alias_sqbr

I'm glad my rant inspired you! And (surprise!) I definitely agree, both that discussions tend to collapse a much wider group into the speaker's corner of it, or they simply generalize their personal experience across the whole group. And I do think that a lot of it is an unthinking reach for legitimacy (while some is sheer laziness).

Personally, some ways to deal with it that I try (I'm sure I still generalize at times, though):

-- at the very least, telegraph that you're generalizing: 'by and large, [a] does [x]' or 'b tends to do y' or whatnot

-- if it's actually just the legitimacy thing, don't generalize at all, just own your opinions. 'How I see it is,' 'my impression is that,' 'I think' (I simply tack on 'imo' a ton)

-- if you're talking about a trend, avoid framing it in universal, absolute terms. Say, 'in my experience' or 'I've seen a lot of' or 'there seems to be a tendency towards' or even 'have you noticed that...?'

-- definitely something I grabbed from humanities and social science, define your terms! Make sure that you're actually saying what you think you're saying. This ties into generalizations, because often people use a general term to talk about a subset of a group, sometimes even when they know that it's not true of the whole group.

hele and I ran into this the other day, when we were talking about "slashers" and it turned out that she was talking about people who exclusively slash and I was talking about people who ship slash ships among others, and despite a lot of overlap in our fannish backgrounds, it'd given us very different perspectives on how fandom does shipping. So the word meant something different to each of us.

The defining doesn't have to be super pedantic, it can just be 'I'm talking about migratory slash fandom here, not all slashers ever.'

-- just a consciousness that your corner of fandom is not ALL corners of fandom helps, especially since Tumblr seems the dominant platform at the moment, and it's very customizable.

-- just a note: I think 'we' phrasing is much more valid when talking to people outside fandom than others within it. I say 'we generally' or 'we usually' often enough to non-fans, or fans outside a particular fandom (unless it's hugely fragmented). It seems much more condescending to other members of the same group.