Eccentric Flower:200911/Tempests In Teapots
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Tempests In Teapots
As has been documented here recently in several places, my wife and I share not only a vast similarity of tastes, but the uncanny ability to know when an article or clip or other item will be of interest to the other party, often resulting in near-telepathic mutual lock-on of a target.
But we do not always coincide, and one of the ways that we do not coincide is that my wife enjoys reading petty infighting, meaningless squabbles, name-calling, the reactions of the oversensitive, et cetera - the collective messes that the internet is so very good at making, which some people call trainwrecks and my wife refers to by the fandom term of "wankery." (Which, if you are from the UK, is rude, but that's the point.)
Wankery upsets my stomach. Or, if I feel that I belong to a side which is the minority or is getting slighted, makes me mad. Or, if I think both sides of an argument are pathetic, makes me sad. No matter what the emotion inspired, wankery does not fill me with confidence in human nature (said confidence is low enough already) and it makes me want to throw the whole internet in a fiery pit for a while until it learns to behave better.
Even when a bit of this type of infighting is conducted politely and with good intentions, it is always so trivial. We're not talking about discussions of what policy Obama should pursue in Afghanistan or the state of human rights legislation in America or why people turn to frothing religious intolerance groups and how this trend can be corrected. We're talking about fusses about things which, no matter which way they go, will not affect the world a whit.
These fights fill my wife with joy. I will never understand, just as I don't understand how she gets so much pleasure from ridiculing, and reading others' ridicule of, bad fanfic writers. (It's not that I don't enjoy an occasional well-written piece of scathing, destructive criticism - but geez, pick some higher-hanging fruit. Criticizing most fanfic for quality is like picking on McDonald's for the quality of its cuisine.)
So - I don't use Twitter because it is one of the wellsprings of the decline of Western civilization*, which means that when I am inclined to track down something in a Twitter conversation, I only see part of the conversation. That is, if I look at Jeph Jacques' Twitter feed, and I see something I want to get to the bottom of, I also have to read Gary Tyrrell's and Scott Kurtz' and several others, each of which contains only one part of the conversation. I suppose that if I got a Twitter account I could follow them all and then they'd all appear together for my reading pleasure, but in order to do that, I'd 1) have to get a Twitter account and 2) actually follow them all. I'd have no way to string together their conversation without following them all, and frankly, if I put Scott Kurtz in the people I followed, he'd get the wrong impression.
You see, while I do read his comic and his comic is often funny, my general impression of Kurtz is that he is an asshole.
While I do occasionally read Ted Rall's screeds and he is often making good points, my general impression of Rall is that he is an asshole.
I don't have enough evidence to know whether Ryan Sohmer and Lar DeSouza are assholes. I don't read their comic because the main character is such an asshole that it ruins the whole comic for me; I have no idea why someone would attempt to base their humor on such a detestable protagonist. (I have this problem with R.K. Milholland as well. As far as I can tell, all of his characters are people I wouldn't want to spend ten minutes in a room with.)
Anyway, so, the gist is - at the bottom of all this digging - that Sohmer and DeSouza have decided to fund a scholarship, and while you might quibble with the nature of the scholarship, it does seem clear that, as Jacques put it, "Jesus fucking Christ, I don't care if you think LiCD is the worst comic ever made, they're DOING A NICE THING."
So Ted Rall, being Ted, pounds on this scholarship idea over at Daily Cartoonist, because Ted pretty much hates everything, and Kurtz, who has never seen a land war he didn't want to get involved in, fires back with an (admittedly pretty brilliant) rebuttal ... and they're off.
The irony is that later in the thread Kurtz asks Rall:
and I feel like asking Kurtz the same thing.
I guess my point here is, I see this sort of fight start every single day on the internet, and I wonder what we could use all those man-hours for if they were spent doing something other than petty bickering. I don't really mean to single out any of the participants here for special abuse - they're just the example that crossed my path this morning.
And yet!! I am not unaware of my glass house. I realize perfectly well that I spent ten minutes finding this fight so I could see what the fuss was, instead of ignoring the whole thing which is what I should have done.
Here's my theory: We are all starved for entertainment. The internet is a vast and complex place and yet, somehow, in our little circles, it often fails to satisfy our voracious appetites for new sensations. I don't know how many websites I check every day, and yet in those orbits, there are far too many days when THE INTERNET IS NOT DELIVERING PIPING HOT CONTENT GODDAMNIT.
So we make fights. Or search them out. And it's sad and pathetic.
I sometimes think the best thing we could do for the world is destroy the internet so we are all forced to actually interact with one another like humans. The problem with that is that the doors which it has opened would then close. Someone please come up with a way to keep the good parts of the internet (e.g. my ability to stay in touch with people in far corners of the world, some of whom I have never physically met) and lose the bad parts (the bickering, the trolls, the loss of subtleties of communication skills, the general decline in contextual ability)?
Please?
* Please see next entry.
I don't understand how she gets so much pleasure from ridiculing, and reading others' ridicule of, bad fanfic writers.
Let's be perfectly clear about this, because there's a very important distinction to be made here: I am generally not ridiculing fanfic writers. I am ridiculing bad fanfic writing. There is a significantly smaller group of people who deserve ridicule for being obnoxious human beings in addition to being shitty fanfic writers, and I try to ignore them as much as possible.
I also would like to point out that when writers publicly post their material online, they are fair game for criticism. (And this applies equally to my own material.) Some authors believe that because they're doing this "just for fun," they should be immune from all criticism, including critiques from those of us who simply want to point out that when you fail to punctuate dialogue or anything else, your story becomes unreadable -- never mind critiquing the actual content!
Also, if you were to get a Twitter account to follow a few people, I guarantee that no one except a few friends will notice you are following them. @pvponline has 18,696 followers. Scott Kurtz isn't going to look at follower 18,697 and get any impression of you unless he already knows your name; he's going to just ignore the Twitter status email about a new follower and get on with his life.
-- 17:20, 19 November 2009 (GMT)
I was going to make a joke about how it's a good thing that everyone here likes reading "the reactions of the oversensitive," but then I realized you'd be oversensitive about it.
More seriously, the problem is not the internet; it is the users. The same, exact problem of incivility and stupidity existed in print. The "newspapers" from the federal era, for example, were just as polemical as the internet is now.
The remedy (even hypothetically) is not to blow up the internet, but to ignore the idiots, which I think you sorta recognize in the post. I kick myself, too, on the rare occasions I get drawn into a flamewar. But just as owning a radio doesn't mean you have to listen to Howard Stern or Rush Limbaugh, having internet access doesn't mean you have to read stupid crap, either. The worst thing you can do to people like that is to ignore them.
-- 17:29, 19 November 2009 (GMT)
Patrick: Yeah, I agree with the possible reasons you give, but the fundamental problem - and the reason these tempests-in-teapots depress me - is that the statement "We, as a race, like to find places to fight" strikes me as one of the most depressing truths ever. How did we ever survive so long as a species when one of our key drives is to bash each other over the head with clubs?
Also: You're absolutely right, I'm often uncomfortable with dealing with humans in person as well - sometimes more so. But it's really the same problem at heart. I guess I want humans to be better people; and, barring that, I want to interact with them in some way that removes the bad crazy and the beat-with-clubs part.
Which brings me to Robert:
You're not quite getting me. Newspapers are entitled to be polemical. Opinion pieces can be polemical. Ted Rall is allowed to be as much of an asshole as he wants as long as he is wearing his cartoonist-columnist hat. If you stand on a soapbox you can shout anything you like, in my ruleset. It's the infighting in comments and in other places which should be non-soapbox discussions between humans that bothers me. I want strong opinions in the Opinion frame and polite discourse in the Response frame; just as I would always try to adhere to a higher standard of civility below the COMMENTS BEGIN HERE line on these pages than above it.
-- 17:48, 19 November 2009 (GMT)
I am fascinated by how you describe your expectations for content above and below the comment divider. Some sites are more-or-less like you describe; others (notably news outlets and youtube) are nefariously the reverse. Some sites are largely the former, but occasionally shift phase into the latter in a way that can be horribly jarring (and here I agree with you that threaded comments are a nursemaid to that transition).
When I enter a comment thread, I always hope to some degree for conversation. I have to admit, though, that disagreement and the urge towards polemic go hand in hand and I am not always good at separating them.
-- 18:09, 19 November 2009 (GMT)
Nor I, Dan, let it be said. I'm sure some of my disappointment at the high infighting level is because I'm too much aware of my own failures to suppress my polemical side.
-- 18:15, 19 November 2009 (GMT)
Andy:
Here is a brilliant (IMNSFHO) analysis of one of the reasons for the lack of civiility on the internet, and it's a reason I don't think I've seen discussed before; well worth reading.
-- 20:21, 19 November 2009 (GMT)
Very interesting. I don't disagree but it does make me wonder, "Can it really be so hard to find verbal markers which substitute adequately for the milder spectrum of non-verbal responses?" Maybe the answer is yes!
Incidentally I agree with alexx_kay: In most cases disemvowelling is far more severe than deletion. Deletion has issues of its own, but it doesn't point and laugh.
-- 21:06, 19 November 2009 (GMT)
Okay, I can understand not liking LICD because Rayne is an asshole, but Looking For Group? "You all saw it, that orphanage attacked me!" has become my fallback attitude...
-- 06:52, 20 November 2009 (GMT)
I hadn't actually seen Looking for Group before. (Since I don't go to LiCD unless someone sends me there, and maybe not even then, I haven't seen any crosslinks, and for some reason it hasn't been among the many RPG-themed webcomics people have called to my attention before now.)
I'll reserve judgement on it until I can read more of it, although I'll say that there's really only room in my heart for one WoW-based comic (that is, one with in-game plots and characters - NPC's focus is different), and Scott Kurtz blew it off without even an apology.
-- 14:26, 20 November 2009 (GMT)
Re Looking for Group: Nah. Same problem. They apparently think Richard is funny. He's not. He just harrasses everyone randomly and makes remarks and picks on people who don't deserve it. I don't mind evil characters who have motivations or at least, you know, a character, but I can already see who's the focal point twenty strips in, and I want to ditch the idiot blood elf, throw Richard in a hole, and follow the story of the lady orc and the tauren instead.
-- 14:34, 20 November 2009 (GMT)
From @ProfRobert: "having internet access doesn't mean you have to read stupid crap, either": Yes!
I've been on a fairly limited internet diet this fall, which started at Burning Man and then got another boost during the pneumonia, when I just was too exhausted to do anything, even something so meager as internet reading. It's been kind of cool. I try not to read things that upset me that I can't do anything about.
-- 04:20, 21 November 2009 (GMT)
Patrick:
"I sometimes think the best thing we could do for the world is destroy the internet so we are all forced to actually interact with one another like humans."
Um. What?
I thought you only liked to interact with most people over the internet. You've written a lot about how it's just about the only medium where you want to deal with the filthy masses, so you're kind of at odds with this statement.
I think people start fights because we're sitting a lot more these days, facing screens that we have to pay attention to for work, for bill-paying and for entertainment. After hour upon hour of this, everything that appears on a screen seems like fodder for an argument, because our focus has become so narrow, and yet so broad at the same time. The little things become big deals.
Also, I think most people like to blow off steam, and when it's something that's so trivial, the stakes are lowered. Sure, insults can hurt, but most people can get into a good scrap using text and not be mortally wounded by it.
I think if we didn't have the internet, we'd start falling back into the types of social conventions in which a misplaced fork would be subject to a beheading. We, as a race, like to find places to fight, and this one just happens to be the one where it's easiest to start, and easiest to leave.
-- 17:20, 19 November 2009 (GMT)