What is SWIL?
Dec. 18th, 2003 02:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
reldnahkramSo over the last several months there've been times when I've been thinking about what SWIL is and what I'm doing in it. I'm feeling compassionate, so I'll condense it all into a link and let those of you who don't know what SWIL is or don't care just move on, but I don't think there are many of you reading this journal who fit that category.
Through a few different examples, I've come to my conclusions about what SWIL is. SWIL is billed as the Swarthmore Sci-Fi/Fantasy club, and that's just wrong. Other than weekly movies and the occasional other activity, SWIL doesn't do much that's SF/F. What SWIL really is, in my eyes, is a group for people who read SF/F in high school. This is a broad, unfortunate stereotype that holds all too well. The people in SWIL are (mostly) those who weren't the most popular in the high school. They probably weren't even among the ranks of the popular, though this partially depends on the size of the high school, as does whether their presence was acknowledged by the popular folks in high school. All of a sudden, these folks come to Swarthmore and find a bunch of other people like them. People who are bookish, geeky, weren't popular, and possibly not very socially experienced or skilled (sorry, I know it hurts, but there's no avoiding it). Of course these people will stick together, since they understand each other and their quirks. But calling a social organization a support group for geeks just doesn't work, so the premise of SF/F, which many of these people do read, attracts them all together.
Over the last few months, I've sort of questioned some of the reasons why I'm in SWIL. I used to be a much bigger SF/F reader than I am now, it started fading in high school when I became a progressively bigger sports fan and spent a lot of time hanging out with my friends, most of which were cultivated from the band. So I came to Swarthmore and found myself attracted by the SF/F of SWIL, in retrospect I don't really know why. I've found that, while I'm a decent socializer, I generally prefer a group dynamic to a one-on-one social interaction (especially when meeting people), so making friends was easier through SWIL. And at the time, I liked most of the people I made friends with. But the problem is that it locks you in, and I've found there are people who I would like to know better and spend more time with (outside of SWIL), but I don't have anything to build these friendships on. And when you're in a social group that attracts people (as opposed to the people attracting people to the social group), you have little choice in who your friends are. Granted, this could be influenced by people, myself included, bringing people to SWIL, but this is harder than it sounds. And there are people in SWIL right now that I'm fed up with and would like to spend less time around, but since we're both in the same social group, there's no way out, other than leaving, which is something I don't want to do, because there are people in SWIL and things about SWIL in general that I really like.
Ultimately, this comes back to the SWIL social group vs. SWIL campus group dichotomy, and there's no way around this. If SWIL the social group maintains a course for SWIL the campus group that's reasonably far from SF/F, there are people on campus interested in SF/F who have no real outlet for this unless they want to put up with all of the baggage that is SWIL. On the other hand, if SWIL the campus group is pulled towards more SF/F, it may alienate folk who are less interested in SF/F and more interested in just being friends. I know I'm definetely happy with how SWIL, the organization, is right now, with regards to SF/F content, though if a little more were brought in, I wouldn't mind.
That being said, many of my interests are reasonably uncharacteristically SWIL. I'm almost certain I'm the biggest sports fan currently in SWIL, possibly ever. This is fine as an anomaly, but it's a very un-SWIL characteristic. Also, my wanderings at Philcon have pretty much convinced me that I'm not really a con person. Though It's not a required SWIL characteristic, but seems reasonably appropriate, this feels a little odd. I have this feeling that when I leave Swarthmore, my social pendulum is going to swing the other way and I'm going to end up in a very un-SWIL-like group of people wherever I am. This is disturbing because there are definately aspects of SWILfolk that I like, and gaming is not necessarily the dominant one of those. To a point, I like the warped view of reality (or warping reality to the amusement of all) that many SWILfolk have, but only when it comes from a strong basis in reality. This is harder to explain than I thought it was, so I'll leave it for now. I could make do without some of the overanalysis and endless bickering, but that may just be Swarthmore in general.
I was hoping to be able to spend a little less time around SWIL this year, getting to know some more people, but this clearly hasn't happened. I'm again cursed with a hall that isn't socially cohesive, so I find myself wondering whether this is the standard for Swarthmore or if I've ended up on two dysfunctional halls in three years. Oh well. I suppose this ultimately relates to the forced friendship issue I addressed above - on a hall you're stuck around a bunch of people - either you make friends or don't, there's not much you can do about it.
I think my inertia for this post has about run out now, and I need to sleep so I stay healthy and can finish all my engineering problems tomorrow (hah!). Oh, did I mention that Return of the King was fabulous? And for what it's worth, I get to go home this weekend. I guess it loses some of the appeal it used to hold when going home made accessing other friends really easy, but I'll just rack up frequent driver miles over the bridges and visit H-field a lot.
Oh, and re: mood, I don't think there's anything that quite covers how I feel right now. I think I'm starting to get sick again (sleep, not enough), and writing this all has had an impact on my mood, and the music now (David Gray's White Ladder) is contributing to a low, slow mood, so I'll call it melancholy, though it probably isn't right.
Through a few different examples, I've come to my conclusions about what SWIL is. SWIL is billed as the Swarthmore Sci-Fi/Fantasy club, and that's just wrong. Other than weekly movies and the occasional other activity, SWIL doesn't do much that's SF/F. What SWIL really is, in my eyes, is a group for people who read SF/F in high school. This is a broad, unfortunate stereotype that holds all too well. The people in SWIL are (mostly) those who weren't the most popular in the high school. They probably weren't even among the ranks of the popular, though this partially depends on the size of the high school, as does whether their presence was acknowledged by the popular folks in high school. All of a sudden, these folks come to Swarthmore and find a bunch of other people like them. People who are bookish, geeky, weren't popular, and possibly not very socially experienced or skilled (sorry, I know it hurts, but there's no avoiding it). Of course these people will stick together, since they understand each other and their quirks. But calling a social organization a support group for geeks just doesn't work, so the premise of SF/F, which many of these people do read, attracts them all together.
Over the last few months, I've sort of questioned some of the reasons why I'm in SWIL. I used to be a much bigger SF/F reader than I am now, it started fading in high school when I became a progressively bigger sports fan and spent a lot of time hanging out with my friends, most of which were cultivated from the band. So I came to Swarthmore and found myself attracted by the SF/F of SWIL, in retrospect I don't really know why. I've found that, while I'm a decent socializer, I generally prefer a group dynamic to a one-on-one social interaction (especially when meeting people), so making friends was easier through SWIL. And at the time, I liked most of the people I made friends with. But the problem is that it locks you in, and I've found there are people who I would like to know better and spend more time with (outside of SWIL), but I don't have anything to build these friendships on. And when you're in a social group that attracts people (as opposed to the people attracting people to the social group), you have little choice in who your friends are. Granted, this could be influenced by people, myself included, bringing people to SWIL, but this is harder than it sounds. And there are people in SWIL right now that I'm fed up with and would like to spend less time around, but since we're both in the same social group, there's no way out, other than leaving, which is something I don't want to do, because there are people in SWIL and things about SWIL in general that I really like.
Ultimately, this comes back to the SWIL social group vs. SWIL campus group dichotomy, and there's no way around this. If SWIL the social group maintains a course for SWIL the campus group that's reasonably far from SF/F, there are people on campus interested in SF/F who have no real outlet for this unless they want to put up with all of the baggage that is SWIL. On the other hand, if SWIL the campus group is pulled towards more SF/F, it may alienate folk who are less interested in SF/F and more interested in just being friends. I know I'm definetely happy with how SWIL, the organization, is right now, with regards to SF/F content, though if a little more were brought in, I wouldn't mind.
That being said, many of my interests are reasonably uncharacteristically SWIL. I'm almost certain I'm the biggest sports fan currently in SWIL, possibly ever. This is fine as an anomaly, but it's a very un-SWIL characteristic. Also, my wanderings at Philcon have pretty much convinced me that I'm not really a con person. Though It's not a required SWIL characteristic, but seems reasonably appropriate, this feels a little odd. I have this feeling that when I leave Swarthmore, my social pendulum is going to swing the other way and I'm going to end up in a very un-SWIL-like group of people wherever I am. This is disturbing because there are definately aspects of SWILfolk that I like, and gaming is not necessarily the dominant one of those. To a point, I like the warped view of reality (or warping reality to the amusement of all) that many SWILfolk have, but only when it comes from a strong basis in reality. This is harder to explain than I thought it was, so I'll leave it for now. I could make do without some of the overanalysis and endless bickering, but that may just be Swarthmore in general.
I was hoping to be able to spend a little less time around SWIL this year, getting to know some more people, but this clearly hasn't happened. I'm again cursed with a hall that isn't socially cohesive, so I find myself wondering whether this is the standard for Swarthmore or if I've ended up on two dysfunctional halls in three years. Oh well. I suppose this ultimately relates to the forced friendship issue I addressed above - on a hall you're stuck around a bunch of people - either you make friends or don't, there's not much you can do about it.
I think my inertia for this post has about run out now, and I need to sleep so I stay healthy and can finish all my engineering problems tomorrow (hah!). Oh, did I mention that Return of the King was fabulous? And for what it's worth, I get to go home this weekend. I guess it loses some of the appeal it used to hold when going home made accessing other friends really easy, but I'll just rack up frequent driver miles over the bridges and visit H-field a lot.
Oh, and re: mood, I don't think there's anything that quite covers how I feel right now. I think I'm starting to get sick again (sleep, not enough), and writing this all has had an impact on my mood, and the music now (David Gray's White Ladder) is contributing to a low, slow mood, so I'll call it melancholy, though it probably isn't right.
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A few comments
Date: 2003-12-18 12:44 am (UTC)As for social involvement in high school, I had a very tight-knit group of friends (aka The NurdSquad, a name for which I was largely responsible), many of whom had been my friends since 2nd or 3rd grade. We didn't have a huge amount in common, beyond a general affinity for math and science, and a general desire to perform well academically. The latter was almost completely true across my entire high school class of 85 some people.
I don't think I was very big into the kind of sci-fi/fantasy read by a lot of SWILlies. Certainly the classics, and a number of films and a certain set of TV series that we know and love (and that contain absolutely no subtext whatsoever), but almost none of what I would refer to as "heady" or perhaps "intelligent" sci-fi/fantasy.
I do not think I am terribly involved in SWIL the social group, although I certainly have friends in SWIL. This is largely due to having a large core group of friends here at Swat, built around the community of '05ers who lived in Parrish as freshmen, most of whom will probably never have anything to do with SWIL.
As for the campus group, I definitely enjoy gaming (even though I lose a lot). I like the community provided through SWAPA and the various e-mail lists. I like seeing SWILmovies when I get a chance. This semester definitely revealed to me how tough it is to balance academics with organized free time (i.e. activities) and actual free time.
As for people in SWIL that are annoying, I think that you will find that in any social group. I think that the best course of action is to try and not let the little things bother you. Although I think the subtext crowd is just asking for me to go postal on a SWILmeeting...
no subject
Date: 2003-12-18 02:25 pm (UTC)I think it's better this year than in the past two, due to the large number of people we have. We can separate into various groups to discuss various stuff (You, me, and Chris can talk about several sports, there's the anime crowd, the slash crowd, etc), so there are outlets for varied interests.
The solution, as I see it, is for SWIL to make a more complete evolution in the direction it's been traveling since 2000. The classes of '00 and '01, which were huge, set up SWIL as sort of a large family which did lots of stuff together and had a real cohesive ethos. ~Elliot can tell you more about this, since I heard it from him, but I think cases like yours and to a lesser extent mine demonstrate why that's a bad idea--in a situation like that it's hard to recruit people as what SWIL is about becomes more specialized, until you reach the point where of the 3 presidents (who would normally be expected to be the most core-SWIL), one has his own other social group, one wants his own social groups and is sort of muddling toward it, and one wants an alternative but can't find it.
Instead, what we're becoming, and what I've been pushing for from the beginning, is a "community of wierd," with no real center, instead a number of subsets with more specific interests. This community follows a generally sci-fi/fantasy agenda in terms of official events (foam swords, LotR and Star Wars showings, movies, etc), but holds under its umbrella a large amount of unofficial stuff of all genres from slash to sports.
What is missing to make that transformation is two things:
1) Grass-roots participation. Everyone with a pet way to have fun should post it to fun and invite folks all the time--that way these subsets can form.
2) Tolerance of other subsets. As fun as it may be to make fun of the philosophers/historians/sports fans/slash readers/anime fans/video gamers for talking about their thing at the dinner table, all that really does is inhibit the growth of these subsets and set them off as, well, wierd and sketchy. We all should stop the casual negativity of our interactions with SWILsets that aren't our own.
SWIL
Date: 2003-12-22 12:07 am (UTC)Of course, there's also the issue of the sort of visceral resistance I have had to defining myself as a Swillie. For me at least, I've sort of had the excuse that I don't know much about sci-fi, but it's probably more because I didn't want to define myself as an "outcast." (Although I'll bet our freshman year quad dynamic had something to do with it as well--partly because I already had Jordan considering me as much of an outcast as I'd ever want to be, and partly because I figured that if I got involved with SWIL, me and you would see too much of each other and really drive each other crazy...) Still, because of the sci-fi thing, I just assumed that I wouldn't really have anything in common with people. I think that's turned out to be wrong, and I really do enjoy hanging out with SWIL people. Of course, it still took rooming with Jon, and starting to sit at the SWIL table when he was there, and then Benitez pulling me in at other times, as well as the realization that most of the friends I had from freshman year (like Jawaad) had sort of gravitated towards SWIL, before I gave myself the chance to realize that I was wrong.
The other interesting thing is the SWIL social dynamic. For me at least, it's a lot more comfortable to just be able to sit down, know people, and join in the conversation, without having to wonder if you're welcome or not. That's probably why I've been hanging out with SWIL more and more, and doing even less non-SWIL social stuff. But on the other hand...every time I come back from breaks, I think "wow, I should really spend more time with non-Swillies." I think that's because that "comfortable" SWIL social dynamic also lets me be lazy socially, and so my social skills sort of end up deteriorating because of it. (I wonder if that's one reason why, like Qian was talking about once, Swillies really need to be forced to take basic social skills classes--I think even if people who end up in SWIL don't have the best social skills to begin with, the SWIL social dynamic makes that worse. And yeah, insert wisecrack here about the (lack of) social skills I had to begin with. It's my mother's fault. ;) ) But anyway...I don't know if this is just me or not, but because of that "laziness" I end up feeling like even though I'm COMFORTABLE around a lot of SWIL people, the only people who I necessarily consider reasonably close friends are the people who I knew before getting involved in SWIL. So I haven't actually MADE any friends through SWIL, which doesn't seem right...and I'm not sure if that's the fault of the social dynamic, or if I really am just being lazy (or both).
Wow, I really should get around to getting my own LiveJournal to post some of this kind of stuff....
--Michael
Sports fans in SWIL
Date: 2003-12-22 12:21 am (UTC)Wow, so I guess if I count myself in there, sports fans aren't completely unheard of in SWIL. Of course, I've sort of become less of a football fan than I was, say, freshman year...but I've still been following the Rams fairly closely (and they're still goign to beat the Eagles. ;) ).
Of course, as for sports fans in SWIL...I still remember when freshman year, I guess it was at your birthday party (since that's probably the only SWIL thing I went to freshman year), we were playing Wink and I was the Wink and, since I couldn't think of anything better, I called something like "people who think the Rams are going to beat the Eagles." And I got the blankest look from most people... So from then on, I just sort of figured that sports and SWIL don't mix...