"It's Just The Internet"
I think I've clawed myself out of the black hole for now. Being bipolar, in some ways, always feels like walking down the dividing line of a major highway at night, in the fog. WHOOSH. The truck passed this time, you dodged it this time, but you never know when another is going to appear, from which direction, or how close. Sometimes you see the headlights as they come, sometimes you can't, and you don't know until they're on top of you.
Some people give a shit. It's enough.
Of course, there are just as many people that don't. And worse, there are the kind of vultures that seem to take some perverse pleasure in another's pain, whether gloating (assholes) or worse - taking that whole "cluck cluck" concern troll attitude - while clearly twisting and manipulating or deliberately misunderstanding everything that you say.
I mean, why on EARTH would anyone be upset about being thrown out of a community they've been a part of for a decade? How WEIRD. How UTTERLY BIZARRE.
These are the kind of people who say things like "it's just a messageboard, it's just the internet" if you get upset by the deliberately rude or horrible things that they say or do. As if messageboards and the internet are solipsisitic playgrounds populated solely by robots and scripts, instead of being comprised of individual people.
I mean, isn't this what Web 2.0 was supposed to be about? Social networking, connectivity, all that gubbins? The internet isn't this weird little world populated by freaks and people who are "not quite right" (I mean, if they had a real life, what on earth would they be doing on this weird interweb thing?) and hasn't been for a long, long time. The communities and relationships and dynamics that form on the web are JUST AS REAL as the ones that form "in the real world." Especially, as in Web 2.0, the "web" and "IRL" interact and overlap with increasing frequency.
I sit in front of a computer for 9 to 10 hours a day, for my job. That's not unusual, at all. I have more interactions with the people through my browser than I do with anyone - friends, family, etc. - except perhaps the colleague that sits opposite my desk. My family are scattered around the globe. Ditto my friends - and even the ones that still live in London often live at the end of an hour-long journey on public transport. Is it somehow more wrong or creepy or weird to reach out or connect to people using a messageboard or twitter or facebook/MySpace than it is to use, say, a telephone?
So when someone turns around and says something like - and I quote - "if participating on a msg board can impact your life to the extent that you feel suicidal, then i really think you need to stop participating."
Take that quote and replace "messageboard" with "place of employment" or "school" or "church" or "social club" or "family life" or any of the places that you find your community. Yes, many of these communities are voluntary, but it does not change the level of engagement or involvement that one feels towards them. The pure physical *means* of engagement does not determine how "real" these communities are to those that are involved.
Now replace "participating on" with the phrase I actually used - being EXCLUDED FROM. Excommunicated. Shunned. Especially when no reason is given, and no recourse is available. Have you ever been sacked from a job? Have you ever been expelled from a school, or excommunicated by your chosen religion, or even simply "friend-dumped" by a social circle? Being ejected from a community - it HURTS - no matter what the medium.
This idea that the internet is somehow "not a real place" and that one's actions on it - or other people's actions towards you - somehow do not have very real emotional impact - is TOTAL BULLSHIT. And is totally in line with this horrible, selfish, solipsistic view that somehow other people on the internet are not real, that they are just playthings for your amusement.
If that, seriously, is your attitude towards the internet, and the social media utilities on it, and how individuals use them, then I'm not sorry. It's YOU that has the serious problem, and it's probably YOU that should stop participating.
Some people give a shit. It's enough.
Of course, there are just as many people that don't. And worse, there are the kind of vultures that seem to take some perverse pleasure in another's pain, whether gloating (assholes) or worse - taking that whole "cluck cluck" concern troll attitude - while clearly twisting and manipulating or deliberately misunderstanding everything that you say.
I mean, why on EARTH would anyone be upset about being thrown out of a community they've been a part of for a decade? How WEIRD. How UTTERLY BIZARRE.
These are the kind of people who say things like "it's just a messageboard, it's just the internet" if you get upset by the deliberately rude or horrible things that they say or do. As if messageboards and the internet are solipsisitic playgrounds populated solely by robots and scripts, instead of being comprised of individual people.
I mean, isn't this what Web 2.0 was supposed to be about? Social networking, connectivity, all that gubbins? The internet isn't this weird little world populated by freaks and people who are "not quite right" (I mean, if they had a real life, what on earth would they be doing on this weird interweb thing?) and hasn't been for a long, long time. The communities and relationships and dynamics that form on the web are JUST AS REAL as the ones that form "in the real world." Especially, as in Web 2.0, the "web" and "IRL" interact and overlap with increasing frequency.
I sit in front of a computer for 9 to 10 hours a day, for my job. That's not unusual, at all. I have more interactions with the people through my browser than I do with anyone - friends, family, etc. - except perhaps the colleague that sits opposite my desk. My family are scattered around the globe. Ditto my friends - and even the ones that still live in London often live at the end of an hour-long journey on public transport. Is it somehow more wrong or creepy or weird to reach out or connect to people using a messageboard or twitter or facebook/MySpace than it is to use, say, a telephone?
So when someone turns around and says something like - and I quote - "if participating on a msg board can impact your life to the extent that you feel suicidal, then i really think you need to stop participating."
Take that quote and replace "messageboard" with "place of employment" or "school" or "church" or "social club" or "family life" or any of the places that you find your community. Yes, many of these communities are voluntary, but it does not change the level of engagement or involvement that one feels towards them. The pure physical *means* of engagement does not determine how "real" these communities are to those that are involved.
Now replace "participating on" with the phrase I actually used - being EXCLUDED FROM. Excommunicated. Shunned. Especially when no reason is given, and no recourse is available. Have you ever been sacked from a job? Have you ever been expelled from a school, or excommunicated by your chosen religion, or even simply "friend-dumped" by a social circle? Being ejected from a community - it HURTS - no matter what the medium.
This idea that the internet is somehow "not a real place" and that one's actions on it - or other people's actions towards you - somehow do not have very real emotional impact - is TOTAL BULLSHIT. And is totally in line with this horrible, selfish, solipsistic view that somehow other people on the internet are not real, that they are just playthings for your amusement.
If that, seriously, is your attitude towards the internet, and the social media utilities on it, and how individuals use them, then I'm not sorry. It's YOU that has the serious problem, and it's probably YOU that should stop participating.
posted by Masonic Boom | 3:37 pm
1 Comments:
I have no axe to grind, but it seems increasingly clear that SB mechanism is 51 shades of FAIL.
It's a political failure, because excluding members of a community is very shoddy politics indeed, the stuff of gated communities and Salem. It's a technological failure, because it's a tool introduced without consideration of its wider social impact. It's a deep failure of empathy, because it encourages people just to zap others rather than trying to engage with or understand them. It's a failure for the reasons you outlined the other day: when no reasons or warnings are given it can hardly be premonitory or palliative. It's a failure for the behaviours it encourages: blandness on the part of posters, petty, smug, strutting authoritarianism on the part of the self-appointed authorities. It's a moral failure because it arms the mob with torches and tells them to go find witches. It's - as you say - a form of shunning (what is this, the 16th century?). It's an ethical failure because it impacts the vulnerable harder than anyone else. If there were even the slightest suggestion that it had caused actual bodily harm to anyone, this mechanism - just a piece of programming, FFS, not a Mosaic commandment chiseled in God's own stone - should have been decommissioned instantly.
In failing one of its longest-standing, most intelligent, most active members (for nothing more, it seems, than being too interesting, too opinionated, too "forceful while female"), the community has spectacularly failed itself.
Post a Comment
<< Home