Posts by Stephen Judd
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Commentary track too.
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Also, NZ is a post-Christian culture and Christianity has taught that suicide is a sin for 2000 years.
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I personally make foodie tweets, and selfie tweets, and zingers, and post links to interesting things I read, and tell self-deprecating FML stories, and chat, and seek support in hard times and give it. All part of my Twitter life.
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Yeah. In essence the Twitter form is the telegram, which historically could carry the most important and significant and emotional news. Some people use it frivolously. Some don't. To focus on the frivolous is just prejudice.
It took me a long time to adopt Twitter after many of my online contacts already had, and I couldn't see the point at first, but after a while, all the little messages, from close friends to people I sort of internet-know, added up to something neat.
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Hard News: Poor Choices, in reply to Tom Semmens,
Internet culture is like that.
I go back a long way, to pre-web days and BBS, and I remember the change in tone in Usenet as access broadened out from universities and research institutes, and I remember the emergence of trolling and the handwringing about netiquette.
Still, I dispute that there is a fixed internet culture that we can't do anything about. Different online contexts have very different standards of behaviour, enforced in different ways, and every participant is part of a wider IRL culture too. Cultures can be made to change, and subcultures dependent on particular technologies are much easier to change.
The pileons and zingers are one part of Twitter, but only a part -- it also sustains a supportive and gentle community of semi-friends. It has its merits and its place.
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Hard News: Poor Choices, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
I’ve definitely been on the wrong side of that line
Me too. And while I try to be better, it's inevitable that sometimes I won't. I don't believe I deserve to be punished or judged too harshly for it either. I think there's a strong difference between normal people getting overly provoked sometimes, and some people gleefully, righteously, and above all repeatedly going after a victim.
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Hard News: Poor Choices, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
I assert my right to snark, rant and be downright rancid about bad arguments and crappy attitudes contained therein. That far, no further.
Although I wouldn’t like it, I think you in principle have a right to say “Stephen is a stupid dickhead” with obscene variations to suit your taste. I’m sure you could imagine a scenario where that would feel fully justified.
It is problematic if many people start to join in doing so to the point where the target feels severe distress – where a single rude volley becomes mob bullying – and I’m interested in ideas that would prevent that.
And again, I want to distinguish that from “Stephen, I know where you live and I’m coming for you.” In NZ I imagine that’s covered by s306 of the Crimes Act. The big problem online is that anonymity enables such threats to be made with little fear of discovery, and the kinds of solutions that remove anonymity in this case also remove it in other cases where it could be warranted. Some people have enough faith in our public institutions to entrust them with the power to strip away that anonymity. I am not sure that I do, but I also don’t think we can tolerate the way threats of violence are used to silence people through fear and disgust. For me this is a different (and much more serious) cateogry of thing than insult though.
ANd on the third hand this all leaves aside the issue of the vulnerability of the target. Many people we think can cope with a bit of flak (or however we want to euphemise our behaviour to them) are in fact struggling with problems we can’t see and will respond in ways we didn’t expect. A thoughtful person will think about that but most of us aren’t that thoughtful most of the time.
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I would find this discussion easier to follow if we could carefully distinguish:
- rape and death threats (almost always aimed at women, it seems to me)
- rudeness and name-calling and insult (often multiplied by retweets or shares or joining in)
- “callout culture”Because for example, “trolling” as I understand the term could encompass all of these behaviours, but I would respond quite differently. I want to preserve my right to be rude to the deserving, but deny anyone a right to issue death threats. The pileon is a nuanced phenomenon that in some cases is a legit protest campaign and in others a nasty exercise in ostracism and shame.
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A few random thoughts.
First, there are some genuinely bad people out there.
Second, celebrity culture is about performance of a role, the role of oneself. Public figures' personas are artificial constructions, collaboratively made by many players. This was already problematic in traditional media's heyday, when people could be hounded to death in the press, and is much more so when people can directly address hate towards a public figure, who is unreal to them as a person, and hit the real person as a target.
I feel there's some evidence for this second idea of mine. I had an interesting talk the other day with someone who handles all the complaints that come through her firm's generic support email address. Some are vitriolic obscenities. She told me how she responded politely and helpfully to each one, and that very many of the people who sent nastygrams would then respond with an apology -- they had felt they were shouting into the ether and had never expected a real person to talk to.
So: some people are evil and mean, and some are thoughtless and mean. Not too sure how to deal with that. Especially since one piece of thoughtless meanness can be amplified way beyond the originator's intent if other people run with it.
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Being cute is the only worthwhile response to your determined projections. Apart from silence, of course. By which I mean: laterz!