesting to me personally than it actually turns out to be. This tends to happen most often at the intersection of fantasy plots, gender, and sexuality.

"Great new queer fantasy adventure novel!" Oh. With male protagonists. Oh well.

"I loved this Regency-era magical romance!" Oh. Straight romance. Oh well.

"Isn't in wonderful to get an epic fantasy full of exciting female characters?" Oh. But none of them are attracted to each other. Darn.

(I'd include "exciting lesbian adventure novel" but I know better than to jump to a conclusion that those are going to turn out to be my kind of sff.)

Nothing wrong with the books themselves! Not at all! But in that instant before I click through and find out what actually fills in those assumed defaults, each of those books was the most perfect book ever. The one that was going to shoot to the top of my to-be-read list instantly.

What's your most memorable encounter with the emotional whiplash of filling in the blanks with the wrong defaults?

Comments

[ursula]

I don't usually have this problem with books, because the best predictor of my taste aside from matters of literary style is "Is the protagonist Lawful Good?" and most reviewers don't consider this a meaningful factor, so I rely on knowledge of the author instead.

The closest analogue for me is actually "diversity" events for scientists, where I am simultaneously uncomfortable because I am one of the few white people in the room, and relaxed because for once I am in a room full of STEM people where a short, dark-haired woman looks normal.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

Yeah, in that case one needs to know what unmarked default one is diversifying.

[aryanhwy.livejournal.com]

One of my stranger computer science conference experiences was one not where I was one of the only women (and thus one of the only younger women) but where of all the rather many younger women there, I was the only one not wearing a head scarf. Indonesia is a pretty secular country, so no one was bothered that I had my head bare, but it was definitely an odd experience!