Good morning from Dublin! Today has been a very long day. Technically it's already "tomorrow" but I haven't yet made it home from Boston (my connecting flight leaves in a couple of hours) so I thought I'd take the opportunity to scribble a quick post.
This PAX weekend has been pretty much everything I hoped it would be. I had a great time with my friends, I saw some cool stuff at the show and I picked up some fun swag.
Most importantly, we successfully carried a number of formerly Internet-only relationships into the offline realm. Doing this is always a nerve-wracking experience — regardless of whether said relationship is platonic, romantic or anything else — and so it's always a pleasure when things come together and we all get along.
I actually wasn't too worried this time around, though. Something brought us all together in the world of Final Fantasy XIV and the fact most of us have been together for nigh on two years now says something positive about us and what we mean to one another. There have been tough times, as with any relationship, and people have come and gone over time, but the people with whom I spent my weekend represent a core group that I have always very much enjoyed spending virtual time with — and it turns out I enjoy spending real time with, too. It's just a pity we're all so scattered.
"I'm glad everyone is exactly how they seem to be," said one of our number last night, possibly slightly fuelled by a beer or two. "It means that everyone's genuine. And that we're all as fucked up as each other."
That latter point is key, and not necessarily a bad thing. Almost without exception, we've all had Shit to Deal With to varying degrees over the years, and our adventures in Eorzea have provided not only some much-needed escape at times, but also an outlet through which we can talk about the things that have been bothering us with like-minded individuals.
And that is immeasurably valuable; in an age where it seems people are drifting further and further apart from one another for various reasons, it's comforting to have a group that is pretty much always there for you. I know I'm grateful for these friends, and I'm sure they are too.
Now coffee is calling, closely followed by a connecting flight, a taxi ride back home and then almost straight back out (hopefully with time for a shower first!) to go and teach clarinet to kids. It's all go, huh. I shall sleep well tonight, for sure.
So another outlandish "privacy scandal" looked set to erupt on Twitter earlier. For the benefit of anyone who might be considering sharing anything regarding Samsung Smart TVs sending your personal information to third parties, allow me to clarify a few things.
Samsung Smart TVs have a voice recognition feature. I know this because I have one. (I also never use it, because voice recognition is, for the most part, stupid and pointless when you have a remote control right there. Assuming you have hands, it is pretty much always just as quick to use the remote as it is to remember exactly how you're supposed to phrase a voice command.)
Anyway. The way this voice control works is very simple. You press a button on the "special" remote, not the "normal" one, and the microphone in the remote starts picking up your voice. When you've finished speaking, it sends what you said over the Internet to a speech recognition service (that more than likely converts the speech into computer-friendly text for more accurate processing) and then your TV receives an instruction based on what you said. The TV itself isn't doing any real processing; that all happens remotely, and the TV simply receives the instruction to do something based on what the speech recognition service thinks you said.
Astute iPhone-owning readers will know that this is exactly how Siri on Apple devices works — it's why you can't use Siri when you don't have an Internet connection, even to access information stored locally on your phone such as your address book and suchlike.
The reason these services work like this is to take some of the processing workload off the phone/TV/other device with voice recognition. It's not an ideal solution, but it does mean that the devices in question can be less expensive because they don't need hefty processing power or software to recognise voices pre-installed on them. One day we may have devices that can recognise our voices accurately without requiring an Internet connection — although chances are by the time we've perfected that, the Internet will be "everywhere", rather than just in Wi-Fi hotspots and mobile coverage areas — but until then, this is how voice recognition tends to work.
As such, a necessary part of the entire process involves sending a recording of what you said to the third-party speech recognition service. This means that if you press the microphone button on your Smart TV remote and then decide that the appropriate thing to say at that moment would be "My credit card number is…", a recording of you saying your credit card number will be sent to this speech recognition service. Chances are, nothing will happen with it, but as with any sort of unencrypted information transmitted across the Internet, there's a slim risk of nefarious types intercepting the transmission and taking advantage of it.
Because of this slim risk of stupid people telling their TV remote what their credit card number is, Samsung have had to put a disclaimer in their Smart TV documentation that the TV may send your personal information to a third party, and of course, people have misinterpreted this as the TV always listening to what you're saying, and it therefore being unsafe to share any personal information while within earshot of your TV. This is, of course, utter nonsense, because as I've outlined above, you have to specifically press a button in order to activate voice recognition mode, and the "third party" it's being sent to is doing nothing more than converting your babblings into something the computer in the TV can recognise as an instruction to do something.
That is it. Nothing more. Nothing sinister. And if you're still uneasy, you could 1) not buy a Smart TV, since technology clearly terrifies you, 2) not use the voice recognition function (which, in my experience, is patchy, slow and pointless anyway) or 3) not talk about credit card numbers or other personal information when you've pressed the button that specifically asks your TV to listen to you.
So there you go. This has been a public service announcement. I thank you.
I rarely leave user reviews on things, be they App Store/Google Play downloads, Amazon purchases, eBay sellers or Steam downloads. And I've realised that in not doing so, I'm being a bit of a fool.
Why? Because whenever I consider purchasing something, one of the first things I do is have a look at the user ratings and reviews and determine whether or not they're 1) genuine 2) worth listening to and 3) something that might need to make me reconsider or confirm my purchase.
But when they work, they can be extremely useful — and every time I write one, I'm reminded how much I have always enjoyed reviewing things. Not necessarily critiquing them in depth or from any sort of theoretical perspective, but providing a simple, straightforward analysis of how much I liked something, how it made me feel, whether I think other people would like it and all that sort of good stuff.
It's also really fun to write a negative review, though it's also very easy to be extremely unfair when you're doing so, which is why I try and remain positive most of the time. (People are also more inclined to disagree with something negative than positive in my experience, too, and I really don't enjoy arguing with people.) I have made one fairly consistent exception over the years, though, and that's with mobile games that have been truly, truly awful, particularly those that have desecrated beloved franchises like Dungeon Keeper, Theme Park and SimCity. (Oh, hi, EA.)
But I've decided as a belated and rather lame resolution that I'm going to start making an effort to review things that I've bought, played, used, whatever. Because if I make use of user reviews for their intended purpose — to find out what the average Joe on the street thinks of something that I'm considering purchasing — then I'm sure other people will do too. And, not to blow my own trumpet too much, but I feel like I'm quite good at expressing myself about the things I do and don't like about something.
I give it a couple of weeks before I stop doing it, but for now it's a little something I can do to help make the Internet as a whole a slightly better place. I made a start this evening by reviewing HuniePop on Steam; see if you can spot my review if you're pondering whether to drop some cash on a pornographic puzzle game!
I was browsing Twitter earlier when I came across the following quote, retweeted by someone I follow.
"If you're a writer writing about video games, I recommend you get your face in front of a camera to prepare for the future."
My initial reaction to this was a fairly straightforward "fuck that", but then I contemplated it a bit further.
I still don't agree with the premise. The written word is a powerful medium and to unequivocally declare, as some people do, that its days are very much numbered is to show that you're extremely blinkered. Yes, there is a large audience out there who enjoy video-based content, but they're just one group who occupy the somewhat younger end of the spectrum. And while this is an important group to court — particularly as they're one of the key demographics for the video game industry — this doesn't somehow mean that all the 30-40 year olds who have grown up with computer and video games since their inception are immediately irrelevant. What it should really mean is that content should be provided to cater to these different audiences, who have very different wants, needs and expectations from media relating to their favourite things.
I'm not sure how representative an example of a 33-year old gamer I am, but personally speaking, I'm not a big fan of video-based content for the most part. I can't stand Let's Plays, for example — I'd rather play the game myself, and there's no way I'm going to watch someone play The Binding of Isaac or Minecraft for literally hundreds of episodes — and I'm not a fan of the numerous variations on the "angry dude shouting about something" formula that proves quite popular.
Exceptions for me are things like TotalBiscuit's "WTF Is…" series, in which he spends 20-30 minutes giving a good overview of a diverse array of PC games, including everything from the options available in the menu to how the game itself actually works; Yahtzee's "Zero Punctuation" series, which doesn't rely on game footage at all and is instead actually more of a well-written comedy series that happens to explore specific games as its central premise; and Extra Credits' (usually) intelligent discussions of all manners of game culture. These are all carried by strong personalities and well-written content, and for me represent the best that video game videos (you heard) have to offer.
Thing is, though, I'm not always in the mood to sit down and watch a video — particularly longer stuff like TotalBiscuit's 20-30-minute affairs. I'm not always in a particularly ideal situation to watch a video, either; perhaps I'm on my phone in an area of poor signal or in an environment where I can't put sound on — in both those cases, this makes video almost completely useless as a medium of delivery, whereas text is absolutely fine in both scenarios.
Despite all this, though, I can sort of see why more and more people are turning to these video content producers. The overall quality of video games writing is rapidly going down the pan, to my eyes, and it's at least partly due to the continuing reliance on the clickbait advertising model. The need for page views has lead to many individual writers (and even publications) jumping aboard the insidious and obnoxious "social justice" train, stirring up pointless Daily Mail-style moral panics and controversies at every turn under the guise of cultural criticism. Long-form pieces such as those that Polygon used to be renowned for clearly don't draw in readers in the same numbers as a table-thumping opinion piece about how terrible it is that you can kill prostitutes in Grand Theft Auto V — and, by the way, let's just recall that the games press a few years ago was quick to quite rightly point and laugh at any mainstream publications that pulled this still exceedingly stupid line of criticism — and thus we get more and more of these perpetually outraged pieces driving frustrated readers away from sites and towards personalities who don't subscribe to these ridiculous, borderline hysterical viewpoints.
But it shouldn't have to be a case of one or the other. There should be a range of different opinions and writing styles; those of us who enjoy the written word shouldn't be pushed away from it in the direction of video by the fact that all these issues are only ever explored from one single sociopolitical perspective. That's what's happening, though, and unfortunately I don't see it getting any better any time soon.
I'm glad I got out of the games press when I did. I don't want to sit in front of a camera — I don't look good on camera: I'm fat, I have bad hair, I'm perpetually unkempt (even when I try to be… kempt), I have terrible dress sense, I have dry skin on my face that flares up when I'm stressed and, moreover, I find it terribly difficult to act naturally when being stared down by a camera — and, on the writing side, I have absolutely no desire to become a source of further moral panics or fuel the perpetual outrage machine. So there doesn't really feel like there's a place for me anyway.
It's sad, really; there's a clear gap in the market here for some old-school media — magazines! — of the ilk we had in the '80s, '90s and early '00s, but no-one seems to actually want to fill it. I can't be the only one hungry for this sort of thing, can I?
I know I've been very anti-Twitter and very anti-social media in general recently, but an unfortunate side-effect of "going dark" is, to be perfectly frank, loneliness.
It kind of sucks that social media is the default means of people communicating with one another today. I'll grant that it's a convenient and easy means of people to talk to each other without sharing completely "personal" details like email addresses or phone numbers, but I sort of miss the days of sending lengthy emails back and forth with people. I know the option is still there to do that, but how many people would actually respond, I wonder?
This is a preamble to the fact that I have rejoined Twitter in an attempt to reconnect with the people I effectively severed social ties with when I went dark a while back. I don't regret doing that — remaining clear of some of the most ridiculous Internet drama in years has been thoroughly pleasant, and it makes me glad to have the close friends I do have who have stuck by me even as I was harder to get hold of — but I have found myself somewhat wanting for conversation at times.
And so we come to this, then: an attempt to recapture whatever it was that attracted me to Twitter in the first place, and kept me as an avid user for a long time until I became thoroughly disillusioned with the whole thing.
The temptation with Twitter is to follow everyone and everything. A follow isn't the same as a friendship request on other forms of social media: it's not reciprocal. You can follow someone and they remain completely unaware of your existence. This isn't necessarily as harsh (or creepy) as it sounds, since many Twitter users make use of the social network primarily as a broadcast medium for keeping people up to date on the latest happenings or pointing them in the direction of posts, forums and articles that are a better place to hang out and talk in detail. Twitter is, after all, shit for nuanced discussion, as anyone who has ever attempted to discuss anything deeper than how nice the sausage you're currently eating is will have undoubtedly discovered.
I'm not going to do that this time, though. I'm not going to use Twitter as the noisy, messy hodgepodge of microblogging tool, text messaging service and RSS reader that it once was: the emphasis for me now is on the thing I always enjoyed using it for most: talking to people from all over the world.
I'm not going to follow hundreds of people. I'm not going to feel obliged to follow people who follow me unless I find them interesting. If people start retweeting things that upset or annoy me, I'll simply turn off their retweets — retweets, after all, are by far the most irritating feature of Twitter in my experience since it's a means of someone shoving a third party's opinion in your face — and if they remain annoying or upsetting after that then, well, maybe I don't really want to be following them after all.
My account is public at present, but once I have a nice little collection of followers gathered once again, I'm turning my account back to private, which means my tweets won't be public and people will have to request to follow me rather than just being able to do so. My professional life is now completely separate from my online existence, and as such I have no need to "network" online by sucking up to "important" people and trying to make them aware of my existence by building up as much "social capital" (to co-opt a phrase that means something else) as I can.
I can instead concentrate on using Twitter as a means of talking with friends and — hopefully, anyway — having a bit of fun. And with any luck, this will help at least partly deal with the feelings of isolation and loneliness I've been feeling recently.
I find Internet culture endlessly fascinating and, at times, more than a little terrifying.
One of the most interesting things about Internet culture is how small it makes the world seem at times. I recall when online connectivity was just starting to become a thing — beyond the old-school world of direct-dial bulletin board systems, that is — and as well as the obnoxious phrase "information superhighway" being coined, a second, lesser-known but rather accurate phrase came into brief usage: "global village".
The concept of the Internet — or, perhaps more accurately, the Web — as a global village is an interesting one, and if you spend some time wandering around online, you'll come to recognise the village's various haunts. There's the village hall that hosts everything from coffee mornings to neo-Nazi rallies (Facebook). There's the pub where everyone is always talking over everyone else and no-one's really listening to one another (Twitter). There's the deceptive village shop that looks small but actually carries a frighteningly comprehensive array of products of all descriptions (Amazon). There's the coffee shop where socialites of all descriptions like to hang out and have in-depth discussions about everything from literature to their sexual conquests (Reddit). And there's that dark, unlit back alley that very few people go down, but down which you'll find either an army of like-minded outcasts or a horde of terrifying monsters, depending on your outlook (4chan and its successor 8chan).
There's far more to the Internet than this, of course; the global village has become more of a town over the years, but it's never really lost that sense of having "landmarks" around the place: easily recognisable places from which you can easily get your bearings and which, should you choose to make them your regular hangouts, provide a sense of comfortable (or sometimes uncomfortable) familiarity.
They've all evolved over time, too. Take Facebook; when it originally launched, it was designed for college students. Then it expanded to take in young, cool people in general, and allow them to keep in touch with their close personal network of friends easily. Then it expanded again to become more public and open. And today, of course, almost everyone is on Facebook to some degree or another, regardless of age, gender, interests and even level of computer literacy.
Change hasn't always been for the positive, of course — although how you regard these changes, positive or negative, is partly down to your own individual feelings and how you want to communicate online. Twitter and I, for example, parted ways when it was becoming increasingly apparent that the microblogging service was being used by a lot of people more as a broadcast medium — and sometimes an echo chamber — than a means of communicating effectively. Its inherent limitations started to strain at the seams as people, for some inexplicable reason, started to think that it was an appropriate medium for having in-depth debates about complex issues. (It really isn't.) Then the marketers found it, trying to encourage us to tweet using the hashtags for their products seen on adverts or TV shows — who does this? And over time the noise built and built and built until, much like Facebook, it was not what it once was. For some people, it's still fun; for me, it had lost much of the charm that caused me to use it a great deal in the first place.
There's a lot going on behind the scenes in a lot of places, too. Take Wikipedia, for example; at face value, it appears to be a perfectly reputable source containing a vast array of information about pretty much anything you would care to name. Ostensibly being a reference work, much of it is written in an impartial, unbiased manner — though there are exceptions. And it's in those exceptions you start to see that yes, this is something that is put together and constantly maintained by humans, many of whom are doing it simply because they enjoy doing it. Dig further and take a peek at the inner workings of Wikipedia and you'll see that it's far from a solo effort; teams of editors are constantly discussing, debating, arguing and even fighting over the most peculiar of topics; in order to deal with such situations, the site has formed its own quasi-government to arbitrate disputes, with unfortunate instances going through strict, formal procedures managed not by Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales, but by councils of users. It's fascinating to observe.
There are billions of people on the planet, a significant proportion of whom now have some form of access to the Internet. With that in mind, it's kind of crazy how small the Internet feels sometimes. That "global village" really is a thing and, while just like any other village, not everyone gets along with everyone else, the virtual world we've all helped build together is a fascinating thing indeed.
Just be careful if you venture into some of those dark corners. You might not like what you find… but on the other hand, there's always the possibility of being pleasantly surprised, too. Explore at your own risk!
Over the weekend, mankind enjoyed a significant step forward in the field of space travel. Unmanned spacecraft Rosetta successfully detached its probe, named Philae, and landed on Comet 67P, aka Chryumov-Grasimenko. It was the culmination of a ten-year mission for Dr Matt Taylor and his colleagues at the European Space Agency, and a historic moment for humanity: we finally had the chance to examine a comet up close, and perhaps make some steps forward in understanding the way the universe works; how the solar system formed; perhaps even how there came to be life on this planet.
As much as it was a historic moment for humanity, then, imagine how Dr Matt Taylor felt as a significant portion of his life's work finally came to fruition as the probe successfully touched down and began transmitting data back to Earth.
Then imagine how Dr Matt Taylor felt when confronted with a giddy press more concerned with his sartorial choices than with the scientific milestone he had just passed — the shirt in question being a rather loud Hawaiian-style number featuring rather vivid, camp, retro-style imagery of women in PVC outfits shooting guns and generally looking pretty badass. (A shirt, I might add, made for and given to him as a gift by his friend Elly Prizeman.)
"I don't care if you landed a spacecraft on a comet," read a headline on The Verge put together by the two-person team — yes, this garbage took two people to put together — of former Polygon editor Chris Plante and his colleague Arielle Duhaime-Ross, "your shirt is sexist and ostracizing." And this was far from the only article published that day attacking him and his wardrobe rather than celebrating his achievements.
We don't have to imagine how Dr Matt Taylor felt. Because it was captured on film.
Can you imagine. Can you imagine reaching the culmination of a ten-year project, making such a significant step forward, and then some blowhard on the Internet telling you that your shirt is directly responsible for women not wanting to enter the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics? Can you imagine having to deal with abuse seemingly supported by the mainstream media, whom you previously thought would be keen to celebrate your achievement but now are, quite rightly, somewhat wary of?
Welcome to a world dominated by bullies.
The Internet has brought with it many great things, one of the most powerful being the principle that "everyone has a voice". The Internet has done more to advance the concept of free speech than pretty much anything else in the world, but while some people use this for good — to share information, to reach out to people who need help, to make friends in far-flung corners of the world without having to physically travel there — there are others who use it for ill. To lie, to cheat, to accuse, to blow things out of proportion, to bully.
This particular breed of unpleasant individual has been seemingly growing in numbers — or, if not numbers then certainly prominence — in the last few years, largely thanks to social networking sites Twitter and Tumblr. Ostensibly concerned with admirable-sounding concepts such as "social justice" and feminism, these individuals purport to be progressive thinkers who want to make the world a better place for everyone, but in actual fact are nasty, narrow-minded bullies who simply attack anyone who doesn't see the world in the same way they do.
The mission is a colossal achievement. Millions of us have been watching Philae's heart-stopping journey. Everyone in this country should be proud of Dr Taylor and his colleagues, and he has every right to let his feelings show.
Except, of course, that he wasn't crying with relief. He wasn't weeping with sheer excitement at this interstellar rendezvous. I am afraid he was crying because he felt he had sinned. He was overcome with guilt and shame for wearing what some people decided was an "inappropriate" shirt on television.
Why was he forced into this humiliation? Because he was subjected to an unrelenting tweetstorm of abuse. He was bombarded across the Internet with a hurtling dustcloud of hate, orchestrated by lobby groups and politically correct media organisations.
And so I want, naturally, to defend this blameless man. And as for all those who have monstered him and convicted him in the kangaroo court of the Web — they should all be ashamed of themselves.
Sadly, Dr Matt Taylor's trials were far from the first time this sort of outrage has erupted, and it will be far from the last time this happens, too. These supposed advocates of social justice — referred to in the vernacular by their opponents as "social justice warriors" or "SJWs" — are renowned for two things: taking offence at everything it's possible to take offence at, and then bullying people into submission, often until those suffering the bullying end up apologising, as Dr Taylor did.
This sounds ridiculous, but it's all too painfully familiar for me. I was bullied repeatedly throughout primary and secondary school — and once again at one of my previous workplaces — and the execution was exactly the same. Wear down the victim's defences with repeated, unprovoked, unwarranted attacks until they snap in one way or another — be it violently, at which point the bullies can point at the victim and say "look how violent they're being!", or tearfully, as in Dr Taylor's case, at which point the bullies can point and laugh at the victim and claim that they're only upset because they know they did wrong — and then move on in the knowledge of a job "well done".
It keeps happening, too, and these people never get called on it because they wield a considerable amount of influence and power — influence and power that lets them get away with a whole lot of nonsense.
Consider, if you will, the recent case of Independent Games Festival judge Mattie Brice, an outspoken, anti-men feminist who has claimed to be "leaving" the games industry on several occasions due to the abuse she was supposedly receiving.
Brice tweeted that she was "automatically rating low any games with men in them" during the course of her IGF judging duties and that she was "loving all this power". Understandably, this tweet — whether or not made in jest — upset a number of people, who complained to the IGF, who subsequently, admirably and promptly asked politely that she, you know, stop doing that lest people think that their judging was rigged. Brice then complained publicly to her Twitter followers about how she was being "harassed" and how the IGF were treating her poorly, and continued until the IGF issued an apology, not her. Her defence in all this? "It was a joke" — the last fallback of the bully, and an excuse I heard many a time when working as a teacher. It was never, ever, true, and you'll forgive me for being skeptical of this particular instance being a "joke" when we're talking about a person who made a game called "Destroy All Men" and has often posted anti-men rants on Twitter.
And lest you think I'm singling out Brice here, she is far from the only one; she's simply one of the most recent examples. I've thankfully remained largely free from this sort of nonsense up until now (though it remains to be seen if this blog post will attract zealots) but I've witnessed friends and former colleagues being attacked too many times over the last few years for me to sit here continuing to bite my lip.
YouTuber and PC gaming enthusiast TotalBiscuit demonstrated a good understanding of the issue in a recent post, and came to what is quite possibly the crux of this whole social justice thing and why it bugs me so much:
It's so goddamn American.
A lot of this social justice stuff seems to be focused on a very American set of ideals and circumstances that doesn't take into account much going on outside the country's borders. I mean the idea that racism against white people doesn't exist: let's take that one on for a second. [Fellow YouTuber and Irishman] Miracle of Sound accurately pointed out the genocide perpetrated against a portion of the Irish population and the hundreds of years of oppression that they suffered under the English. Sounds pretty damn racist to me.
The concept of white privilege is very American, too. You'll find a lot of British people, particularly Northerners like myself, bemused by it. I grew up in pit towns, or should I say, ex-pit towns, because Thatcher destroyed our economy when she broke the miners' unions and put a lot of people out of work. Our towns were vast white majorities but I can safely say we had no privilege, no advantages for being white. Some of the richest and most successful people in our towns were Indian and Pakistani.
He's absolutely right. These social justice types take a very American — specifically, West Coast — view of the world and assume it is the correct one, then shout down anyone who doesn't agree with them. They release the hounds on Twitter; they publicly shame them on Tumblr; they encourage the media to buy in to the narrative, and, worryingly, they succeed. Compare, for example, the media portrayal of consumer revolt "Gamergate" as a misogynist hate campaign that wants to drive women out of gaming with the reality of it being one of the most articulate, passionate, genuine, diverse, intelligent and inclusive — albeit at times somewhat ill-focused — groups of gamers of all genders, races and creeds that I've ever observed. (As an aside, I haven't involved myself in Gamergate's activities — as a former member of the press I don't agree with everything they stand for, though I feel they do have a number of fair points to be made — but I have spent a couple of weeks lurking around their regular online haunts to see what made them tick. It's been eye-opening to see the dissonance.)
It is worth clarifying at this juncture — and it pisses me off that I have to add this disclaimer — that I am not against the concept of "social justice" or, more accurately, equality. Quite the opposite; I believe in equal opportunities and equal, fair treatment for everyone, and my behaviour towards other people in my own life reflects this. Meanwhile, however, these keyboard crusaders make themselves immune to criticism by simply responding to any critics with "so you're against social justice, are you? You're against progressiveness?" but there is a right way and a wrong way to go about things — and bullying people until they seemingly agree with you is very much the wrong way to go about it. That is what this post is about, not about standing against the very principles of progressiveness.
All this has been going on for several years now — longtime readers will doubtless recall a number of posts where I've alluded to this in the past, and I've seen more friends than I'd care to mention either fall victim to these Internet bully mobs for a careless word at the wrong time or get swept up in their twisted ideology, never to have a rational word to say ever again — and it's time it stopped.
Why do I bring this up now? Why do I feel that this one lone blog post can make a difference?
Well, frankly, I don't; I am but one voice shouting into the void, and I would doubtless be argued to be a textbook example of a white cishet male privileged neckbeard shitlord (yes, this is genuinely something that these believers in "social justice" call people), but it's worth mentioning — particularly as the debacle over Dr Matt Taylor's shirt has brought this whole sorry situation very much into the public eye. I hope that this helps more people to see what has been brewing in online culture for a few years now — and I hope it helps put a stop to it.
This is not a move towards a progressive society. It's a move towards 1984-style Thought Policing, and it's not the direction that we as a society should be moving.
The bullying needs to stop. And it needs to stop now.
As the years have passed, the Internet has undergone continuous improvement for the most part. It's now one of the most — if not the most — democratic media in the world, for better or worse, allowing pretty much anyone around the world to speak their brains on pretty much any subject they'd care to share with anyone who wants to listen. (This blog is, of course, a prime example of this in action; I'm still frankly bewildered anyone reads this at all.)
But not every improvement in the Internet has been a positive one. In fact, one thing specifically appears to be on the rise, and it's not at all a positive thing, despite usually being implemented with good intentions.
I am referring to websites that, within moment of you arriving, pop up a Google Hangouts-style chatbox in the corner of the screen, often featuring a photograph of some overly-chipper looking person, and invite you to "chat" if you need help.
Now, in principle this isn't a terrible idea. Those who are less familiar with the Internet will probably appreciate having guidance on hand — immediately, and without having to seek it out — should they run into difficulties. (That said, assuming that "those less familiar with the Internet" are too dim to determine that clicking on a link that says "Help" — as most (vaguely useful) websites offer — will actually provide them with assistance is, to be honest, rather insulting towards those who are "less familiar with the Internet". And yes, I'm primarily talking about old people.) Having a live person on hand is, theoretically, a great thing, as it means you can ask questions without having to work out what the specific search terms to describe the problem you're having are — and then discover the only vaguely useful search result is an unanswered forum post from three years ago of someone having the exact same problem and never resolving it, of course.
The implementation, however, leaves something to be desired. Take WordPress here, for example. I started composing this post and not five seconds after the post editor had appeared, up popped a little blue box in the corner of the screen cheerfully enquiring "Hello! How can we help?" It's distracting, it's annoying, it's patronising and it is, in this case, unnecessary: I have been using WordPress for… (checks) quite a long time now, and thus it's probably reasonable to assume I know my way around most of it — and that anything I don't know how to do I'm perfectly comfortable with looking up in help files and forums.
That doesn't stop this silly little box from popping up every few times I start creating a post, however — yes, it's not even every time I start writing a post. No, apparently WordPress believes that maybe two or three times a week I'll reach some sort of existential blogging crisis and rather than, as most bloggers would do, pontificate about it for a thousand words in a self-indulgent stream-of-consciousness post, I would like to "chat" with someone about it. I do not want to "chat" with anyone from WordPress. I would like them to be on hand if I have a specific question, but I'm more than happy to use the already established channels for that — I don't need live support.
And it's not as if this "live" support is particularly live, anyway. Owing to the fact that most chat support people are juggling a number of different conversations at the same time — each of which is with someone who has a markedly different thinking and typing speed from everyone else they're interacting with — it can often take minutes at a time to get a response. Not exactly "instant" messaging. And, okay, it's still quicker than waiting a day or two for an email response — or more, if you ever have the misfortune to deal with any sort of government agency via email — but the benefit of instant messaging is supposed to be that you can get an immediate response, and if that one benefit isn't even present in these ever-present "How can we help?" boxes, then there's no fucking point them being there in the first place.
I might write a letter. That's always seemed like the most satisfying — albeit least time-efficient — means of expressing your dissatisfaction. Although sadly, it's also one of the easiest to ignore in this digital age. But the recipient actually receiving and reading it isn't necessarily the point in many cases; often putting pen to paper is a cathartic experience that makes the frustrated party get a few things off their chest and calm down a bit. It may not resolve anything in the long run, but, speaking from personal experience, by golly does it sometimes make you feel better.
So that's how you can help me, WordPress. You can bugger off with your patronising little chat box, otherwise you might just find yourself on the receiving end of a sternly-worded letter written on actual paper.
Or not. I might just stop getting worked up over stupid little things like this and go and do something fun instead. Hah! That'll be the day, eh?
Just slightly over two years ago (really quite surprisingly close, now I look at the dates), I pondered the subject of how I Don't Care about certain social issues.
That particular rant — kind of shocked how little things have changed in two years, to be honest — was inspired by the amount of time certain people spent pontificating on Twitter about how awful certain groups were towards other groups. Whether it was racism, sexism, ableism or any of the other bad -isms, there was always someone on hand to loudly denounce anyone who displayed one or more of these traits as The Worst Person Ever.
I've tended to find over the years that the more I find myself seeing the same things said over and over — and the more hyperbolic those things are — the less I'm inclined to care about them, until eventually you cross some sort of apathy event horizon and find yourself feeling completely and utterly unmoved by even the most tragic of human suffering. Desensitisation is very much a real thing — although I'll qualify that at this stage by saying that I am by no means desensitised to things like violent imagery or things happening to those who are close to me and that I care about.
I was reminded of this feeling today when a friend got in touch and told me about some dude I'd never heard of supposedly sexually assaulting a whole bunch of people, the dodgy things he'd said on Facebook and the rather specific, creepy details that his alleged victims had said independently of one another. Now, I knew that I was probably supposed to feel outraged about this apparent miscarriage of justice, but the fact is, I just couldn't bring myself to care even a little bit about it. I couldn't bring myself to Google who this dude I'd never heard of was; I couldn't bring myself to look at the news stories; it just didn't matter to me.
And, you know what? I don't actually think that's necessarily a bad way to be thinking about things. While it would be nice if all the good people in the world could wave their respective magic wands and make all the bad people's dicks fall off (where applicable), we all know that isn't the way things work. And it's all very well and good and probably morally admirable to get upset on other people's behalf, but there are an awful lot of bad people out there and only so many hours in the day. I know I'd much rather be concentrating on my own life and the wellbeing of those immediately around me (in social, not necessarily geographical terms) than wasting time — yes, I do think it is a colossal waste of time — getting angry on behalf of people I've never met, will likely never meet and have absolutely no means of relating to, helping or indeed having any impact on the lives of whatsoever.
Why do I say this is a good thing? Doesn't that make me some sort of woman/ethnic minority/disabled person-hating narcissist? Well, no, of course not — although a woman/ethnic minority/disabled person-hating narcissist would say that, wouldn't they? The simple fact is this: very few people are real "heroes". Very few of us have the power to make a true difference in the lives of people we've had absolutely no contact with whatsoever. And it's not good for one's mental health to continually get upset and angry on behalf of everyone who is wronged in the world. I've seen one friend go down that road, and frankly they became rather insufferable as a result. More than that, though, it seemed impossible for them to ever be happy, because there was always something new to get upset and angry about; they were perpetually in a state of anguish and fury, because there was no way to fix this broken world we live in. It was heartbreaking to see, and there was nothing I could do to help them.
Ultimately all most of us do is try to be the best people we can be to the people who do matter to each of us: family, friends and the acquaintances we come into contact with on a regular basis through work or other activities. If everyone simply tried to be a bit more excellent towards one another in their own social circles, the world would probably be a much more pleasant place overall.
Unfortunately some people simply appear to be hard-wired to be as un-excellent as possible to the people around them. And that's not at all cool, but if you have nothing to do with those people, harsh as it may sound, they're not your problem. They have to either recognise the problems they have themselves and do something about it, or the people who are close to them and care about them have to take action. You, as some random stranger on the Internet, have no influence, no power and, moreover, no real right to interfere with that person's life. Concentrate on dealing with your own issues, because everyone's got them to varying degrees, and if you're one of the lucky few to be in a place of relative contentment? Enjoy it, for fuck's sake; don't go looking for trouble.
So, to sum up: I Still Don't Care. And, I have to say, ditching social media has made it a whole lot easier to do just that. While my own issues mean that I'm still a way off feeling truly, completely 100% happy and content with my own life, I sure feel a lot closer to that ambition than I once was. And, should I ever reach it? I'm damn well going to enjoy every minute of it.
It is traffic that drives the modern Web, whether we're talking about a commercial site or a personal social media page, but I'm gradually coming to regard the relentless pursuit of this easily measurable but sometimes quite misleading metric as something I'm keen to step as far away from as possible.
Why? Because the behaviour of the Internet hivemind — they who create the traffic — is predictable. Write something interesting and compelling — but, crucially, not controversial — that you've poured blood, sweat and tears into and came away from feeling yes, this is one of the best things I've ever written, and you'll inevitably barely register a blip on the graphs. On the flip side, write something controversial or angry — preferably with plenty of finger-pointing — and you'll get hundreds, thousands of hits. But are they the kind of people you want to be attracting to what you're writing?
In the case of a commercial site, it doesn't actually matter all that much; in the case of the biggest sites like IGN, the comments section moves so quickly with all the commenters' vapid nonsense that there's no time for anyone to be able to fixate on the actual people who have been reading it in most cases — unless, of course, it becomes clear that the community at large has an opinion contrary to that of the writer, in which case it usually degenerates into a battle of snark via Twitter within hours of publication. But even on smaller sites, comments sections are easily ignored; ultimately, it is those traffic figures that are totted up at the end of each week to determine how "well" things are going — the theory runs that if you lure people in with more "clickbaity" stuff, they will hopefully enjoy it and stick around to click through to some other, less controversial but much better pieces. It doesn't necessarily work like that, sadly: bounce rates are high, and tricky to "fix", particularly if you contemplate how your own personal browsing habits tend to go.
In the case of a personal site like this one, however, it very much does matter who you're attracting to read the things you've written. I have a small group of semi-regular to regular commenters on this site, all of whom I've gotten to know and come to regard as friends. When someone new shows up, their first comment is important; it determines whether or not I actually want to engage with them, or whether I never want to speak to them ever again. It's nice when the former happens; when the latter happens, however — something which is seemingly exponentially more likely on a high-traffic day — it can be anything from mildly annoying to actually quite scary, particularly for someone with anxiety issues around certain social situations.
It's for this reason that I've come to dread the WordPress notification that reads "Your stats are booming!" because it means that, for whatever reason, lots of people have come to my site and are doubtless just itching to leave a comment on something and tell me how much I'm wrong. (The side effect of the aforementioned anxiety is that one negative comment counts for about 20 positive comments, making it very hard to get a nice, calming balance, and making me very anxious and nervous about the possibility of arguments, even over the smallest of things.) Today was one of those days: something I wrote a little while back — something which I stand by, but am also keen to put behind me now my life is moving forwards — got linked a whole lot. Judging by my stat reports, it seems it was linked from Twitter, Reddit and a few other places and, at the time of writing, has produced my "best" traffic day for a very long time.
I can't say I'm particularly happy about that, though, because all it means is that I've written something contentious that I anticipate those who agree will stay quite and maybe give a Like, while those who disagree will jump in the comments and yell at me. (The comments on the aforementioned piece are now closed, so this makes prospective yellers' lives at least a little bit more difficult, which is something.)
Since ditching the hustle and bustle of social media, with its constant pursuit of validation through Likes and Comments, I've become much more content to simply continue along on my way without interference from wider society. And while you may point your finger at me and say that I'm just trying to live in a bubble or an echo chamber, to that I simply say so what? We don't need to open everything we say and do up to public scrutiny, and just because you publish something online for family and friends to read doesn't mean that you particualrly want it shared with the wider world.
It's a fact of life, however, that with this modern, connected world, if you publish anything online, whatever it is, you open yourself up to it being shared more widely, possibly well outside of your own safe place, and consequently run the risk of attracting… undesirables, shall we say. And that sort of thing is starting to make me increasingly uncomfortable — particularly after I've been the victim of an organised Twitter harassment campaign in the past; something I'm really not keen to repeat in any shape or form through any online medium.
Oh, don't worry, this blog isn't going anywhere; personally speaking, it's been a valuable outlet and almost a form of "therapy" for me over the course of the last four and a bit years, so I can't seem myself giving it up any time soon. I would, however, ask anyone reading any post on this site and contemplating sharing it or leaving a comment to take a step back for a moment and think about the person behind the words: a 33-year old dude who is just now finally starting to get his life moving in a vaguely normal direction after numerous years of upheaval, disappointment, upset, anger and chaos; a 33-year old dude who, after 4+ years of working "on the Internet" is now keen to have a bit of a quiet life. I'm not saying don't share; I'm not saying don't comment; I'm not sure what I am saying, really, if I'm perfectly honest: just please take what I've said above into account. That's all I ask.
I find Internet culture endlessly fascinating and, at times, more than a little terrifying.
As the years have passed, the Internet has undergone continuous improvement for the most part. It's now one of the most — if not the most — democratic media in the world, for better or worse, allowing pretty much anyone around the world to speak their brains on pretty much any subject they'd care to share with anyone who wants to listen. (This blog is, of course, a prime example of this in action; I'm still frankly bewildered anyone reads this at all.)
Just slightly over two years ago (really quite surprisingly close, now I look at the dates), I pondered the subject of how 
It is traffic that drives the modern Web, whether we're talking about a commercial site or a personal social media page, but I'm gradually coming to regard the relentless pursuit of this easily measurable but sometimes quite misleading metric as something I'm keen to step as far away from as possible.