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silveradept[This Year's December Days Theme is Community, and all the forms that it takes. If you have some suggestions about what communities I'm part of (or that you think I'm part of) that would be worth a look, let me know in the comments.]
The Internet facilitated my childhood, helped me make friends at distances, got me into other communities, helped me find a job, was responsible for my bad relationships and for my good ones, introduces me to new things on a regular basis, and otherwise has become an indispensable part of my life. Broadband access and pocket computers with always-on connections and unlimited data plans have made possible the infrastructure of living a life online without having to worry all that much about data caps or whether the phone line will need to be clear for people to call and check in on me.
It's become a statement/insult of this era to other people to "touch grass," to leave the computer screen behind and go out and experience the world of the body for a bit, even to experience some of the natural world, with the implicit idea that the time spent outside and away from the screen will impart perspective and wisdom to someone. As someone who was regularly ousted from a screen to go play outside and run around in their childhood, I can't really attest to the efficacy of this technique, especially when imposed. What it does do, though, is allow someone to burn through frustration or other kinds of emotional states and return their energy levels and baseline mental state to something other than agitated or aggravated. Even when you get back from touching grass, that person will still be wrong on the Internet, but maybe you'll be sufficiently over it that you'll stop feeding the cycle. Assuming, of course, that the other person or people involved also stop feeding the cycle, and that's not anywhere near a given, especially in the middle of a campaign, a brigade, or other such coordinated attack.
(The solution to bullying is not to force technology off. The solution to students not paying attention or learning in class is not to force technology off. These are situations where there has to be concerted effort to make schooling interesting and relevant and for schooling to be much less a prison run by the inmates and more like actual practice for the world outside of school.)
Having a relatively rural upbringing meant that I did not have a set of peers to hang out with for spontaneous activity, but instead had to plan such things out with them and set dates and the like. What that left me with was books and offline games in the before-Internet era. Which are not bad companions by any means, and I still regularly read books and play offline games. The trickiest part, though, with books and offline games is that you always run the risk of discovery when you want to branch out into topics or ideas that are less accepted in the house, but are part of normal curiosity and desire to understand the wider world around you. Some of those subjects are the kind of thing where jokes get made about looking at the National Geographic subscriptions or squirreling away the intimates catalogs when the under-age cannot get their hands on age-restricted material. (Not that those kinds of things give you much of a realistic picture about anatomy, availability, willingness, or other such things, but that's for a later entry in this series.) Other things are study material about other religious beliefs, which draws ire in a family where both parents are staunchly Catholic. (And who I would have not been surprised to find out they believed that tabletop roleplaying games were portals to hell and allowed demons to possess the unsuspecting players.) Fiction was one thing, but something that looked like a more practical manual was not going to get a good reception.
Setting aside my brief forays into learning about information security practices along with trying to exercise my curiosity about the world around, the Internet made it easier for me to interact with other people, and as the caption to the comic went, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." A child / teenager signing on to message boards, forums, and playing Internet games with others (I still miss the BeZerk online games) is only recognizable in their text if they sound like a child or a teenager. Which I might have, but if I did, the people who were also on those forums didn't have an issue ith it. So I got to exercise a lot of socialization practice in those places, some of which went well, some of which did not, but I learned a lot from all of it. The people who were on-line were vastly more interesting than the people near me, at least until I went off to university. Even if they were constructed personas and people playing a role for a specific segment of the Internet, it was better than what was happening around me.
That said, I had the opportunity to experience a Web that was friendly to anonymity, pseudonymity, and that didn't do a lot of trying to track or link you across various sites. Real Names on the Web were still a security risk, rather than an enforced policy to participate in some spaces, and the centralizing and data-mining parts of what is now social media weren't present. Like so many other people who experienced this version of the Web, I want it back. I prefer the serendipity, the effective search, and the way that most of the web stayed separated and apart from each other, choosing to affiliate with each other, rather than everyone being on the same site and being thrown together by an algorithm fulfilling a different purpose. (So, yes, I like Dreamwidth as well, because Dreamwidth has many of those Old Web aspects to how it is run.) If you come into a Web that is mediated by apps in app stores, where you have to maintain a presence in all of the centralized social media spaces under your wallet identity, and then try to keep something else separated from all of that where you can express yourself more fully, it's exhausting. Not to mention that most of those centralized sites have insufficient resources devoted to active moderation of content, or to giving each user sufficient tools to moderate their own content in effective ways. If something escapes containment, there's almost certainly someone ready to spread it further and exactly to the people who will take offense or objection to it and have no qualms at all about attacking and piling on another username on the Web, rather than thinking for a bit about the possibility of a person behind it. (Or are the people who want to persecute someone in person as well as online, and will use information from both modes to achieve this.)
Getting back to touching grass, one of the other accusations that gets made against other people being online for a lot is that they begin to take things that are said online seriously. I'm forgetting what the actual terms were, although I think if it wasn't "terminally online," then it was at least in the family of that term. The idea of people taking things seriously online produced at least a couple of different attitudes and factions. One part headed to a space that prided themselves on their edgelord edgy humor, "freeze peach," and the lulz, where anyone who took them seriously or tried to point out the harms and biases they were perpetuating unironically, even in their jaded "ironic" stances, were laughed out of the space because they were clearly too stupid to understand what was going on. This segment of the Web also produced the popular perception of the Brony, as well as response characters like Quibble Pants and the episode Fame and Misfortune from the showrunners and writers themselves.
A different segment went out to a place where Right Speech was praised over all other things (except perhaps the appearance of Right Action), and they threw themselves into tizzies trying to find ways to rectify themselves into shining examples for the rest of us to follow. Unfortunately, as the Confucians learned before them, such a system is brittle, and if one person can be forever excluded form the company of the righteous through one mistake or by being a fraction behind in using whatever was currently decided as the perfect Right Speech, then what you get are a lot of people taking everything seriously and then taking on to themselves the burdens of policing everyone else's actions. This has historically gone over like a lead balloon, and online, it was a lead balloon filled with more lead. A lot of the Disk Horse that grapples with what's "problematic," based on their own tastes and very little other information or scholarship, springs from this segment.
The average corporate social media site contains both of these segments, and the algorithm desperately wants those two segments to meet so they can enjoy the heat put off by the combustion and serve ads to everyone. The algorithm also wants to put the people who truly believe in the supremacy of white men in contact with as many not-white not-men as they can, for similar reasons of combustion and advertising. Stereotypically, the white male supremacist takes the role of the lulz segment laughing at anyone trying to take seriously the idea that white men don't deserve automatic deference or all the power, and everyone else tries to figure out if there's some way to displace them from their comfort and get them to care about anything other than themselves and their supremacy. But there's plenty of infighting amongst the Right Speech segment as well, and that will do for an algorithm in a pinch. (Admittedly, there is a fascinating amount of creativity at work among everyone who is trying to game the algorithm so as to get their post in front of other people by not triggering specific text filters while still getting their message across and making it as clear as possible what they mean. And an equally large amount of frustration among users who are trying to use their moderation tools to curate their experience, only to have things they don't want to see leak through because they haven't yet put into their filters whatever the latest algorithm dodge is.)
Would having both of these segments go out and touch grass regularly help lower the level of tension online? Not necessarily, as we're seeing both of those segments start online and then work their way out into how they handle interactions with other people, too. (Or, possibly, that they are already that way through interactions with people and they find each other online and reinforce their interactions in a shared space.) Nor is it a useful belief or practice to say that everything online is ephemeral and less important than the interactions in the real world. That particular attitude doesn't work when it's phrased as "ignore the bullies and they'll go away," and with the way that apps and technology like to use push notifications, it's even harder to ignore the things that are happening, even if you don't intend to respond to them.
An awful lot of people are finding their communities, identity language, and very important friendships on-line, and that includes me. The people I know on-line are people, and our friendship over shared interests and shared spaces is no less real than the collegiality I have with the people that I work with every day. If I stayed in my rural, provincial town, and only interacted in the physical, I would have, by the end of my high school career, interacted with one Black person. How unprepared I would have been to handle the social environment of the university and the wide variety of experience that all the students and instructors bring to it. (And even more unprepared for graduate studies and the working world in my chosen profession, had I not been online and worked with people online.) Online interactions have meant getting to see and hear people in other nations and read their words about what is happening where they are without the filter of whether someone else decided this was important enough to put into a publication or on a news broadcast. Pseudonymity also means that people are more able to be their genuine selves when talking to the online audience. A physical culture of "no homo, bro" gives way to an online culture where everyone may know you're gay, but very few, if any, are able to connect that to your wallet name. Online is still one of the easiest places to begin a social transition, or to feel our your identity through reading and experimentation, and to gather people who will support you in being your most authentic self, even if you live somewhere actively hostile to trans people.
For as much as there is talk about the dangers, the deceptive patterns, the algorithms, and the aspects of being online that permit malicious activity, many of which are driven by the profit motive or similar ideas of making money, there's also thriving and vibrant communities that welcome, assist, squee about the blorbos from their shows, share gifts, support each other, and occasionally, save each other's lives. Or assist with the heist of someone from their bad relationship.
The Internet facilitated my childhood, helped me make friends at distances, got me into other communities, helped me find a job, was responsible for my bad relationships and for my good ones, introduces me to new things on a regular basis, and otherwise has become an indispensable part of my life. Broadband access and pocket computers with always-on connections and unlimited data plans have made possible the infrastructure of living a life online without having to worry all that much about data caps or whether the phone line will need to be clear for people to call and check in on me.
It's become a statement/insult of this era to other people to "touch grass," to leave the computer screen behind and go out and experience the world of the body for a bit, even to experience some of the natural world, with the implicit idea that the time spent outside and away from the screen will impart perspective and wisdom to someone. As someone who was regularly ousted from a screen to go play outside and run around in their childhood, I can't really attest to the efficacy of this technique, especially when imposed. What it does do, though, is allow someone to burn through frustration or other kinds of emotional states and return their energy levels and baseline mental state to something other than agitated or aggravated. Even when you get back from touching grass, that person will still be wrong on the Internet, but maybe you'll be sufficiently over it that you'll stop feeding the cycle. Assuming, of course, that the other person or people involved also stop feeding the cycle, and that's not anywhere near a given, especially in the middle of a campaign, a brigade, or other such coordinated attack.
(The solution to bullying is not to force technology off. The solution to students not paying attention or learning in class is not to force technology off. These are situations where there has to be concerted effort to make schooling interesting and relevant and for schooling to be much less a prison run by the inmates and more like actual practice for the world outside of school.)
Having a relatively rural upbringing meant that I did not have a set of peers to hang out with for spontaneous activity, but instead had to plan such things out with them and set dates and the like. What that left me with was books and offline games in the before-Internet era. Which are not bad companions by any means, and I still regularly read books and play offline games. The trickiest part, though, with books and offline games is that you always run the risk of discovery when you want to branch out into topics or ideas that are less accepted in the house, but are part of normal curiosity and desire to understand the wider world around you. Some of those subjects are the kind of thing where jokes get made about looking at the National Geographic subscriptions or squirreling away the intimates catalogs when the under-age cannot get their hands on age-restricted material. (Not that those kinds of things give you much of a realistic picture about anatomy, availability, willingness, or other such things, but that's for a later entry in this series.) Other things are study material about other religious beliefs, which draws ire in a family where both parents are staunchly Catholic. (And who I would have not been surprised to find out they believed that tabletop roleplaying games were portals to hell and allowed demons to possess the unsuspecting players.) Fiction was one thing, but something that looked like a more practical manual was not going to get a good reception.
Setting aside my brief forays into learning about information security practices along with trying to exercise my curiosity about the world around, the Internet made it easier for me to interact with other people, and as the caption to the comic went, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." A child / teenager signing on to message boards, forums, and playing Internet games with others (I still miss the BeZerk online games) is only recognizable in their text if they sound like a child or a teenager. Which I might have, but if I did, the people who were also on those forums didn't have an issue ith it. So I got to exercise a lot of socialization practice in those places, some of which went well, some of which did not, but I learned a lot from all of it. The people who were on-line were vastly more interesting than the people near me, at least until I went off to university. Even if they were constructed personas and people playing a role for a specific segment of the Internet, it was better than what was happening around me.
That said, I had the opportunity to experience a Web that was friendly to anonymity, pseudonymity, and that didn't do a lot of trying to track or link you across various sites. Real Names on the Web were still a security risk, rather than an enforced policy to participate in some spaces, and the centralizing and data-mining parts of what is now social media weren't present. Like so many other people who experienced this version of the Web, I want it back. I prefer the serendipity, the effective search, and the way that most of the web stayed separated and apart from each other, choosing to affiliate with each other, rather than everyone being on the same site and being thrown together by an algorithm fulfilling a different purpose. (So, yes, I like Dreamwidth as well, because Dreamwidth has many of those Old Web aspects to how it is run.) If you come into a Web that is mediated by apps in app stores, where you have to maintain a presence in all of the centralized social media spaces under your wallet identity, and then try to keep something else separated from all of that where you can express yourself more fully, it's exhausting. Not to mention that most of those centralized sites have insufficient resources devoted to active moderation of content, or to giving each user sufficient tools to moderate their own content in effective ways. If something escapes containment, there's almost certainly someone ready to spread it further and exactly to the people who will take offense or objection to it and have no qualms at all about attacking and piling on another username on the Web, rather than thinking for a bit about the possibility of a person behind it. (Or are the people who want to persecute someone in person as well as online, and will use information from both modes to achieve this.)
Getting back to touching grass, one of the other accusations that gets made against other people being online for a lot is that they begin to take things that are said online seriously. I'm forgetting what the actual terms were, although I think if it wasn't "terminally online," then it was at least in the family of that term. The idea of people taking things seriously online produced at least a couple of different attitudes and factions. One part headed to a space that prided themselves on their edgelord edgy humor, "freeze peach," and the lulz, where anyone who took them seriously or tried to point out the harms and biases they were perpetuating unironically, even in their jaded "ironic" stances, were laughed out of the space because they were clearly too stupid to understand what was going on. This segment of the Web also produced the popular perception of the Brony, as well as response characters like Quibble Pants and the episode Fame and Misfortune from the showrunners and writers themselves.
A different segment went out to a place where Right Speech was praised over all other things (except perhaps the appearance of Right Action), and they threw themselves into tizzies trying to find ways to rectify themselves into shining examples for the rest of us to follow. Unfortunately, as the Confucians learned before them, such a system is brittle, and if one person can be forever excluded form the company of the righteous through one mistake or by being a fraction behind in using whatever was currently decided as the perfect Right Speech, then what you get are a lot of people taking everything seriously and then taking on to themselves the burdens of policing everyone else's actions. This has historically gone over like a lead balloon, and online, it was a lead balloon filled with more lead. A lot of the Disk Horse that grapples with what's "problematic," based on their own tastes and very little other information or scholarship, springs from this segment.
The average corporate social media site contains both of these segments, and the algorithm desperately wants those two segments to meet so they can enjoy the heat put off by the combustion and serve ads to everyone. The algorithm also wants to put the people who truly believe in the supremacy of white men in contact with as many not-white not-men as they can, for similar reasons of combustion and advertising. Stereotypically, the white male supremacist takes the role of the lulz segment laughing at anyone trying to take seriously the idea that white men don't deserve automatic deference or all the power, and everyone else tries to figure out if there's some way to displace them from their comfort and get them to care about anything other than themselves and their supremacy. But there's plenty of infighting amongst the Right Speech segment as well, and that will do for an algorithm in a pinch. (Admittedly, there is a fascinating amount of creativity at work among everyone who is trying to game the algorithm so as to get their post in front of other people by not triggering specific text filters while still getting their message across and making it as clear as possible what they mean. And an equally large amount of frustration among users who are trying to use their moderation tools to curate their experience, only to have things they don't want to see leak through because they haven't yet put into their filters whatever the latest algorithm dodge is.)
Would having both of these segments go out and touch grass regularly help lower the level of tension online? Not necessarily, as we're seeing both of those segments start online and then work their way out into how they handle interactions with other people, too. (Or, possibly, that they are already that way through interactions with people and they find each other online and reinforce their interactions in a shared space.) Nor is it a useful belief or practice to say that everything online is ephemeral and less important than the interactions in the real world. That particular attitude doesn't work when it's phrased as "ignore the bullies and they'll go away," and with the way that apps and technology like to use push notifications, it's even harder to ignore the things that are happening, even if you don't intend to respond to them.
An awful lot of people are finding their communities, identity language, and very important friendships on-line, and that includes me. The people I know on-line are people, and our friendship over shared interests and shared spaces is no less real than the collegiality I have with the people that I work with every day. If I stayed in my rural, provincial town, and only interacted in the physical, I would have, by the end of my high school career, interacted with one Black person. How unprepared I would have been to handle the social environment of the university and the wide variety of experience that all the students and instructors bring to it. (And even more unprepared for graduate studies and the working world in my chosen profession, had I not been online and worked with people online.) Online interactions have meant getting to see and hear people in other nations and read their words about what is happening where they are without the filter of whether someone else decided this was important enough to put into a publication or on a news broadcast. Pseudonymity also means that people are more able to be their genuine selves when talking to the online audience. A physical culture of "no homo, bro" gives way to an online culture where everyone may know you're gay, but very few, if any, are able to connect that to your wallet name. Online is still one of the easiest places to begin a social transition, or to feel our your identity through reading and experimentation, and to gather people who will support you in being your most authentic self, even if you live somewhere actively hostile to trans people.
For as much as there is talk about the dangers, the deceptive patterns, the algorithms, and the aspects of being online that permit malicious activity, many of which are driven by the profit motive or similar ideas of making money, there's also thriving and vibrant communities that welcome, assist, squee about the blorbos from their shows, share gifts, support each other, and occasionally, save each other's lives. Or assist with the heist of someone from their bad relationship.
