1766: Time for the Bullying to Stop

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.

When you have Boris fucking Johnson calling you out on your bullshit, you should probably rein it in a bit:

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.

1078: Things I Hope We See the Back of in 2013

As I noted yesterday, 2012 was a reasonable year, if a relatively unremarkable one. However, it did play host to a number of trends that really, really need to fuck the fuck off. Here is a selection of my picks for things that I would very much like to not see any more next year.

Gangnam Style

LOOK! LOOK AT THE FUNNY KOREAN MAN! HE DANCING! HAHAHAHAHA

No. Fuck off. When your “viral sensation” gets performed on X-Factor, you know it has officially jumped the shark.

The phrase “jumped the shark”

I can remember it now, but I originally had to look this up five or six times before I could actually remember what it meant. It is a Happy Days reference, for heaven’s sake. Is there not something a bit more, you know, timely you could refer to? Or perhaps just say what you mean? Speaking of which…

Using the term “nice guy” to mean “creep”

I have ranted at length on this subject before so I will spare you that this time and simply say that by doing this you are simply perpetuating the stereotype that people who describe themselves as “nice guys” are creeps and rapists-in-training. Some of them are creeps, to be sure, but some of them are simply shy people with poor social skills. I count myself in the latter category, and have referred to myself as a “nice guy” in the past, and now feel hideously guilty about that. So quit tarring everyone with the same brush and find a new term to describe creepy guys who make women feel uncomfortable, regardless of what they call themselves. I suggest “creepy guys who make women feel uncomfortable” or perhaps just, you know, “creeps”. Capitalising Nice Guy or adding a ™ is not an acceptable way of creating a new term.

Reducing complex sociological issues to binary debates

This is apparent when you look at a number of different issues in today’s sociological climate, but it’s particularly evident any time someone starts talking about sexism and/or feminism. If you’re not in support of the most vocal, outspoken, ranty people who are standing up against sexism, you’re a misogynist. If you are someone who speaks out against sexism, regardless of whether or not you’re being obnoxious in your arguing techniques, you’re a “feminazi”. If you try and have a reasoned, rational debate on this subject, you’re “part of the problem”. There are no shades of grey here.

(Clarification that I am annoyed I feel obliged to include: My beliefs: sexism is bad, regardless of who it is directed towards. Women are awesome. Men are equally awesome. If the world learned this and treated people accordingly, it would be a much nicer place. Yelling incoherently at people is not the same as re-educating them.)

“dot TXT” Twitter accounts

NaNoWriMo participants, fanfic authors and bloggers are all pretty brave to put their work out there for public scrutiny, so how do you think they might feel about having extracts of things they have written or said quoted out of context, posted to Twitter and then retweeted to all and sundry? Yeah. Cut that shit out. On the subject…

Public shaming

Twitter users like “@fart” spend an awful lot of time trawling the social network for examples of things like “ungrateful teens” at Christmas, retweeting what is apparently their most offensive tweet and then, as a bit of frantic backpedaling, encouraging their followers not to harass these people. (I’m aware @fart isn’t the only one, but he’s certainly one of the most well-known.) Sites like BuzzFeed then collect together these tweets and post them as evidence of “first world problems” and other such bullshit. An example was here, but it has since been removed by the author, perhaps partly as a result of this article on Slate.

Public shaming of people for things like this is a horrible way to behave that makes you little more than a bully — especially in cases such as this, where we see that all is not necessarily as it first appears. Call people out if they are genuinely being publicly offensive, sure, but don’t hold them up for ridicule.

Tumblr

Back in 2008, I posted this short entry in which I lamented the fact I didn’t really know what Tumblr was for or why anyone would want to use it. Now I know: it’s for telling the world how awful white people, men, and white men are. The second a white person says something stupid, you can count on there being a Tumblr for it within a matter of minutes, which runs whatever “joke” there was well and truly into the ground, often setting world records for how quickly it can make grumpy people like me want to set fire to anyone who makes such a reference.

White straight cis male guilt

Much of the above leads to white straight cis male guilt. (If you don’t know what “cis” means, it is an abbreviation of “cisgender”, which is where an individual’s self-perceived gender matches their sex, and the opposite of “transgender”. I had to look it up, despite the number of people who are now using it regularly, often in an attempt to make themselves look super-socially aware.) Being a white straight cis male is not anything to be ashamed of, but from the number of people who preface pieces of work by seemingly apologising for being the person they are, you’d think it was the worst thing in the world. The white straight cis male viewpoint is just as valid as the black gay transgender female perspective, and nothing to feel guilty about.

The only thing you should feel guilty about is not giving viewpoints other than your own the time of day, regardless of your ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, sex and any other factors. You can give respect to viewpoints other than your own without diminishing the relevance of your own contributions.

Variations on that Keep Calm and Carry On poster

If I never have to see an “amusing” poster that says “Keep Calm and [something that isn’t Carry On]” again in 2013 and beyond, I will be happy. Indeed, if I never see a piece of merchandise that has the original “Keep Calm and Carry On” slogan on it again in 2013 and beyond, I will be happy. For those who were unaware, the original poster was put out in very limited quantities in 1939 to raise the morale of the British public in the face of the rise of the Nazis, and was subsequently rediscovered in 2000, at which point it exploded and was everyfuckingwhere. Ironically, the reaction on seeing a “Keep Calm and Carry On” poster is now a crushing sense of distress at the state of the modern world rather than a feeling of increased morale.

Data limits

We’re living in the future. We really are. We carry around gizmos in our pocket that are straight out of Star Trek, and yet our usage of them is artificially limited by mobile phone companies’ desire to squeeze as much money out of us as possible. That didn’t happen in Star Trek.

Negativity towards new tech

The new consoles that have been released recently — 3DS, Vita and Wii U — were all met with negativity upon their initial release. The situation with 3DS has improved somewhat, but Vita is still struggling a bit, and it’s too early to say with Wii U so far. These are all great bits of kit that, in many cases, don’t deserve the beatdowns they get. In 2013 I’d like to see a much greater focus on the things that these systems do well, and things that people who have bought one can appreciate, rather than endless Why Not To Buy One pieces.

Sales figures being equated to whether something is any good or not

People don’t like buying stuff that isn’t selling (see: Vita) but this doesn’t mean that those things aren’t actually any good. The Vita (sorry to keep harping on about it, but it’s a good example) is a gorgeous piece of kit, but people are ignoring this arguably more important fact because its sales figures aren’t very good.

Fact: pretty much everything I’ve enjoyed this year has been a “niche” title that hasn’t been designed to sell in massive quantities. Not everything has to be a blockbuster.

Unnecessary mobile social networking apps

If you’re considering seeking funding for a new mobile app that “lets you Like anything!” or is yet another Instagram ripoff then just stop. Now. No-one is going to use your product for more than five minutes. Before you design your app consider whether or not the world really needs it or would at least find it somehow beneficial. If the answer to either of those questions is “no”, then reconsider what you are doing.

Blind reposting

This has been a particular issue on Facebook this year. People see something that they think is amazing (like that supposed Morgan Freeman quote on the school shooting) and then blindly reshare it to their Facebook friends without checking to see whether or not it’s actually true. It subsequently spreads and spreads and spreads, because very few people along the way bother to fact-check it. When someone does fact-check it, discovers it to be bollocks and says so, they are often lambasted. “It does no harm,” people will say. “It’s a nice quote, does it matter who said it?”

Well, perhaps not in the case of a thought-provoking quote misattributed to Morgan Freeman, but when you see the massive virality of scaremongering posts accusing, say, Red Bull of containing a chemical that causes brain tumours, that’s when you can hopefully start to see where the problem lies.

Let me introduce you to Snopes.com. If something sounds suspiciously like bollocks, it probably is, so check it out on Snopes.

____

I could go on but I’ve already written nearly 1,500 words so far. I think if all of the above just went and vanished in time for the new year, I’d be happy for maybe a few days at least. Then something new will undoubtedly come along to irritate me, and I can write another post like this on December 31, 2013. See you then.

(Actually, I’ll see you tomorrow, but you know.)

Oh, and happy new year for later, I guess.

#oneaday, Day 299: The Internet Hits Me… But It Loves Me

The Internet is, as I’ve said a number of times on this blog, a fabulous invention. I certainly wouldn’t be without it and the friends I’ve found because of it, the things I’ve learned from it, and all manner of other good stuff.

Paul Chambers, he of the #TwitterJokeTrial, certainly wouldn’t be without it either. Because today has been a pretty remarkable demonstration of solidarity and support for him, with huge proportions of Twitter reposting his original “menacing” tweet in full, coupled with the hashtag “#IAmSpartacus”. The story even made The Guardian earlier. The principle behind the thing, if you haven’t worked it out for yourself anyway, is that if everyone was posting the exact same thing that Chambers posted and was not, in fact, getting arrested for it, then clearly his conviction and the failure of his appeal is utter nonsense.

And so far, there have been no reports of anyone getting a friendly knock on the door from their local bobby. Which is good.

It was actually quite heartwarming to see Twitter—a community of, essentially, strangers—coming together to show an enormous amount of unified support for someone who is still technically a stranger to most of us. The vast majority of people posting the #IAmSpartacus tweets don’t know Chambers personally. But they understand what his plight represents—a pretty serious threat to not only free speech, but the British sense of humour as well. Whatever will be the eventual conclusion to the whole fiasco is still shrouded in mystery. But in the meantime, Chambers is doubtless sleeping a little easier at night knowing that to many people, he’s a hero of sorts.

So that’s all very nice, and one of many examples of how The Internet is clearly a Force for Good. (Of course, some might, at this stage, point out that if there was no Internet Chambers wouldn’t have got into this situation in the first place, but let’s just leave that argument to one side for a moment, shall we?)

And then we get this:

Source

Good old 4Chan, cesspool of the Internet, originator of some of the funniest and/or most irritating (depending on your outlook) memes to do the rounds on the Web. There they are, genuinely proposing to flood Tumblr with gore, porn, child pornography and “the worst [they] can offer”, which probably means “all of the above”.

Now granted, Tumblr is a bit of a hipster hangout that is full of people who do nothing but post pretentious photographs, “inspirational” quotes and tame pornography. But there are also plenty of people out there who use it as their blogging platform of choice. With good reason—it’s a simple system for sharing text, photos, video and audio that is mobile-friendly. There’s no extraneous features or plugins to worry about, it’s just type, post, go. Couple that with the built-in community features and, to some, it’s like an extended Twitter with no character limits. Not just for hipsters, see.

Whether 4Chan will actually go through with their threat or not is kind of beside the point. The fact that the possibility of such a campaign was even considered is the thing which makes me want to invest in an expansive hammer collection. According to Urlesque, earlier today there wasn’t a huge amount of traction for the plan. Which is kind of encouraging, I guess, but it still sucks that there are a bunch of a-holes out there who feel the need to wave their e-peen around at every opportunity.

Whoever came up with the campaign seems genuinely affronted that Tumblr, as a community, is trying to “imitate” 4Chan. Now, there are many things to aspire to in life. But to aspire to being 4Chan is not something that most people would say with pride. And it’s pretty likely that a considerable proportion of Tumblr’s users aren’t even aware of what 4Chan is in the first place. So the particular “Anonymous” who has his (you know it’s a “he”, and likely a “he” who has never known the touch of a woman/man, depending on preference) panties in a bunch over Tumblr’s “imitation” of 4Chan is clearly just looking for an excuse to wipe his dick on everybody’s curtains.

Still, as ever, it comes back to the Greater Internet Dickwad Theory, which I’ve posted links to on this blog more times than I care to remember. I guess once more can’t hurt.

Basically, Internet, you’re capable of showing the very best and/or worst the human race has to offer at a moment’s notice. So it should hopefully go without saying by now that the words you should live your life by are very simple: always follow Wheaton’s Law.

Don’t be a dick.

#oneaday, Day 91: Hipstamatic-o-matic

It’s been a while since a photo post, so I thought I’d treat you all to one. (As if you care.)

Now, we all know that mobile phone cameras are crap. Put that hand down. All mobile phone cameras are crap. You can have all the megapixies in the world painting the little pictures inside your camera, but if you have a lens the size of a pin head and a sensor to match, you’re going to get crap pictures. You might get slightly bigger crap pictures, but still crap pictures. You may well have a flash, which means you can take crap pictures in the dark. But they are still crap pictures. If you want to take good pictures, buy a proper camera and stop pissing about with phones.

With this in mind, some enterprising young individuals have created the Hipstamatic app for the legendarily-crap iPhone camera, promoting it with the tagline “Digital photography never looked so analog”. The app simulates the titular 80s camera, complete with a selection of virtual lenses, films and flashes available for use. A few are included with the app, and others are sold via microtransaction within the app itself – though a friend discovered that by using the “shake to randomise” feature, you can actually make use of the premium equipment without having to pay for it. Sometimes it takes a bit of shaking to get the effect you want, though.

Anyway, the fact that the app is deliberately trying to simulate a thirty-year old camera means that the normally-crap cameras of mobile phones can be put to good use for once. Namely, rather than being in denial over the fact the iPhone camera is crap, the app embraces its crapness to produce a selection of stylised shots, most of which are way too dark, or overexposed, or coloured completely wrong, or have burnt edges, or too much vignetting, or… You get the idea. It basically gives you the opportunity to create the sort of pictures you see all the time on Tumblr at the touch of a button.

With that in mind, I went out for a little walk in the glorious sunshine today and ended up spending an hour taking pretentious photos of absolutely nothing of note whatsoever. But, should you be interested in the results of this clever little app, take a look at the gallery below:

There’s more info on the Hipstamatic app here, and it’s currently available from the App Store for the very reasonable price of one-pound-somethingorother.

Communication, mmm-mm-mmmm

Back in primary school, we used to have to sing songs in Assembly every morning. Then on Thursday mornings, we’d have “Hymn Practice” instead of Assembly, which in most cases was simply an Assembly by a different name. And then there was the one afternoon a week where the music teacher (who was also my piano teacher at the time) would come into the school and make us sing even more, using material from the BBC’s Singing Together radio programme and companion songbooks.

One of the awful songs that has inexplicably stuck in my head ever since those dark, song-filled times ran thus:

Communication, mmm-mm-mmm,
Communication, mmm-mm-mmm,
Way back long ago men sent messages
Beating out rhythms on drums and bones

I remember the rest of the tune, but not the words. It was one of those songs that parents like to describe as “funky” when in fact, due to the fact it’s performed by tone-deaf primary school students accompanied by a miserable pianist on an out-of-tune piano, is anything but.

This is a roundabout way of introducing the topic I feel like talking about today which is, oddly enough, communication (mmm-mm-mmm). I apologise, but if you’re reading this post, you’ve probably indulged my flights into the bizarre in the past.

There’s been a lot of attention on sites such as Twitter recently, and particularly, it seems, in the last month or so. Ever since Stephen Fry happened to mention it on the Jonathan Ross show here in the UK, people in my group of “real-life” friends have been signing up to it like crazy. This is a big thing, because many Internet “fads” often pass by the UK, the general (i.e. non-geek) population here being afflicted by a sort of general malaise and apathy that causes them to denounce anything where you have to do something that could be remotely considered as “work” (i.e. something where you have to use your brain or, God forbid, write something) to be a Bad Thing.

To give you an idea of how this has gone, let me paint you a little picture. I have been using Twitter for some time now as a means of communicating with my friends in the Squadron of Shame, who are mostly based in the US and Canada. It’s been great for that, but it’s also been great as a means of “stress relief” – a place to post those thoughts you don’t really want to say out loud but you kind of want people to “hear”, if you catch my meaning. I often refer to it as a means of externalising your own inner monologue, and for many people it is. Of course, blogs also carry that function for many people, but the immediacy of Twitter, coupled with the fact you are limited in how much you can say, makes it an attractive option for “microblogging”, its originally intended purpose.

Now, as I say, I’ve been using it for some time both as a means of communicating with other people and venting my own frustrations, of which there are many, as you’ve probably seen. My friends here in the UK often wondered why on earth I was bothering with such a simple website when places like Facebook offered far more in the way of options, applications and other fluff – particularly when Facebook offers its own system for microblogging through its status update system. But the fact is, the simplicity of Twitter is the attractive thing about it. Facebook is full of fluff, and has been growing more fluff as time goes on, as have other sites like it. Now, much more than simply being able to post messages to that hot girl you fancy at college, or trying to avoid exes, Facebook markets itself as a “platform” for the interminable flow of applications that clutter up everyone’s profiles and get in the way of the original purpose – communicating.

Twitter does no such thing. Twitter gives you a box to type in what you’re doing, and a list of other people’s answers to the same query. Nothing more. And as a result, the communication involved is much better. If you want to ask someone something, you ask them. There’s no wading through their Tetris high scores, no comparing people and choosing who is “the most punctual” (thanks for voting for me on that one, you obviously don’t know me THAT well) and no looking at daily LOLcats. Simple and clear.

There’s a time and a place for these different types of communication, of course, but it was just interesting to me that it took a celebrity endorsement for people in this country to pay attention to something as simple as Twitter, while the glitz and flash of Facebook, MySpace and Bebo sweep through the lands like a plague.

With this in mind, over the last few months I’ve been exploring different alternatives for communicating on the web. With the ubiquity of the Internet these days, you’re never very far from some means of talking to another person – be that in real-time via instant messaging services or in a more “when you feel like it” manner via services like Twitter, Facebook and message boards. There’s an interesting variety of different approaches.

First, of course, is the humble blog. You’re reading this, and presumably you’ve got this far otherwise you wouldn’t know I’d said “presumably you’ve got this far”. Why are you reading this? It could be one of several reasons. It could be because you want to get to know me better, it could be because you’re nosey, it could be because you’re interested in the things I talk about (though I defy anyone to pin a single “topic” on this blog) or it could simply because you like the way I write. How did you find me? Chances are, in my experience, that you found this place either because I told you, or because you clicked on a link in one of my other friends’ sites. How you got here doesn’t matter. If you’re reading this, you’re effectively allowing me to talk at you for several minutes before I pause, look around the room at the people who have been listening intently (and ignoring the people who wandered off to look at porn several paragraphs ago) and invite questions and comments in the… um… comments. Blogs can be good starting points for discussions, but they’re inherently one-sided – the blog’s writer has most of the power, and commenters have a more “subservient” role, if anything. That’s not a bad reflection on any of you thinking about commenting, before you say anything – it’s simply the way the medium works.

I find a blog to be a great way of getting complicated thoughts or opinions out of my head in a way I (and hopefully other people) can understand – when expressing myself verbally rather than through text, I often find that social anxiety takes over and I get tongue-tied. Here, though, I can consider what I say before I say it, and then invite questions or opinions after the fact.

Next up, I’ve been exploring Tumblr. Tumblr is a strange one, somewhere halfway between Twitter and a blog in its execution. Different people use Tumblr for different things. For the self-confessed lazy blogger, it makes a solid, easy-to-use foundation for blogging in the manner I discussed above. For others, such as myself, it becomes a sort of digital scrapbook, a receptacle for all the random noise floating around your head or pictures of cats that you see on the Internet that you don’t want to clog up your Twitter stream with constantly.

For others still, it becomes a means of communication, though in a completely different manner to something like Twitter. Tumblr’s communication centres around the idea of “reblogging” – taking something that someone else posted, posting it on your own page and adding your own take on it. This is something that tends not to happen with blogs like this one – either because they’re too content-rich, too long or simply out of respect for the person who wrote it in the first place. After all, if you want to comment, there’s a comments box right at the bottom. Not so on Tumblr, however – because posts tend to be short and snappy – a quote, an excerpt from conversation, a photo – it’s easier to reblog them, comment on them and thereby expose them to more and more people. In that sense, Tumblr is very much a viral marketer’s dream. Post something cool once and if someone reblogs it, then someone else reblogs it, then someone else… each time it gets more and more views and is accessible to a wider and wider audience.

Take this awesome picture of Darth Vader, originally from the Wired blog, apparently. By the time I came across it, fairly randomly, I might add, it had already been through about ten people. Currently, there are 134 “notes” on the image, which means it’s either been tagged as “liked” or “reblogged” by 134 people. Similarly, take the Microsoft Songsmith stuff. There’s absolutely no denying that Songsmith is a work of great evil, but I bet you know what I’m talking about without me having to post a link. Viral marketing at work. Sort of.

Then there’s more “active” means of communication. I have had a long-time fascination with virtual world Second Life, it still representing a fairly unique branching-off from the typical massively-multiplayer scenario in that there are no goals, no scores, no experience points, no set content – pretty much everything – buildings, objects, scripting that makes objects work, bits of interface, even avatar clothing, hair and body parts – is created by the “players”. This is a spectacular achievement, when you think about it, and whatever you may feel about Second Life and the people who enjoy it, there’s absolutely no denying that it’s an impressive means of communication and expression. It is very much its own world with its own rules and conventions, and it’s an interesting place to spend some time, even if you don’t plan on staying. Just to confuse matters, I started a Tumblelog about my Second Life experiences here, and microblog about it on yet another site called Plurk, which feeds to a Twitter feed, which… you get the idea.

There are a million and one other sites I could talk about on this note but I feel I have carried on for far too long already. The point of this post is simply to celebrate the possibilities for communication that the Internet offers. It’s easy to forget – or at least take for granted – the fact that simply by sitting down in front of our computer, we can easily talk to and interact with people from all over the world. Let’s never forget how awesome that is.

An Open Question

Okay. So I set up a site at Tumblr – here it is – and you’ll also notice it’s now sitting happily in the RSS feeds in your sidebar to the right.

Someone with some Internet savvy about them explain to me the difference between a Tumblog and this monstrosity you’re reading right now? So far as I can make out, I can use Twitter to post random short crap or snarky comments about people in ill-taste, ill-fitting T-shirts, Tumblr to post links, videos and slightly longer “minute-by-minute” crap and this place to post long, pretentious ranty crap.

All in all, it’s a lot of crap. And yet for some inexplicable reason, people keep reading it. And for that, I thank you heartily. 🙂

That sound about right?