1888: Put the Phone Down

I’m coming to detest my phone, not necessarily for what it is, but for what it’s done to me.

I don’t specifically mean my actual phone, either; more the general concept of smartphones and the “always-connected” nature of modern existence.

I don’t even specifically object to the “always-online” nature of modern society, more the habits — or, more accurately, compulsions — that it tends to instill in people. I’ve become very conscious of my own compulsions in this regard recently, and I’m making an effort to try and change my habits.

Here’s the problem for me: picking up a phone and fiddling with it (usually checking Twitter and/or Reddit) has become a default thing to do if no better activity is available. Phones are great for that; with the wide variety of apps available these days, there’s something sure to distract and entertain even the most attention-deficient individual, even if only for a few seconds. That “even if only for a few seconds” thing can become a problem, though; the fact a phone can fill an empty few seconds easily means that it’s easy to reach for it while you’re in the middle of something else, breaking your concentration and perhaps immersion.

I became particularly conscious of it while I was playing Criminal Girls the other day. (Side note: I’ve now completely finished that, so expect a comprehensive writeup on MoeGamer very soon.) I noticed that even mid-battle, I was reaching for my phone and fiddling with it while animations were playing, or sometimes between turns. There was no good reason for it, either; I wasn’t particularly interested in what Twitter had to say at that moment, and I was genuinely enjoying the game. It was just a nigh-uncontrollable compulsion to reach for it and look at it.

It happens in the night sometimes, too. I can’t get to sleep, so I pick up the phone and look at whatever vapid nonsense social media is spewing at any given hour. There’s rarely anything meaningful — although there’s occasionally an enjoyable late-night conversation with some of my friends in other timezones — and it doesn’t really have any value; it certainly doesn’t help me get to sleep when I find myself mindlessly refreshing for minutes at a time instead of putting the damn thing down, closing my eyes and trying to disconnect from the stimuli of the outside world.

So I’m trying to stop myself from doing these things. When I’m sitting down to play a game, unless I’m specifically intending on “liveblogging” my experiences as I play, I’ve started putting my phone out of reach or, at the very least, covering it over so I can’t see the notification light and screen. When I go to bed, I’ve started switching my phone off altogether rather than just leaving it in standby mode. And while a phone is a convenient thing to fiddle with to stave off social anxiety when dealing with other people face-to-face, I’m going to try and make an effort to keep it in my pocket unless it becomes clear that I really am surplus to requirements in a particular social situation. (Not necessarily in a negative way; I may just be along for the ride while others are discussing making arrangements for something or other that doesn’t directly involve me, for example.)

I feel like smartphones have done serious damage to our collective concentration spans over the last few years. And I’m quite keen to get mine back.

1883: Social Justice, Public Shaming and Why I Want My Friends Back

I’m probably going to upset a few people with this post, but this is something that has been festering inside me for quite some time; something that I need to release by talking about it. I hope doing so will help me feel a little better, as well as make the people who care about me aware of the way certain increasingly prevalent attitudes in popular culture make me — and, I’m sure, others like me — feel.

I’ll kick off with an immediately contentious statement: I completely understand why the term “social justice warrior” is used as a pejorative.

I will immediately qualify this by saying that I do not think the concept of social justice is unimportant, nor that it is something that should be swept under the carpet and ignored. There are still problems with attitudes towards marginalised groups in society. There are still groups out there whose sole reason for existence is an irrational, burning hatred of certain people. There are subsets of passionate fans in all interest groups — be it video games, sports, movies, books, anything — who do not have a positive influence on the community as a whole.

However, I believe that for the most part, human beings are fundamentally decent people. I’ve met my share of assholes, sure, and seen evidence of people being mistreated, insulted and even threatened online — although, on that note, I will also say that we’re collectively a little hasty to jump to the descriptor “death threat” when it isn’t always particularly accurate. But I’ve also met enough decent people in my time in this world and on the Internet to find it difficult to believe that the world is the seething morass of hatred and prejudice that the most passionate advocates of social justice — the aforementioned “social justice warriors” — believe it is.

Let me clarify my earlier statement. The term “social justice warrior”, as I see it — and as many others see it, too — does not simply apply to anyone who believes in social justice, otherwise there would be no need for it; it would simply be a means of describing pretty much everyone who isn’t an asshole. Rather, it describes, as noted above, a particularly passionate and outspoken advocate for social justice — and someone who is not above using particularly unpleasant tactics to try and get their point across. Tactics like public shaming; insulting; “othering”; discrimination; ignoring opinions based on socioeconomic, ethnic, gender or sexuality groups; dogpiling… the list goes on, and, you’ll notice, these are all things that anyone who truly stands for social justice should really be against the use of, regardless of who they’re aimed at. A “social justice warrior” would discount my opinion on all this, for example, because I’m a white, straight, heterosexual, cissexual male: the very definition of the concept of “male privilege” that many of them cling to so very desperately.

Why is this a problem, though? It’s easy enough to ignore and filter out other bile-spewing groups based on hatred — when was the last time you accidentally stumbled across neo-Nazi ravings without deliberately going looking for them, for example? — so why not just tune out these people? Well, the answer to that is simple: unlike other hate-spewing groups, these loudmouths are increasingly infiltrating mainstream popular culture having positioned their approach as being “correct” from a moral perspective. My experience of them has largely been in the video games sector, but from what I understand, they’ve had a fair crack at numerous other communities over the last few years, too.

Let me explain why they bother me so much, and hopefully, my dislike of their tactics will become a little clearer.

A few years back, a games journo friend of mine — Jeff Grubb of GamesBeat — wrote a news story. I forget the exact details of the story (and can’t seem to find the original since GamesBeat’s numerous refreshes over the last few years), but it involved, as I recall, Twisted Metal creator David Jaffe making some contentious statements that involved the hypothetical punching of a woman in the face. Jaffe wasn’t advocating for violence against women, of course; doing something like that directly would be tantamount to career suicide; if I remember correctly, the context was something to do with playing multiplayer games and reactions to winning and losing. The details of the story itself are somewhat unimportant, anyway; what I’m really concerned with here is the reaction to it.

Jeff wrote the piece on Jaffe’s statements from a factual perspective — as a reporter, without editorialising. Different publications approach this sort of thing in different ways: more blog-style sites like Kotaku have no problem with their authors saying exactly what they think about a particular issue, whereas GamesBeat’s parent site VentureBeat is more of a business-centric publication that is less concerned with drama and more with simply reporting what has been going on.

Because Jeff didn’t condemn Jaffe’s statements in the article, however, he attracted the ire of an early incarnation of the “social justice warriors”. The situation became worse as he attempted to defend himself on Twitter; as time passed, more and more people, including high-profile games journalists with large followings, started attacking him — rather than Jaffe, who arguably should have been the subject of their ire, though even that’s debatable, given what I recall of the context surrounding his comments — and publicly shaming him, denouncing him as an “example of white male privilege” and effectively setting hordes of followers on him. I became seriously worried for his safety and wellbeing while this was going on.

This wasn’t an isolated incident, either. Numerous times over the last few years we’ve seen outspoken members of the industry with social justice leanings adopt the tactic of publicly shaming and bullying, even going so far as to threaten people with ending their career. Most recently, we’ve seen Polygon’s Ben Kuchera attacking a member of EA’s customer engagement team over the latter’s concern over community-made Twitter “blacklists”; in previous months we’ve seen the widely celebrated writer Leigh Alexander threatening to end people’s careers, feminist critic Mattie Brice throwing a hissy fit when someone called her out on a sexist joke and all manner of other atrocious behaviour. It simply isn’t acceptable.

All this isn’t to say that these people can’t voice their concerns. What I do find myself violently disliking about this culture of public shaming that has been growing over the last few years, however, is that there’s little to no “right of reply” in most cases. Once someone is branded as a misogynist, sexist, transphobe, racist or whatever by these self-appointed crusaders of morality, there’s no recovery from it. They have no opportunity to say “well, hang on a minute, here’s why you’re not quite right there…” and no opportunity to criticise the arguments being levelled against them. More often than not, critics of Kuchera, Alexander et al are swiftly blocked, silenced and/or mocked, simply because the “social justice warrior” position has been successfully positioned as the “correct” attitude. The same thing happens when anyone attempts to start a conversation surrounding feminist critic Anita Sarkeesian’s Tropes vs Women video series; while she does attract plenty of hate-filled bile — and that, let’s be clear, is always unacceptable — she and her team appear unwilling to engage with or discuss legitimate criticisms of her work, and often post deliberately provocative statements seemingly with the sole intention of drawing the trolls out to point and laugh at them.

Now, I’ve been standing on the sidelines throughout all of this. I have, thankfully, never been attacked by these people, even when I was working in the mainstream games press on GamePro and USgamer, even when I was writing about notoriously provocative and controversial games such as Senran Kagura and other titles from Japan. Perhaps I was just too small fry for industry “megaphones” (as Alexander calls herself) to bother with, and I’m not complaining; the fact I made a point of remaining positive while acknowledging these titles weren’t for everyone helped me build up a decent audience who appreciated the work I did, particularly as it was in stark contrast to the majority of other sites out there.

So why does all this bother me so much? Well, because it’s deeply, deeply frustrating, and because the culture of fear that these people are perpetuating online makes me very nervous about speaking on certain topics for fear of being ostracised. More important than that, however, is the feeling that it’s driven a wedge between me and a number of friends whom I no longer feel particularly comfortable talking to because I know they’ve drifted more towards the social justice side of the fence — or, in some cases, become outright zealots. I miss those friends greatly, and it makes me extremely sad that I can’t talk to them any more simply because I don’t share their ideological viewpoint — or, rather, I do, but I fundamentally disagree with the methods through which they go about expressing that viewpoint.

What should people do instead? Simple. Champion the things that you’re fond of and believe in, without putting down other people for what they enjoy. Diversity isn’t just about creating experiences that “everyone” can enjoy, though that’s part of it. Diversity is also about creating experiences that appeal to specific audiences. There’s nothing wrong with that; in fact, it makes for more interesting, more focused pieces of entertainment that feel personal and relatable. Cater to men, women, heterosexual people, homosexual people, cissexual people, transgender or transsexual people, white people, black people, Asian people, anyone you like. Accept that some things are not “for” you — though that doesn’t need to stop you from finding enjoyment in them, as the number of otome games I’ve enjoyed over the last few years will attest — and celebrate the things that are. If you believe that there aren’t enough works catering to the groups you consider yourself to fall into, throw your support behind those that do or even make your own. Just, for God’s sake, don’t ever position yourself as The One Correct Attitude and point the finger of shame at anyone who doesn’t fall within your own specific worldview, because that’s where the majority of this nonsense is coming from.

I’m not a misogynist. I’m not a sexist. I’m not a racist. I’m not a transphobe. I’m not even an anti-feminist or a men’s rights advocate. I just want these “social justice warriors” to understand that what they are doing is not, in fact, championing diversity; it’s stifling conversation and creating a culture of mistrust between developers, players and press — and between friends.

I hate it. And I wish it would go away. And I want my friends back.

1774: Last Chance, Twitter

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.

1772: Around the Virtual World

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!

1747: I Still Don’t Care

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.

1736: Traffic Report

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.

1731: The Age of Loneliness

I read an interesting piece on The Guardian earlier regarding “the age of loneliness” killing us bit by bit. And while I feel the piece is, on the whole, doomsaying somewhat, there’s also a lot of truth in there.

I’ve become a lot more conscious of all this since starting my “new life” a little while ago — working a “proper job” with three-dimensional people all around me, ditching most of social media for my own sanity and generally trying to “unplug” a little bit from my utter dependence on the digital realm.

The biggest change has been the opportunity to interact with real people on a daily basis. Sometimes those people are asking me to do things as part of my job, but at other times it’s a simple social interaction where we share things with one another: the problems we had with a retailer; what we had for dinner last night; our pets having various illnesses; what we think of this weather we’ve been having, gosh, it’s been really variable, hasn’t it?

I hadn’t realised how much I’d missed this, but being fully immersed in the digital realm for several years had proven an adequate substitute for human interaction at the time. It wasn’t until towards the end of my time with USgamer that I was starting to feel a little dissatisfied with spending all day every day “on my own” (despite hundreds, possibly thousands of people being on the other end of an email or tweet) and, once I was made redundant, it truly dawned on me that I was indeed living through my own personal “age of loneliness”.

It’s often been said that social media ironically contributes to feelings of loneliness and isolation, and it’s a difficult one to win. Without social media, it can be difficult to feel connected to other people — though there are alternative, more focused solutions for communication that rely less on shouting into the ether and more on more direct interactions. But with social media, despite all these connections to other people, it’s equally easy to feel isolated, too; the constant races for oneupmanship on Facebook and Twitter — the race to be the first to post a pithy comment in response to a tragedy; the race to post the coolest photo of an event; the race to get the most Likes and comments on a passive-aggressive statement — all detract from meaningful social interaction, instead turning communication into a competition. That doesn’t feel especially healthy to me.

Like I say, though, it’s difficult to find that balance. At present, I feel like I’m having a reasonable time of it — I get along well with the people I work with during the day; I spend time with Andie in the evening and, on certain occasions such as tonight, get to spend time with friends — but I do often still find myself wondering if I’m “missing out” on anything by not checking in on Facebook or Twitter. (I actually closed the latter account altogether after the post the other day, which got shared more widely than I intended and consequently attracted ire I didn’t really want to deal with at the time; I haven’t felt the need to reopen it yet, and should I ever decide to return to Twitter I think it will be with a brand new “fresh start” account)

I am not, however, missing that urge to take a photograph of everything that happens in my day and then post it online as if anyone would give a shit about what the sunset looks like from where I’m standing right now (probably quite similar to the sunset from where you’re standing right now) or what my lunch looks like (pretty much like lunch). I find myself longing for the days when things like photographs were more permanent and more meaningful; everything in the digital age feels so utterly disposable, and that’s probably where a lot of the whole loneliness thing stems from: you can be the centre of attention one minute and utterly forgotten about the next. The modern world is fickle indeed.

Anyway. It’s 1am and I’m doing that thing where I ramble only vaguely coherently as I try not to fall asleep in front of my screen. So I think it’s probably time to go and get some sleep; I have a very long day ahead of me tomorrow, so plenty of rest beforehand would probably be a good idea!

1716: Desperately Seeking Information

Something a friend of mine said in an online chat earlier made me think about the way we, humanity, use the Internet on a daily basis — and particularly the role that social media plays in many of our lives.

He said that as human beings, we crave information. It doesn’t matter what that information is, we’re just hungry for it; forever consuming, devouring any input we can get our brains wrapped around, however mundane, stupid or fury-inducing.

After he said this, I took stock of my online existence since leaving Facebook and Twitter behind. I still haven’t looked at the former at all; I’ve peeped at the latter once or twice to see if I had any mentions or direct messages — I didn’t (apart from a share of this post by a dentist who clearly hadn’t read it at all), which, I won’t lie, smarted a bit, but I’ll live.

What I have done, however, is almost immediately replace them with other things. I was always intending to make more active use of the Squadron of Shame forums, for example, but they have become my primary go-to hangout online — which makes their occasional lack of activity a little frustrating. (Come join up and talk in a chin-strokey fashion about games!) But that’s not all I’m doing: instead of relying on what Twitter is talking about for a picture of the day’s news — a practice which tends to give you an inherently biased picture of what is going on, due to the political tendencies of some of Twitter’s most vocal users — I’m specifically seeking out sites like the BBC and the Guardian to read about stories at my own pace. (I still skip over anything that just offers me a video and no text, though; fuck video.)

I am not, however, reading a great deal about video games. This is less about losing interest in them — which my marathon Xillia 2 session this evening will emphatically attest that I am not — and more about feeling there aren’t really any sites out there that speak to (or for) me. I’ve discussed this with a number of people with whom I share similar proclivities, and many of us tend to feel the same way: while the ad-based revenue model for these sites continues to be in place, we’re never going to see the sort of coverage that we’re interested in seeing. Those sites that do try different things — like Polygon with its now-defunct features section, or 1up with its community-driven nature — end up either closing down altogether, or at the very least shedding the things that made them unique and becoming yet another identikit site of daily triple-A and indie darling news churn.

But I digress. The point is, the information void I left when I cut social media out of my life was immediately filled by something else. It’s a compulsion; an uncontrollable urge. As a human being, my brain demands information; it needs input. More input.

I’m not entirely sure if that’s a healthy compulsion, since as I noted above, the 21st-century brain doesn’t appear to be all that selective about what it wants to absorb into itself. Perhaps if the brain craved nothing but new knowledge — information that would allow it to let its host function as a better human being — that might be absolutely fine.

But no. The 21st century brain is interested in menstrual menaces and megachile perihirta (commonly known as the Western leafcutting bee); in cats drinking from squirt bottles and… oh, you get the idea.

The human brain is a mysterious thing. Whatever you may feel about the information you stuff into it on a daily basis, though, I think we can probably all agree that the Internet has had a profound impact on how we perceive, seek out and consume information these days, hmm?

1706: Bug Me and I Leave You

Given the ubiquity of technology these days, there’s a lot more competition between apps and online services than there ever was in the past. This means that all of them have to stoop to increasingly low levels in order to get people to “engage” with them, leading to a situation we’ve simply not had prior to the last few years.

That situation comes in the form of apps and services begging you to use them. It’s obnoxious, obtrusive and, more to the point, makes me disinclined to make use of that app or service ever again. In fact, in most cases, if an app or service begs me to use it or come back, I will simply uninstall it or unsubscribe from their mailing list.

The most egregious example I can think of recently was an app called TuneIn Radio. I was recommended this as a good means of listening to both streaming Internet radio and podcasts, but was dismayed to discover after firing it up just once that it then insisted on reminding me of its own existence at least once a day via a push notification that was usually recommending something I had absolutely no interest in whatsoever. (“Listen to TalkSport!” Oh, how little you know me.) However good the app is, notifications bug me enough at the best of times, so in the bin it went.

I’m still getting email messages from services I had to sign up for when I was reviewing endless reams of shitty mobile-social apps for Inside Mobile Apps, too. Eventually I simply registered for these services with an email address I don’t use any more, and this mitigated the problem somewhat, but there are still times where there are services that I haven’t touched for a year or more feel the need to email me and remind me that they exist.

Worse, when you unsubscribe from these mailing lists you inevitably end up signed up to, you’re often questioned as to why you’d ever want to stop your inbox being cluttered up with this meaningless crap. I had one email the other day from a service called AppData, a ludicrously expensive analytics service that was attached to the Inside Social Games and Inside Mobile Apps sites I used to write for, which asked whether I had unsubscribed “by mistake”. Seriously. Look.

The sheer arrogance of this is absolutely astonishing. “Oh, no, whoops, I unsubscribed from your marketing spam by mistake. I actually do want you to try and sell me things! Sign me back up, quick!” Or, indeed, “oh no, the pointless marketing spam I forwarded on to my friend [who does this?] annoyed them so much that they tried to unsubscribe themselves and instead unsubscribed me! Sign me back up, quick!”

I kind of understand why this happens. As I said at the beginning, the sheer amount of competition between mobile app and online service providers these days is ridiculous, so they have to resort to ever more drastic measures to retain their users, and hopefully convert them into paying customers — or at least people who will click on ads.

I can’t say I feel much sympathy, though. Surely having to resort to this is not a signal that you should market harder. Surely having to resort to this is, instead, a sign that there is far too much pointless, useless crap on the market, and maybe you should try a bit harder to come up with an idea that is actually innovative and helpful to people rather than a rehash of other things people already use? Harsh as it may sound, these days I find myself smiling a little with every email I receive that informs me a pointless, stupid mobile-social service that I reviewed a year or more ago is closing down. I’m glad; there’s too much noise in our lives anyway even with just the well-established services like Twitter and Facebook, so stop adding to it.

1699: A Note to Anyone Following Me on Twitter, Facebook or Google+

Posts that essentially boil down to “I’m Leaving [insert site name here] And Here’s Why You Should Care” are the very worst kind of egocentric narcissism, as most of you probably know. This is because they usually amount to someone attempting to attract attention to themselves flouncing off in a huff after they feel they’ve been slighted, only to return a week/month/year later to repeat the cycle anew. If you’ve had the patience and willpower to follow Fez developer Phil Fish over the last couple of years, you’ll have witnessed this action firsthand.

And yet here I am making a largely similar post, and not for the first time. I shall try and keep the egocentric narcissism to a minimum, however — though I’m making no promises.

This post is about two things: 1) why I don’t intend for Twitter, Facebook and Google+ to be part of my daily routine any more, and 2) how you can reach me if you’d still like to talk to me online — because despite the things I’m going to say under heading 1, I can’t deny that I’ve made a lot of good friends across all three networks over the years, and it would be a shame to abandon that completely.

To begin at the beginning, then. There are a lot of words ahead, but I would appreciate you sticking around to read them — particularly the last section about keeping in touch.

Don't worry, there will be pictures. They'll be irrelevant pictures, but there'll be pictures. — Don’t worry, there will be pictures. They’ll be irrelevant pictures, but there’ll be pictures.

Why I don’t intend for Twitter, Facebook and Google+ to be part of my daily routine

Those of you who have been following this blog recently will know that I decided to subject myself to a voluntary social media blackout this week. Specifically, I logged myself out from Twitter, Facebook and Google+, deleted the relevant apps from my phone, ensured that anything that might bug me with notifications from them was well and truly switched off and finally settled down to a week of peace.

It’s now a week since I started that blackout, and the time at which I decided I was going to review whether or not I needed social media in my life any more. And the conclusion I’ve reached is that I don’t think I do. I opened Twitter earlier today to see how I felt, and felt no urge to scroll down to see if I’d missed anything — I closed it straight away without even scrolling off the first page of tweets. I didn’t even feel the urge to open Facebook or Google+ at all. I have broken the “habit”, it seems, and I don’t feel like I “need” to develop it again.

Because it is a habit. It’s compulsive behaviour — at least it was for me. You may do it yourself without realising it; you reach a quiet moment in the day, and out comes the phone or up comes the web browser, and you do your “rounds” of your social networking sites of choice. You scroll through the reams and reams of content the millions of members of these sites worldwide have made, rarely taking anything in, rarely stopping to appreciate, say, the composition of a photograph on Instagram, or the witty headline that someone came up with for a news story on Facebook. It’s page after page of noise, little of it meaningful, all of it vying for your attention with equal fervour. And yet still around and around and around you go.

Some people deal with this noise better than others. Some people can discipline themselves to set aside a little bit of time to check their networks, then put them aside for hours or even days at a time. That can be a valid strategy, but with the speed at which modern social networks move, if you’re not there when something happens, your contribution to the “discussion” — and I use that term loosely — is likely worthless, since conversation will have moved on by then.

This matter of “discussion” is worthy of consideration, so let’s ponder that a minute.

The approach most people tend to take to discussion online.

One of the things that drove me to start my week-long blackout a couple of days earlier than I intended was the whole #GamerGate thing on Twitter. For those who don’t follow the video games field — or those who simply aren’t on Twitter — in simple terms, this was an argument between video game journalists (particularly those who err on the “feminist” side of the sociopolitical spectrum) and those who self-identify as “gamers”, i.e. people who play, enjoy and are passionate about video games and would rather not be told they’re awful people whenever possible.

I don’t really want to get into the details of the events surrounding #GamerGate as that would be long, tedious and, more to the point, has already been summed up in a great amount of detail elsewhere on the Internet. (As always, note that there are two sides to every story — something that both sides on this particular argument have been guilty of forgetting.)

Suffice to say, however, that #GamerGate brought out the very worst in a lot of people. It brought out some of the most unpleasant trolls the Internet had to offer, who, predictably, went after a number of people who — let’s be honest here — often court controversy to make a point. On the other side, those loud-voiced members of the press and their numerous sycophants continued down a path that I’ve been unhappy to see them proceeding down for the last year or two: belittling, ridiculing, publicly shaming and even outright insulting the very people they are supposed to be writing for.

Whatever fair points both sides had — and make no mistake, both sides had fair points — were lost amid the noise, and discussion never got anywhere. It was frustrating to watch; I tended not to participate as much as possible as I learned a while back that any attempts to call for moderation in such matters tended to result in accusations of “tone policing” — which, ironically, is itself a form of deflection attention away from a point being made — rather than genuine attempts to calm down and discuss things like rational adults. And thus nothing was ever resolved.

As I said above, different people deal with different things in different ways. My frustration with these endlessly circular arguments — in which no-one was really listening to anyone else and in which any fair points were inevitably lost in all the blind anger and insults being thrown in both directions — manifested itself as anxiety, stress and depression. I was genuinely afraid to contribute to these discussions for fear of attracting the wrath of one, the other or both of the angry mobs involved. And it was having an effect on my mental health.

If you can take yourself out of a situation that is causing you problems with your mental health and not cause yourself further problems, you should do. So that’s exactly what I did. I extracted myself from the whirling miasma of rage, quietly slipped away for a while to reflect, contemplate and heal — and now, here I am, a week later, with no desire to jump back into the fray.

This isn’t to say that Twitter, Facebook and Google+ are nothing but whirling miasmata of rage and other negative emotions, but frankly, the other stuff there has seemed of little value to me for some time, too. There’s only so many “You Won’t Believe What Happened Next!” videos you can take seeing before you just don’t care What Happened Next; only so many “adorbs” pictures of cute things you can see before you never want to see another squirrel again; only so many baby photos you can scroll past before your only reaction to a friend enjoying a new addition to the family is… well, nothing.

It’s all noise to me, in other words; an overwhelming swathe of constant content; a never-ending stream of consciousness in which meaningful life events are ascribed equal importance to a video of a cat drinking water from a squirt bottle. I don’t need that. I’ve always been one for social anxiety, but right now I’d rather hear important things from the lips of the people involved rather than read it on Facebook or Twitter; I’d rather actually hang out with friends than hope I get more than a couple of “Likes” on the picture of the bag of chips I’m about to eat, or a couple of comments on a post I made about how much I’m enjoying Tales of Xillia 2.

I’m not saying there’s no place for these sites in society at all — clearly a lot of people get great joy, excitement and enjoyment out of them. But for me, their value has dwindled significantly over the last year or two, so it’s starting to make sense to cut them out of my daily routine and instead seek other means of staying in touch with the people I actually care about.

Which brings us neatly on to the second part of this post.

Well done for reading this far. Have a cake.

How to stay in touch with me

I’m not retiring from the Internet altogether. Rather, I’m being more selective with how I communicate and with whom. Consequently, I’m focusing on ways of communicating that allow me to take more control over my online presence, and which are more inherently personal than just shouting into the void of social media.

Note that I’m not closing down my Twitter, Facebook and Google+ accounts — they’ll be used to broadcast these blog posts — but I won’t be actively checking any of them, so please don’t @mention or comment via any of those means if you want a reply from me.

Here are the main ways through which you’ll be able to contact me in future:

This site. I post one blog entry here every single day, and have done for the last 1,699 days. Leaving a comment on my most recent post is a good means of getting a message to me. I’ll try and be better about replying than I have been in the past!
Email. Close friends probably already have my email address. I don’t mind sharing it, but I’m not putting it out in the open on this site. If you’d like to chat via email, you can start a private conversation via the contact form on my About Pete page and, assuming you’re not some sort of crazy stalker, I’ll probably get back to you.
Google Hangouts. For real-time chat, I use Google Hangouts almost exclusively. I don’t do voice and I don’t do video, but text chat is something I’m happy to engage in with you, assuming I know who you are before you just pop up saying “hi” and nothing else. If you don’t already know my Google Hangouts info, drop me a message via the aforementioned contact form.
The Squadron of Shame forum. Most of my “public” conversations — “broadcast-type” messages, I like to think of them as — will now be found over on the Squadron of Shame forum. Although the Squad was originally set up as a small but well-formed group back in the 1up.com days, the modern Squad is very open to new members, with the only requirements for membership being that 1) you’re interested in games, particularly those a little off the beaten track and 2) you’re respectful to other people’s tastes in games, even if they don’t coincide with your own. Come and sign up and say hello, since that forum is where I’ll be spending most of my online “social” time these days.
Final Fantasy XIV. If you happen to play Final Fantasy XIV and find yourself on the Ultros server, look up Amarysse Jerhynsson and say hello.

Thanks for taking the time to read this post; I appreciate it. To those of you that I’ve only interacted with on social media in the past: I’m sorry to leave you behind just as, in some cases, we’re starting to get to know one another (I’d like to give particular, specific shoutouts to @FinalMacstorm and @SonyofLastation here, both of whom I’ve very much enjoyed talking to recently) — but I hope you’ll consider staying in touch via one of the means above, and I hope you understand my reasons for wanting to eliminate stressful, anxiety-inducing and unnecessary noise from my personal life. To those of you who are already firm friends beyond the boundaries of social media — well, the same, really; I hope you’ll respect my decision here, and that you’ll stay in touch via other means.

Onwards to a brighter future, then: one largely free of pop-up notifications, pointless arguments and unnecessary stress. I’m looking forward to it very much indeed.