Yesterday my diary was meant as simply as a way for me to vent. In writing it I came across this master’s thesis when, out of curiosity, I was looking up the history of the term diary being used for Kos stories. Today’s diary is a diversion. It is just a way to avoid thinking about the malignant madness that Trump and his henchmen have unleashed upon the land.
In 2006 Samantha Isabella Soma (profile) at Portland State University, who went on to earn her PhD in urban studies there and become an executive leadership coach, speaker, and design facilitator in San Francisco, wrote her master’s of science thesis in conflict resolution and her doctoral dissertation about Daily Kos. She described her thesis and distortion as case studies and addressed online conflict resolution questions by “performing a qualitative analysis of comment conversations within two diaries that discussed a conflict event known as the Pie Fight within the Daily Kos community in June, 2005.”
The Pie Fight Incident led to the “Pie Fight ad” diary by Kos which was recommended only nine times but generated 1048 comments.
The thesis author notes that: “the number of active authors during the week in question was approximately 5,000, and 1,820 community members (about 36% of the active user base) participated in some fashion. Given these numbers, a conservative estimate of the number of lurkers who read the Pie Fight diaries would be 3,180 members.”
dKospedia was “a collaborative project of the DailyKos community to build a political encyclopedia. There was a link to this which was prominent on the Kos front page. It was started in April of 2004, and (as of 2010) consist(ed) of 14,378 articles.” I am not sure when it stopped being updated. This is how dKosopedi described the Pie Fight in their comprehensive entry: The links I haven’t struck out are still online.
On Friday, June 3, 2005 an ad for the TBS reality series "The Real Gilligan's Island" appeared on a number of websites, including DailyKos. The ad (above) depicted reality series contestants dressed as the characters Ginger and Maryann from the original television series. They were pictured from the waist up, facing one another, each showing a bit of cleavage due to their tight-fitting shirts. The ad was titled "Pie Fight" and there was suggestive captioning included with the advertisement. Click here to watch the ad (YouTube).
By the following day, some members of the DailyKos community were upset about the presence of this ad, prominently displayed on the DailyKos main page. The ad was indecent, objectifies women and a supposedly liberal site should not condone that sort of thing. This was countered by members of the community who did not consider the ad pornographic or offensive and rejected the idea that such imagery is in anyway disrespectful of women. This stalemate persisted until the following day when Markos himself finally decided to weigh in on the matter.
CONTINUED
The term pie fight as comes up occasionally in Daily Kos diaries although readers who weren’t involved at the time might not realize that there is particular significance beyond just the dictionary definition of a pie fight. For example this story by Meteor Blades was illustrated with a picture from the famous pie fight scene in the movie “The Great Race.”
In the introduction to the thesis about the Daily Kos Pie Fight Incident the author describes the evolution of blogging and of websites like Daily Kos which generated a community of thousands of active participants in the early 2000’s. She includes a description of online culture and how conflicts emerge, develop, escalate, and are handled by various websites.
It is a worthwhile history and analysis to read for those who are interested, but for those who remember the Daily Kos Pie Fight incident and for newer members of the Daily Kos community it doesn’t get really relevant to us until she describes the Pie Fight itself.
Below: Excerpts from the Pie Fight from the thesis:
For some I reason wasn’t able to use the quote function on the excerpts so I used a row of flowers instead to show where the quoted passages are. My comments are in italics.
On Friday June 3,2005, an advertisement for Turner Broadcasting Network's reality show The Real Gilligan's Island first appeared on the Daily Kos website. This advertisement contained a picture of two women depicting Ginger and Mary Ann from the original television show Gilligan's Island in the middle of a food fight featuring coconut cream pie. Clicking on the image, a pig-tailed Mary Ann licking her finger while gazing seductively at cream-pie-covered Ginger, took the user to a web page containing a video commercial of the show. The commercial featured two women, Mary Ann dressed in short shorts and a low-cut, midriff-baring tie-top, Ginger wearing a low cut gown with a thigh-high slit, each getting progressively more disheveled and aggressive as they threw pies at each other, eventually culminating in their wrestling each other to the ground.
At least one community member posted a derogatory diary article about the advertisement being sexist and thus inappropriate for the Daily Kos site on Saturday June 4. The following day, Sunday June 5, Moulitsas himself posted a diary which took issue with the initial anti-"Pie Fight" diary, and with similar additional comments he had received via personal email. Moulitsas ended his post with the admonition that if people did not like it they "could go to other sites (which could certainly use the traffic)," but that he was going to focus on ''the important shit". This front-page article unleashed the firestorm of commentary; the comments discussions resulting from it and the subsequent diaries about the Pie Fight (as it had come to be called) are the focus ofthis research.
On Monday June 6, an even more risque 60-second "director's cut" of the advertisement was placed on the site. This version was explicitly targeted at mature audiences, and was only viewable between 10pm and Sam EST. The new ad, combined with increased commentary about Markos' response to others' criticisms, kept the Pie Fight and discussion going for a week. The final comment in the research corpus was posted on June 13, nine days after the initial diary.
I found the entire thesis interesting Here are two more excerpts:
Although the Pie Fight took place within a threaded discussion space, the use ofdirect quoting rather than paraphrasing was the norm. Commenters seemed to use these direct quotes to prove the original writer wrong, even when this ostensibly occurred in the context of asking questions about the original statement. What appeared to be paraphrasing had the opposite effect of escalating the conflict rather than promoting understanding between conversants.
Unfortunately, this cut-and-paste response process often led to an increase in miscommunication, and the person who was misunderstood rarely returned to correct the record. The metadiscussion that occurred was about ''what the conflict is about," not about the way in which people were understanding each other. Rather than use this practice to gain a better understanding of the previous commenter's meaning, people were much more likely to use direct quotes from previous posters to advance their own arguments.
In one interesting case, a commenter who suggested that people who were offended needed to "cal/ the waaaambulance" (Diary 11, Comment 2), stated less than 15 minutes later that people need to "be gentle and don't carry grudges. And relax. And breathe. And realize people have different opinions than you and its o/r' (Diary 11, Comment 19). When challenged about his earlier waaaambulance comment, the author blamed it first on frustration, and second on the Internet's being prone to misunderstandings and misreading. He admonished his challenger not to "take it personal/y." This author also agreed with Markos that people who didn't feel that the site was meeting their needs should leave. Thus, his call for calm was really a call for people to put up or leave. It is often very easy for people to recommend calm when they are in the dominant position or are not otherwise feeling attacked or emotional.
Here are two examples of how the comments were analyzed:
In one interesting case, a commenter who suggested that people who were offended needed to "cal/ the waaaambulance" (Diary 11, Comment 2), stated less than 15 minutes later that people need to "be gentle and don't carry grudges. And relax. And breathe. And realize people have different opinions than you and its o/r' (Diary 11, Comment 19). When challenged about his earlier waaaambulance comment, the author blamed it first on frustration, and second on the Internet's being prone to misunderstandings and misreading. He admonished his challenger not to "take it personal/y." This author also agreed with Markos that people who didn't feel that the site was meeting their needs should leave. Thus, his call for calm was really a call for people to put up or leave. It is often very easy for people to recommend calm when they are in the dominant position or are not otherwise feeling attacked or emotional.
Evidence of wordplay or irony occurred in numerous instances throughout the dataset, often occurring when a serious or explanatory comment was followed by a joke, sarcasm, or simply an unrelated remark. There was one instance in which a wordplay strategy backftred spectacularly. Although it did not occur in this dataset, it was discussed as an important factor in people's feelings and behavior. Mr. HinkyDink coined the term Menstruating She Devils to describe the women who took offense at Markos' diaries. This offensive appellation was said to be the impetus for the creation of a new blog of the same title, which was created and maintained by women who chose to leave the community. Mr. HinkyDink referenced his apology for this unfortunate and misunderstood joke in Diary 11 Comment 47, and explained his thought process and chagrin more thoroughly in Comment 49. His apology was well-received and appreciated. In a lighter instance of wordplay, Maryscott coined the neologism Kostroversy, giving her the last word within a somewhat heated discussion in Diary 11, Thread 1.2.
If you want a total break from the politics of the day reading this thesis is a good escape.
Addendum: You can also read her entire 2009 PhD dissertation here. It is also a study of Daily Kos. That portion begins on page 22 and then jumps to page 63 for a discussion of the Pie Fight which is as far as I can tell taken verbatim from the master’s thesis.