Editorial #11 – Award Ceremonies Should Be Banned
Blogging awards are funny things. They seem to mark a particular point in a community’s lifespan that suggests establishment. Establishment in the chronological sense of showing a robustness of community in supporting such ceremonies, and establishment in the sense of drawing out a canon of popularity, influence and age.
I hate them as a rule. They impose a sort of food chain that, regardless of the original egalitarian intent, feels dangerous in how it entrenches bigotries and draws very specific lines around things that are wholly subjective. Equally, they just seem so obvious and redundant. I remember in the early days of blogging when an award ceremony appeared and Kottke swept the decks. It’s not hard to imagine the resounding NO SHIT SHERLOCK that immerged from the lips of those who read the results – like it’s no surprise that exactly the same thing happened with Anime Bog Awards’ nominations and what’s happening with its results.
I don’t mean to attack the ABAs particularly – it has a number of good qualities that, if they existed independently from the back patting, I’d wholly support. I’m just worried about what it will do to a community that I’ve loved because of its nebulous existence – because people have had their own favourites without any particular authority to validate or deny them. There’s nothing wrong with recognising bloggers who occupy important roles in the community, but I can’t see the point of overtly awarding them for something that is expressed through other, healthier means. We all know who is important in this community; the influential are explicit by their nature of being, yknow, influential. As are the humorous and the thought-provoking. I know who influenced me, I know who gets me thinking and makes me laugh. Surely these personal things are so subjective that to canonise them is to dilute their meaning completely?
It’s all very doom and gloom to say this, I know, but the ABAs do have elements I love. Ideally if it was just concerned with awarding new blogs then I’d be enthused to the point of irritating. And the ABA is commendable in how it gets new blogs some attention. I just fail to see why categories like Most Influential etc need to exist when their participants speak for themselves. Do we really need to know who is Most Most Influential? Don’t we all know, in a general sense, that Hop Step Jump, Memento et al are the reason for the existence of most current blogs? Their recognition is implicit through practice – in the way they spur others to start their own blogs – which feels the ultimate form of community building to me. My biggest fear is that by standardising their position with a shiny gold badge it alienates the potential influence of other blogs and the different approaches they present.
My main point, then, is that award ceremonies compromise the natural growth that keeps a community healthy. It’s funny that Impz, one of the core responsible for the ABAs, also produced the best alternative to it: a nostalgic snapshot of our history. Because fundamentally this is all the inaugural Anime Blog Awards will be: a history lesson and statement of the bleeding obvious.
May 15th, 20089:40 pm at
I agree!
May 16th, 20082:05 am at
Nice post. I was thinking a very similar thing. Not like I’m thinking of such things as “cults” and whatnot.
May 16th, 20082:21 am at
Noted. Your reasons are solid, and I’m more than eager to start on the “new blog awards” thing Impz was talking about — I’ll talk to him about it when he comes back from the States or something.
May 16th, 20083:42 am at
As far as this part of the process I agree. I mean whoever wins, is going to win because well they’re the most popular. I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad thing though. I mean the popular folks will still be popular. The less popular people will still be less popular.
But I do think the nomination process was really neat. And useful.
May 16th, 20083:45 am at
[...] the world (or at least all of the world that matters) You can blame Impz, Martin, Bateszi, Hige, Lythka, Author and Michael for this [...]
May 16th, 20086:41 am at
Community <33 is greater than any award. ’nuff said.
May 16th, 20087:22 am at
…and you’ve just explained why my interest in the ABA waned after a while. Don’t get me wrong, the intentions were good and the organisers put a lot of effort in but while it’s a good idea in theory, in practice it won’t work out because of good ol’ human nature.
The sad thing is, despite everyone’s best efforts, this did still turn out to be a popularity contest between the names and faces we’re already familiar with – the little trees are still in the shadow of the larger ones which meant there were no real surprises.
The fact that the ABA was even the mixed success it was proves that we have a geat sense of community to begin with IMO.
May 16th, 20089:21 am at
Established blogs (+1 year old) could battle it out with visitor statistics if they wanted to release them. The nomination process would turn out to be much more festive, for me, when assumed popularity gets brought down by hard facts.
May 17th, 200810:34 pm at
If you read my post on the matter, as a member of the committee heading this first instance (hopefully there are more up), I basically agree with Cameron here, and it’s why I myself am not really caring much about who actually wins voting-wise, because that’s just how it is about popularity. People vote for what they’ve known and like. From my post:
I don’t see why that’s so much of a problem. I trust that whatever the vote was for someone, that it came from them using good judgment on it. :3
I wonder what people kept expecting to see or were hoping to occur when the actual voting occured based on how much complaints and critiques there are about the “It’s just a popularity contest” argument and not, and it pisses me off because I feel people are pushing more importance on that final result than just the idea of the nominations (and it seems like both the critiques. It’s why I get annoyed when people call it a “circlejerk” or a “cult” as well, but that’s probably because of how I see things. I figured the nominations were the important thing here, not the final process, because those were what were supposed to get people to check out blogs that they haven’t known before. I also would expect people to tend to prefer a blog that they’ve known for a while compared to ones that they’ve just met to, since that also seems to be how things work. Does that make sense? :/
But I feel that if this occurs another time, the fact that people should know more blogs than before would help to make things closer, if that’s what people want. Me? I just want to expand my knowledge of the community, and I felt that the nominating process was a great way to do that. And I really don’t think quantifying things hurt that much anyway, since though it may be statisically the majority of what people think is the best, as long as you have your own views, it should be all good for you. I think people might be overstating the importance of the final vote and downplaying the importance of the nomination process, but that might just be me. And that’s probably the grumpiest you’ll get me to be in a comment or post. :(
May 18th, 20084:57 pm at
Hey, I’m just glad to hear I count as a big tree – even if my average daily hits are somewhere around two-fifths-to-a-half of Martin’s. Must be the tub of compost I put my feet in when I sit down to blog, and the glass of fertiliser I sip. Yumsk.
(One of these days I’ll try going on a Stats Fast, and stay away from my counter for a month, or something.)
May 19th, 20085:59 pm at
… wait, I think I made that picture?!
Damn you Creative Commons! Damn you! If not for that, I was going to say that I will license you the use of that picture if you go and molest Lastarial at Makoto Shinkai’s screening of 5cm in Southbank.
Alas. And if for what ills the anime blog awards bring, I welcome them with my TNT-We-Know-Drama LulzWagon in one hand and URLs to new sites in my rss reader in the other. I must say there is just not enough drama! I applaud your attempt to start some right here.
May 19th, 20086:28 pm at
Thanks for the comments, everyone. Most of them don’t need response except:
@Omo: Orly? I found it by typing in ‘anime blogging’ into Google Image search – It’s one of the top results I think. And god bless the CC. Yet again it saves me from molestation-related blackmail.
May 21st, 200810:55 am at
RIUVA had this contest a while ago (years?) in which the most popular (de)motivational poster wins.
http://www.riuva.com/?p=389
Better than the ABA IMO.
November 26th, 200812:18 am at
[...] those I mentioned in the last post (Memento and Hop-Step-Jump!); ironically, they are mentioned by Hige vs Otaku as being most influential. No qualm there, but this leads to a pseudo-duality. A blog may have [...]