I find Internet culture endlessly fascinating and, at times, more than a little terrifying.
One of the most interesting things about Internet culture is how small it makes the world seem at times. I recall when online connectivity was just starting to become a thing — beyond the old-school world of direct-dial bulletin board systems, that is — and as well as the obnoxious phrase "information superhighway" being coined, a second, lesser-known but rather accurate phrase came into brief usage: "global village".
The concept of the Internet — or, perhaps more accurately, the Web — as a global village is an interesting one, and if you spend some time wandering around online, you'll come to recognise the village's various haunts. There's the village hall that hosts everything from coffee mornings to neo-Nazi rallies (Facebook). There's the pub where everyone is always talking over everyone else and no-one's really listening to one another (Twitter). There's the deceptive village shop that looks small but actually carries a frighteningly comprehensive array of products of all descriptions (Amazon). There's the coffee shop where socialites of all descriptions like to hang out and have in-depth discussions about everything from literature to their sexual conquests (Reddit). And there's that dark, unlit back alley that very few people go down, but down which you'll find either an army of like-minded outcasts or a horde of terrifying monsters, depending on your outlook (4chan and its successor 8chan).
There's far more to the Internet than this, of course; the global village has become more of a town over the years, but it's never really lost that sense of having "landmarks" around the place: easily recognisable places from which you can easily get your bearings and which, should you choose to make them your regular hangouts, provide a sense of comfortable (or sometimes uncomfortable) familiarity.
They've all evolved over time, too. Take Facebook; when it originally launched, it was designed for college students. Then it expanded to take in young, cool people in general, and allow them to keep in touch with their close personal network of friends easily. Then it expanded again to become more public and open. And today, of course, almost everyone is on Facebook to some degree or another, regardless of age, gender, interests and even level of computer literacy.
Change hasn't always been for the positive, of course — although how you regard these changes, positive or negative, is partly down to your own individual feelings and how you want to communicate online. Twitter and I, for example, parted ways when it was becoming increasingly apparent that the microblogging service was being used by a lot of people more as a broadcast medium — and sometimes an echo chamber — than a means of communicating effectively. Its inherent limitations started to strain at the seams as people, for some inexplicable reason, started to think that it was an appropriate medium for having in-depth debates about complex issues. (It really isn't.) Then the marketers found it, trying to encourage us to tweet using the hashtags for their products seen on adverts or TV shows — who does this? And over time the noise built and built and built until, much like Facebook, it was not what it once was. For some people, it's still fun; for me, it had lost much of the charm that caused me to use it a great deal in the first place.
There's a lot going on behind the scenes in a lot of places, too. Take Wikipedia, for example; at face value, it appears to be a perfectly reputable source containing a vast array of information about pretty much anything you would care to name. Ostensibly being a reference work, much of it is written in an impartial, unbiased manner — though there are exceptions. And it's in those exceptions you start to see that yes, this is something that is put together and constantly maintained by humans, many of whom are doing it simply because they enjoy doing it. Dig further and take a peek at the inner workings of Wikipedia and you'll see that it's far from a solo effort; teams of editors are constantly discussing, debating, arguing and even fighting over the most peculiar of topics; in order to deal with such situations, the site has formed its own quasi-government to arbitrate disputes, with unfortunate instances going through strict, formal procedures managed not by Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales, but by councils of users. It's fascinating to observe.
There are billions of people on the planet, a significant proportion of whom now have some form of access to the Internet. With that in mind, it's kind of crazy how small the Internet feels sometimes. That "global village" really is a thing and, while just like any other village, not everyone gets along with everyone else, the virtual world we've all helped build together is a fascinating thing indeed.
Just be careful if you venture into some of those dark corners. You might not like what you find… but on the other hand, there's always the possibility of being pleasantly surprised, too. Explore at your own risk!
Over the weekend, mankind enjoyed a significant step forward in the field of space travel. Unmanned spacecraft Rosetta successfully detached its probe, named Philae, and landed on Comet 67P, aka Chryumov-Grasimenko. It was the culmination of a ten-year mission for Dr Matt Taylor and his colleagues at the European Space Agency, and a historic moment for humanity: we finally had the chance to examine a comet up close, and perhaps make some steps forward in understanding the way the universe works; how the solar system formed; perhaps even how there came to be life on this planet.
As much as it was a historic moment for humanity, then, imagine how Dr Matt Taylor felt as a significant portion of his life's work finally came to fruition as the probe successfully touched down and began transmitting data back to Earth.
Then imagine how Dr Matt Taylor felt when confronted with a giddy press more concerned with his sartorial choices than with the scientific milestone he had just passed — the shirt in question being a rather loud Hawaiian-style number featuring rather vivid, camp, retro-style imagery of women in PVC outfits shooting guns and generally looking pretty badass. (A shirt, I might add, made for and given to him as a gift by his friend Elly Prizeman.)
"I don't care if you landed a spacecraft on a comet," read a headline on The Verge put together by the two-person team — yes, this garbage took two people to put together — of former Polygon editor Chris Plante and his colleague Arielle Duhaime-Ross, "your shirt is sexist and ostracizing." And this was far from the only article published that day attacking him and his wardrobe rather than celebrating his achievements.
We don't have to imagine how Dr Matt Taylor felt. Because it was captured on film.
Can you imagine. Can you imagine reaching the culmination of a ten-year project, making such a significant step forward, and then some blowhard on the Internet telling you that your shirt is directly responsible for women not wanting to enter the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics? Can you imagine having to deal with abuse seemingly supported by the mainstream media, whom you previously thought would be keen to celebrate your achievement but now are, quite rightly, somewhat wary of?
Welcome to a world dominated by bullies.
The Internet has brought with it many great things, one of the most powerful being the principle that "everyone has a voice". The Internet has done more to advance the concept of free speech than pretty much anything else in the world, but while some people use this for good — to share information, to reach out to people who need help, to make friends in far-flung corners of the world without having to physically travel there — there are others who use it for ill. To lie, to cheat, to accuse, to blow things out of proportion, to bully.
This particular breed of unpleasant individual has been seemingly growing in numbers — or, if not numbers then certainly prominence — in the last few years, largely thanks to social networking sites Twitter and Tumblr. Ostensibly concerned with admirable-sounding concepts such as "social justice" and feminism, these individuals purport to be progressive thinkers who want to make the world a better place for everyone, but in actual fact are nasty, narrow-minded bullies who simply attack anyone who doesn't see the world in the same way they do.
The mission is a colossal achievement. Millions of us have been watching Philae's heart-stopping journey. Everyone in this country should be proud of Dr Taylor and his colleagues, and he has every right to let his feelings show.
Except, of course, that he wasn't crying with relief. He wasn't weeping with sheer excitement at this interstellar rendezvous. I am afraid he was crying because he felt he had sinned. He was overcome with guilt and shame for wearing what some people decided was an "inappropriate" shirt on television.
Why was he forced into this humiliation? Because he was subjected to an unrelenting tweetstorm of abuse. He was bombarded across the Internet with a hurtling dustcloud of hate, orchestrated by lobby groups and politically correct media organisations.
And so I want, naturally, to defend this blameless man. And as for all those who have monstered him and convicted him in the kangaroo court of the Web — they should all be ashamed of themselves.
Sadly, Dr Matt Taylor's trials were far from the first time this sort of outrage has erupted, and it will be far from the last time this happens, too. These supposed advocates of social justice — referred to in the vernacular by their opponents as "social justice warriors" or "SJWs" — are renowned for two things: taking offence at everything it's possible to take offence at, and then bullying people into submission, often until those suffering the bullying end up apologising, as Dr Taylor did.
This sounds ridiculous, but it's all too painfully familiar for me. I was bullied repeatedly throughout primary and secondary school — and once again at one of my previous workplaces — and the execution was exactly the same. Wear down the victim's defences with repeated, unprovoked, unwarranted attacks until they snap in one way or another — be it violently, at which point the bullies can point at the victim and say "look how violent they're being!", or tearfully, as in Dr Taylor's case, at which point the bullies can point and laugh at the victim and claim that they're only upset because they know they did wrong — and then move on in the knowledge of a job "well done".
It keeps happening, too, and these people never get called on it because they wield a considerable amount of influence and power — influence and power that lets them get away with a whole lot of nonsense.
Consider, if you will, the recent case of Independent Games Festival judge Mattie Brice, an outspoken, anti-men feminist who has claimed to be "leaving" the games industry on several occasions due to the abuse she was supposedly receiving.
Brice tweeted that she was "automatically rating low any games with men in them" during the course of her IGF judging duties and that she was "loving all this power". Understandably, this tweet — whether or not made in jest — upset a number of people, who complained to the IGF, who subsequently, admirably and promptly asked politely that she, you know, stop doing that lest people think that their judging was rigged. Brice then complained publicly to her Twitter followers about how she was being "harassed" and how the IGF were treating her poorly, and continued until the IGF issued an apology, not her. Her defence in all this? "It was a joke" — the last fallback of the bully, and an excuse I heard many a time when working as a teacher. It was never, ever, true, and you'll forgive me for being skeptical of this particular instance being a "joke" when we're talking about a person who made a game called "Destroy All Men" and has often posted anti-men rants on Twitter.
And lest you think I'm singling out Brice here, she is far from the only one; she's simply one of the most recent examples. I've thankfully remained largely free from this sort of nonsense up until now (though it remains to be seen if this blog post will attract zealots) but I've witnessed friends and former colleagues being attacked too many times over the last few years for me to sit here continuing to bite my lip.
YouTuber and PC gaming enthusiast TotalBiscuit demonstrated a good understanding of the issue in a recent post, and came to what is quite possibly the crux of this whole social justice thing and why it bugs me so much:
It's so goddamn American.
A lot of this social justice stuff seems to be focused on a very American set of ideals and circumstances that doesn't take into account much going on outside the country's borders. I mean the idea that racism against white people doesn't exist: let's take that one on for a second. [Fellow YouTuber and Irishman] Miracle of Sound accurately pointed out the genocide perpetrated against a portion of the Irish population and the hundreds of years of oppression that they suffered under the English. Sounds pretty damn racist to me.
The concept of white privilege is very American, too. You'll find a lot of British people, particularly Northerners like myself, bemused by it. I grew up in pit towns, or should I say, ex-pit towns, because Thatcher destroyed our economy when she broke the miners' unions and put a lot of people out of work. Our towns were vast white majorities but I can safely say we had no privilege, no advantages for being white. Some of the richest and most successful people in our towns were Indian and Pakistani.
He's absolutely right. These social justice types take a very American — specifically, West Coast — view of the world and assume it is the correct one, then shout down anyone who doesn't agree with them. They release the hounds on Twitter; they publicly shame them on Tumblr; they encourage the media to buy in to the narrative, and, worryingly, they succeed. Compare, for example, the media portrayal of consumer revolt "Gamergate" as a misogynist hate campaign that wants to drive women out of gaming with the reality of it being one of the most articulate, passionate, genuine, diverse, intelligent and inclusive — albeit at times somewhat ill-focused — groups of gamers of all genders, races and creeds that I've ever observed. (As an aside, I haven't involved myself in Gamergate's activities — as a former member of the press I don't agree with everything they stand for, though I feel they do have a number of fair points to be made — but I have spent a couple of weeks lurking around their regular online haunts to see what made them tick. It's been eye-opening to see the dissonance.)
It is worth clarifying at this juncture — and it pisses me off that I have to add this disclaimer — that I am not against the concept of "social justice" or, more accurately, equality. Quite the opposite; I believe in equal opportunities and equal, fair treatment for everyone, and my behaviour towards other people in my own life reflects this. Meanwhile, however, these keyboard crusaders make themselves immune to criticism by simply responding to any critics with "so you're against social justice, are you? You're against progressiveness?" but there is a right way and a wrong way to go about things — and bullying people until they seemingly agree with you is very much the wrong way to go about it. That is what this post is about, not about standing against the very principles of progressiveness.
All this has been going on for several years now — longtime readers will doubtless recall a number of posts where I've alluded to this in the past, and I've seen more friends than I'd care to mention either fall victim to these Internet bully mobs for a careless word at the wrong time or get swept up in their twisted ideology, never to have a rational word to say ever again — and it's time it stopped.
Why do I bring this up now? Why do I feel that this one lone blog post can make a difference?
Well, frankly, I don't; I am but one voice shouting into the void, and I would doubtless be argued to be a textbook example of a white cishet male privileged neckbeard shitlord (yes, this is genuinely something that these believers in "social justice" call people), but it's worth mentioning — particularly as the debacle over Dr Matt Taylor's shirt has brought this whole sorry situation very much into the public eye. I hope that this helps more people to see what has been brewing in online culture for a few years now — and I hope it helps put a stop to it.
This is not a move towards a progressive society. It's a move towards 1984-style Thought Policing, and it's not the direction that we as a society should be moving.
The bullying needs to stop. And it needs to stop now.
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.
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.
I've decided to go through with a week-long social media blackout. (By "social media" I mean "Twitter and Facebook", just to clarify; I'm not breaking my own rules by posting here.)
I was originally intending to start it off on Monday, but then yet more nonsense in the whole Zoe Quinn thing kicked off this morning and I just didn't want anything to do with it whatsoever — either the inevitable abuse she would receive for the things she was posting, or the unbearable smugness of her supporters.
So I started it today, cold turkey. And I'm serious about it. I deleted the Facebook and Twitter apps from my phone. I logged out of the sites on all my browsers. I removed the bookmarks from Chrome, the browser I use most frequently. And I haven't looked at either all day.
While I won't pretend I haven't felt a few urges to pop my head in and have a look, I haven't acted on these urges at all. I haven't felt the need to. I know that, going by what I saw this morning, something would just irritate and annoy me. And I don't need that.
I'm not going to cut myself off completely, though. For the week, my online socialisation will be through email, instant messaging (Google Hangouts), comments on this site and the Squadron of Shame forums. All of these are environments where I have much greater control over my socialisation, and which are populated by far smaller groups of people. And they are all people with whom I know I get on and can enjoy conversation with.
One may argue that there's a danger of creating an echo chamber when you simply surround yourself with people that you're 100% comfortable with, but in reality it's actually rather desirable to have a friendship group that understands you. It's an admirable goal to attempt to understand and ingratiate yourself with groups that you don't know a lot about, or whom you probably wouldn't hang out with in "real life", but eventually it just all starts to feel a bit high school, what with all the cliques, cool kids and groups that end up being the butt of everyone's jokes — often without justification.
Ponder how your friendships work in real life. Chances are that over your lifespan, you've met a significant number of people. Some of these became friends because you had things in common or enjoyed spending time together. As time passes, the number of true friends you likely have has probably dwindled as everyone's lives start to move in different directions. That's a bit sad when it means you lose touch with people with whom you used to spend a lot of time, but it's also part of the natural "filtering process" our real-life social lives go through over time.
With social media, this filtering doesn't happen automatically, so unless you take the time to actually go through and prune your friend and follower lists every so often, over time the noise just builds and builds and builds, often with disparate groups ending up butting heads with one another in your timeline or news feed. If you stand on the periphery of a few groups that, for whatever reason, end up at each other's throats, it can put you in a very awkward and undesirable situation, as we've seen with the whole "Gamergate" thing over the last week or so. To use my own personal situation, I identify with the games journalists who are undoubtedly frustrated at the constant accusations of "corruption" being levelled at them, but at the same time I also identify with the gamers who are sick of journalists talking down to them as if they're some sort of superior moral arbiters. Both sides say and do some regrettable things, and even if you're not directly involved — as I've taken care not to be — it can be anxiety-inducing to see what's going on.
That's not what the original promise of social media was. I recall signing up for Facebook for the first time and being amazed by the prospect of being able to easily stay in touch with people. Twitter, meanwhile helped me make a ton of new friends and discover people with common interests all over the world. Since I first signed up for both of them, though, their place in society has changed; Facebook has become little more than a link repository for endless "You Won't Believe What Happened Next!" clickbait bullshit, while Twitter has become a place where they who shout the loudest get to be "right", and whoever is right gets to declare anyone who disagrees with them as some sort of awful deviant.
As such, then, we come to my blackout. I feel positive that it will have a good effect on my mental health. And when it comes to next weekend, I'll make some more permanent decisions about my online existence.
I may have already made up my mind. But we'll see.
Following yesterday's post, I've been having a social media cleanup. This started with the unfollowing of about a hundred people last night — some of which I felt a bit guilty about, as I'd previously considered them friends; in other cases, they were former colleagues that I'd thought I might stay in touch with. That already helped a great deal, but there was still some unwanted noise on my feed, largely through retweets and Twitter's irritating new habit of adding other people's favourites and random tweets from other people's followers to your timeline. Those people were swiftly blocked so hopefully I will never have to encounter them ever again.
All this may seem somewhat harsh, particularly for a platform as open and public as Twitter is. But some reflection has revealed to me that it's really the only way to handle it and stay sane. And it's not, in fact, all that harsh at all, really, when you compare it to real life: after all, we carefully cultivate our real-life friendship groups and, over time, tend to whittle them down to groups of people that we particularly like, enjoy spending time with and have something in common with. We — well, I — don't try to be friends with people just because I feel that I "should" be friends with this person. That's high school stuff, trying to get "in" with the gang of cool kids; that way lies only madness, or at the very least a life where you're unwilling to be able to just be yourself with confidence.
And so Twitter is the same for me, now, particularly now I don't "need" it for industry networking and the like. My Following list has been whittled down to the people I actually enjoy interacting with — a healthy mix of game enthusiasts, game developers whom I have some sort of personal connection with (even if that's just having met them and enjoyed a chat with them), anime fans, and a few people I know in "real life". I'm no longer following people I feel "obliged" to follow — people who are often held up on a pedestal as being "important" to some cause or another — and I'm not following any celebrities. Insufferable arseholes who get retweeted into my feed are quickly blocked without mercy — no sense feeling guilty about it, since I probably wouldn't want to follow them anyway — and those who do nothing but indulge in lame hashtag games for hours on end are also swiftly removed from my following list, at least temporarily; permanently if I haven't actually spoken to them for a while.
It's kind of sad that we've got to the stage where this level of "friendship curation" is necessary, but it's a side-effect of the social media age and the fact that the Internet has brought us in touch with far more people than we'd ever be able to have met in reality. I'm pretty sure there's an "optimum" number of friends or acquaintances for a person to have, and over and above that level everything just starts contributing to an overall, growing amount of white noise — noise that occasionally becomes intolerable. I'm gradually — hopefully, anyway — finding a good balance that hopefully won't drive me mental, and which hopefully won't necessitate me abandoning the genuine friends I have managed to make via Twitter.
In the meantime, I'm trying my best to migrate a lot of gaming discussion over to the Squadron of Shame forums, which you can find here. While the Squadron of Shame was originally a group of people who came together on the 1up forums, I know I for one would be very happy to see some new blood over there, too — particularly if you are, like me, the sort of person who'd rather have a lengthy, wordy discussion about a favourite, underappreciated game than think that "lol" or "cool story bro" is in any way a valid contribution to a debate.
Hopefully I won't have to write about this sort of thing again for a while.
Occasionally, my mind gets into an almost comatose loop, and I find myself going round and round the same websites, over and over again. I hate the loop — and I'm growing to hate the websites and all that they stand for in 2014 — but still I do it compulsively, habitually, regularly.
First I'll check Twitter. Then I'll check Facebook. Then I'll check Google+. Occasionally I'll poke my head in the sites for my Final Fantasy XIV guild or the Squadron of Shame, but more often than not, it's just those three sites. And there's rarely anything interesting to see on any of them — but still I feel compelled to do it, particularly if there's a little red number at the top of the page.
The same is true on my phone. I'll check it every few minutes, looking for little icons across the status bar and hoping that something interesting might have happened. But it rarely does, and still I do it.
I'm talking about "notifications", one of my least favourite developments in modern technology. Turns out I have the sort of brain that gets extremely uncomfortable if something is left "unfinished"; if a little red number is there, suggesting that there's something that requires your attention.
Trouble is, most notifications these days aren't necessary. On Google+, since the Squadron of Shame moved its base of operations to its own site, the only notifications I get are from people who gave a comment I left on a YouTube video six months ago a "+1", saying that they "liked" what I said without actually having to interact directly with me. On Facebook, where I rarely post any more, my only notifications come from replies to a comment thread I long since lost interest in. And Twitter's 2014 incarnation sees fit to notify you not only when someone replies to you, but also when they "favourite" or retweet something you posted — or, in comedically ridiculous levels of Inception-style madness, when someone retweets something you retweeted.
The provocation of this sort of compulsive behaviour is entirely deliberate, of course; these sites' use of notifications — and mobile app developers' use of notifications, too, for that matter — is designed to get you doing exactly what I'm doing, which is visiting the sites or booting up the apps several times a day just to see if the notifications are anything useful. They inevitably aren't, but there's always the hope.
Provoking this sort of behaviour can't be healthy. It doubtless plays havoc with people who already have more obsessive compulsive tendencies than I do, but just from a user experience perspective it's frustrating to never feel like you're "free" — there's always something out there demanding your attention. Look at me, that little red number says. I'm important.
It's because of all this that I find myself considering daily whether or not I should nuke my social media presence altogether and simply interact with people through more private channels — email, blog comments, chat messages, the Squad forum. Every day it gets more and more tempting to do so, so one of these days soon I might just do it — and this time for good. This isn't what I signed up for at the dawn of the social media revolution.
No I won't. Because… come on, fucking seriously? Do you really need me to explain why that is never, ever going to happen?
Apparently so, because last night's #AskHannaForCash travesty on Twitter proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that social media is turning people into dribbling idiots.
For those not on Twitter, or who somehow missed this debacle while it was unfolding, here's the gist.
Twitter user @princessthot posted that she was, for some reason, pissed off with her father, and promptly posted a screenshot that she claimed was his his PayPal account, which supposedly contained in excess of $23 million. She then offered to send money to anyone who retweeted her message or helped spread the word — an offer which would appear to be backed up by a number of people (who, it later transpired, were her followers) who offered messages of varying amounts of exuberance claiming that yes, she "really was" sending out money to anyone who asked for it.
Uh-huh. Sure.
The moment I saw this, I knew it stank. For one of just so many things wrong with this whole situation, who the hell keeps $23 million in a PayPal account — an unverified one, no less?
And yet, very few people — including, I was disappointed to see, some people I follow — seemed to think this was worth questioning, instead engaging with the situation on the grounds that it "couldn't do any harm" or that it was "worth a try". One person I follow said that they were "pretending it was real but staying out of it, because [they] want to think humans are awesome instead of terrible."
Via the Daily Dot, here's just how easy it is to fake a PayPal balance, incidentally:
Uh-huh. Okay. Still believe it? Still want to believe humans are awesome?
Humans are awesome, is the thing — just this week, two separate crowdfunding efforts paid for a little girl's headstone and an indie game critic's cancer treatment. But humans are also terrible, and social media is, regrettably, the natural habitat for some of the worst examples of everyday (i.e. not psychotic dictators or outright psychopaths) scumbags on the planet.
Anyone who's used Facebook at all in the last few years will know that there's an epidemic of blindly resharing things without checking to see whether they stand up to scrutiny. If something uses enough exclamation marks and capital letters, many more gullible users are convinced of its urgency and authenticity, and go on to spread it to their social network — and from there, the more gullible users from among their group of friends then spread it further and further and further.
#AskHannaForCash wasn't as obviously harmful as claiming that Red Bull gives you brain tumours or that a non-existent breed of snake is going to freeze your blood (and, aside: please direct anyone who shares shit like that on your Facebook news feed to those two links and indeed the rest of Snopes at every opportunity). But it's still harmful in its own way; the person behind the Twitter account, whoever he or she is, was purely seeking attention and validation through retweets and favourites — attach a number to anything and it is seen as social currency by some people, particularly those in their teens — and now, unsurprisingly, having revealed that the whole thing was a hoax (sorry, "social experiment" — the usual getout clause) they have come in for a torrent of abuse. That can't be good for their mental wellbeing — something which I'd assume is already in something of a fragile state if they felt the need to pull such an elaborate ruse on the less discerning members of the social media sphere.
You my call it cynicism, but the attitude that "if it looks too good to be true, it probably is" will serve you well in the long term. Would you respond to an anonymous email claiming that you could come into possession of a huge amount of money just by providing some simple details? No — at least I hope not. Would you respond to a suspicious-looking Craigslist ad offering you a vast amount of cash for something simple? I imagine not. Would you let a random stranger into your house just because they promised to give you something amazing? I really hope you wouldn't. So don't do it on social media.
And come on. Do you really think an obviously bitter and twisted teenager "getting back" at their father by doling out their cash to random strangers is an example of humanity at its finest? Would you really trust that cash? Would you really trust that the details you'd have to hand over to obtain that cash wouldn't find themselves into inappropriate hands?
If you would, then your Internet license is hereby revoked. Go and read a fucking book instead; it'll be safer for everyone involved, including yourself.
If you've ever wondered why I talk so much about lesser-known games and visual novels I come across that I end up loving, Twitter today is the reason why. Specifically, this is the reason why.
For those unfamiliar with the way Twitter works, that's a search page giving a snapshot of the number of people using the words "Titanfall beta" at any given moment — at the time of writing, there are approximately 30 tweets every minute on the subject.
Titanfall, the new game from Respawn Entertainment, the studio set up by the guys who created the astronomically popular Call of Duty series, one of the biggest names in gaming for the past few years, is going to be a big hit, it seems. And this is lucky not only for Respawn, but also for Microsoft, who are counting on Titanfall being a system-seller for its so far disappointing Xbox One console. We'll have to wait and see whether Titanfall shifts Xbox One systems, but if interest in the beta is any indication, chances are good.
But I don't want to talk about Titanfall. I haven't played it and thus can't comment on it in any great detail. I have registered for a beta key because I'm interested to see if it can change the mind of someone who finds Call of Duty utterly mind-numbing, but I'm not going out of my way to get one, and frankly I'm sick of hearing about it.
It's this latter point that ties in with what I said in the first paragraph. Any time something "big" like Titanfall comes along, any smaller developers attempting to promote their work may as well just pack up and go home, because the big game is all anyone's talking about. This is how marketing works, of course; EA and Respawn want Titanfall to be as big a seller as possible, so it's in their interests to ensure as many people are talking about it as possible, and what better way to stir the pot than a steady flow of beta keys being released into the wild?
But what of the poor souls who, like me, have pretty much zero interest in Titanfall? There's nothing stopping us continuing to go about our gaming business, of course, but it's frustrating if it just happens to be this week that we find something really cool that we want to share with people. It's also frustrating if otherwise great games come out, but news of them actually being great is drowned out by everyone stampeding to play the beta for the latest manshoot. I fear for Bravely Default and Danganronpa, both of which are fantastic games that deserve a far greater audience than they will almost certainly get — Michael Pachter would probably brand them "failures" if he had any idea either of them existed — and titles that are competing against Titanfall's beta test for the attention of gamers worldwide.
I certainly don't begrudge anyone who's enjoying the experience of the Titanfall beta; by all accounts, it sounds like something that someone who enjoys competitive team-based multiplayer shooters will have a lot of fun with, and that's great. But at times like this, it's easy to feel a little cynical about the games biz's apparent inability to acknowledge the existence of more than one Good Thing at a time. As ever, the game that's likely to make the most money gets the majority of the spotlight attention, leading to swathes of articles from diverse sites all writing very similar things to one another, providing validation to those who were probably going to buy the game anyway and continuing to alienate those who are more interested in more niche, specialised titles.
At times like this — and I've said this before — I feel as if the games press needs more specialised publications. We're starting to get this to a certain extent with indie-focused websites, but we need to go further. There needs to be an acknowledgement — or more of an acknowledgement, at least — that gaming isn't just about the latest, biggest-budget game out there, and that games don't cease to be relevant after their "opening week". The latter point in particular is something that infuriates me no end; if a game doesn't sell a zillion copies in its first week, it's instantly branded a failure by analysts and press alike — meanwhile, it's extremely rare that people like, say, me buy something the moment it's released.
What have I been playing today, for example? Atelier Rorona, a PlayStation 3 game that came out in 2010. Are the experiences I've had with that game today irrelevant due to the fact it came out four years ago? No, of course not, but you might be forgiven for thinking that if you took a look at Twitter today.
Sigh. I'm pissing in the wind with this, of course, and it's far easier to just get on with what I'm doing, talk about the things I'm enjoying and hope people who feel the same way might gather together with me. I just felt the need to express some frustration, and I'll start taking my own advice tomorrow, I think.
I'm not normally one to jump on the controversy du jour and add my voice to the throngs of people yelling about a particular issue, but in the case of Twitter's recent changes to its "block" system, whereby blocked users are now effectively "muted" in only one direction rather than truly blocked, I feel it's important I share my experiences.
Earlier in the year, I suffered an organised campaign of harassment that was enough to drive me from the Twitter service and completely close my account. I only returned a while later for professional reasons — in my occupation of online journalist, Twitter is a convenient means of both getting in touch with people and promoting content. Were it not for my job, I doubt I would have returned.
The harassment stemmed from a single word in my profile: "Brony." Lest you're unfamiliar, this term describes an adult-age fan of the TV show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic by Lauren Faust and her team. The "Brony" community is a large and active one on the Internet, and for the most part a hugely supportive one, with its creed being "love and tolerate". It accounts for a significant proportion of creative derivative works such as fan fiction, artwork and music videos, and is a fascinating cultural phenomenon. I always considered myself somewhat on the periphery of this fandom, since although I liked the show I wasn't so deep in that I was making these creative works; I included the word in my Twitter bio as a means of showing my support for the community, however, and acknowledging something I found to be enjoyable.
What I wasn't aware of until my harassment incident was the fact that there are people on Twitter — and the Internet at large — who specifically seek out self-professed "Bronies" and torment them, usually through repeated and public accusations of paedophilia. In my case, this began as a series of Twitter @mentions that grew in frequency and intensity over the course of several days; I quickly blocked the main instigators without engaging with them, but more and more people came as the situation escalated and the group responsible for the harassment — known as the GNAA — came together against me.
I changed my Twitter username in an attempt to deter the attackers, but all this achieved was causing them to take over my original username, pose as me and post links to pornographic content.
The harassment went a step further than just Twitter @mentions, however. My Twitter bio also linked to the Twitter account of my brother, and to the video games website I was, at the time, managing editor of. The instigators of the harassment followed these links to my brother's personal website and the site I worked for, trawled the WHOIS records to find the phone numbers of the owners — my brother himself and the person who was paying for the hosting of the games site respectively — and then called them to make further accusations of paedophilia against me.
These calls continued for several days, and prompted me to contact the police to find out if there was anything I could do. Unfortunately the police were unable to do much save for keep the incident on file, and recommended that I work with Twitter to resolve the situation.
I contacted Twitter to explain the situation and point the support staff in the direction of the accounts that had been instigating most of the trouble, and which had hijacked my original account name to pose as me. After several days of waiting, during which the harassment continued, Twitter's response was that those responsible were not in breach of Twitter's terms and conditions because it was a "personal dispute". It took another round of contacting them to convince them to suspend my original username, at which point I decided to leave the service entirely, and had no intention of returning unless I absolutely had to.
Without Twitter's Block function allowing for forced unfollows and true blocking of troublemakers, this incident would have been even worse than it already was. Moreover, Twitter has shown itself to be either incapable or unwilling of dealing with persistent and organised harassment that spills out into the non-online sphere.
I am not the only person who has suffered such abuse at the hands of online bullies, but everyone who has has something in common: all they are doing is attempting to be their true selves, unashamed of who they are, what they do and what they like — and attempting to engage with like-minded or supportive people. Harassment on the grounds of something that you are — or, in my case, something that you like — is completely unacceptable, and it's not at all appropriate to just brush these levels of personal attacks off as personal disputes, then do nothing about them.
The changes to the Block policies do not encourage a change in behaviour on the part of the bullies. If anything, they punish the victim more by forcing them to take their account private when they may wish to remain public in order to meet new friends. Twitter is taking its policies with regard to harassment and bullying in the wrong direction — and these policies weren't in a particularly good place to begin with, as I can say from first-hand experience.
I would encourage Twitter to rethink how it is handling this situation, and to ensure that more robust solutions are in place for blocking and reporting persistent offenders. Twitter is an enormously useful online communication resource, and the means through which I have come to know a significant number of friends a lot better. But it needs to be a safe place; for marginalised and vulnerable groups, those who have suffered previous harassment or those who simply suffer from social anxiety, these new changes are not a step in the right direction.
Please consider the good of the community that has been built and not just the supposed needs of the business. When you build a social network, both aspects are important; without the former, the latter simply ceases to exist.
I've written about this on at least one occasion before, but the fact that Breaking Bad is on television again has reminded me of the curiously inverted effect that hyperbole has on me. In other words, the more people waffle on about how amazing something is, the less I want to pay any attention to it whatsoever. I've long since muted everything to do with Breaking Bad for this reason, as it's completely dulled any enthusiasm I might have once had for something that is — by most accounts — very good.
Breaking Bad is a curiously extreme example of what I'm talking about. It's doubly infuriating because everyone posting about it on social media is also being incredibly conscious of spoilers — Breaking Bad fans hate spoilers — and thus what we end up with at the time a Breaking Bad episode is broadcast is a string of tweets that say absolutely nothing. To be more precise, they tend to be nothing but a string of tweets of people going things like "OH MY GOD" and "WOW" which has absolutely no meaning whatsoever to those who aren't watching the show.
Now, I'll grant that Twitter provides a reasonably practical means for Breaking Bad fans to get together and discuss the show — or, more accurately, "react" to it in real-time — but it really doesn't inspire anything like in-depth discussion, and thus I have to question the value of doing this, particularly as it has several knock-on effects: 1) people who don't like Breaking Bad get pissed off 2) people who might have wanted to watch Breaking Bad at some point get fed up and decide they don't really want to watch it until everyone shuts the fuck up about it and 3) the people who are actually watching Breaking Bad are only giving the show half their attention because they're flip-flopping back and forth between the TV screen and their phone.
I tried the "livetweeting" experience a couple of years back when I got vaguely into The Apprentice. I picked up a few followers in the process and found some entertaining people, too, but it really wasn't worth it; the number of people who got irritated at it didn't really make up for the people I "met" in the process, and the interactions I was having with others who were "reacting" to the show in real time were superficial at best. I didn't find it particularly valuable, in other words; certainly no more so than sitting around watching a show with friends in the same room, which is something I don't tend to do — TV, for me, tends to be an accompaniment to something else (like eating dinner) rather than an activity in itself.
More than the fact I didn't find it particularly valuable socially, though, I just found it frustrating to do — if I was tweeting while watching, I found myself unable to concentrate on what was going on on the screen, so eventually I gave up, much to the relief of my Twitter followers.
Ultimately, it's your Internet; if you want to "ooh" and "aah" at Breaking Bad while it's on, feel free — I simply reserve the right to mute your ass if you do it too much!
Grump over. Time to go to a pre-wedding celebration.
I find Internet culture endlessly fascinating and, at times, more than a little terrifying.
