eddyfate

Why do people take social networking sites so seriously?

I'm not being glib or hyperbolic here. I have heard of people falling to pieces over being unfollowed from Twitter. I have seen individuals get really upset that they didn't get friended back on Facebook. I have had folks email me asking why I hate them because I stopped reading their LiveJournal. And it has recently come to my attention that certain choices I've made on such sites have made people upset, assuming that I somehow hate them or wish them ill because of my choices.

Perhaps I have a really strange way of handling social networking. I look at it as a source of information and entertainment. If that source no longer has useful information for me, I stop reading it. If it's no longer entertaining, I cut it. And certainly, if reading it frustrates me or makes me upset, I sure as hell turn it off.

Am I missing something? Are we so wrapped up in our need to be connected, networked, plugged in, up to date and making our utter personal trivia constantly available to the known universe that any quiet departure from our onslaught of hastily hammered out insights means that it's some personal attack that either must be challenged as an affront or requires a vitriolic screed decrying the silent dissenter as a petty, obnoxious bastard equivalent to a village idiot? Or can I possibly make my own decisions about personal relationships with people without checking in with some website's idiosyncratic etiquette?

If the little number on your website showing how many people are reading your inane crap is more important to you than actually talking to a human being, then please do me a favor and stop reading this journal now. Seriously. I won't even be offended or upset. I've had people ask me if they can stop reading my journal, and you know what? Not only was I not mad about it, but I was pretty confused as to why I was being asked. Why are you asking me? It's your life. Read what you want, connect with who you want, and do what the hell you want.

I appreciate that you respect my feelings, but you know what really earns my respect? Talking to me and giving a shit about me as a person instead of caring more about my hotlinks. If you don't respect me that much, that's cool. Just because a website says we're friends doesn't mean we have to be. I'm okay with that -- are you?

Am I way off base here?

Edit: It seems I talked about this a year ago, too.

Edit 2: Within half an hour of posting this, I got a bunch of new Twitter followers. Huh.

Vista: "You are coming to a sad realization. Cancel or allow?"

PC: "Allow."

(I've come to the conclusion that too many people choose "Cancel" instead.)

I believe it was at Angstgiving (our "Thanksgiving for chosen family" that we have every year), or maybe it was in one of the other side conversations that weekend, but I got into a conversation with mrogre and others about John Cage's composition, 4'33". 4'33" is a composition of complete silence that lasts for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. This, of course, prompted a conversation on whether it is really music or not.

Today, on Irregular Webcomic, the cartoonist posted a comic that consists of four black panels. His extremely lengthy annotation discusses his decision about this, and covers at length opinions on art, using 4'33" as a reference point.

( Incoherent rambling about art. Bring a map -- I go all over the place. )

So a common tendency many LJ users have (or at least through my observations of both myself and other LJ users) is to use their LiveJournals to vent. At first, typically anythings goes, but after the first couple of LJ flamewars, most users move to five general tactics [footnote 1]:

1) Cryptic LJ posts that still allow the frustration to be released without going into details.
2) Selective filtering of posts to increasingly smaller and smaller filters.
3) Moving the journal to "friends-only."
4) Not using their LiveJournals at all or for that purpose.
5) Some combination of the above.

Personally, over the past couple of years, I've moved to a combination of 1, 2 and 4, with an emphasis to try to reduce 1 in favor of 2 or 4 as much as possible (since for me it ultimately causes more problems than the brief period of stress relief it provides). When I do feel a need to post snark on some topic that is purely emotional of visceral and largely unhelpful to discuss in a purely public forum (i.e., an unfiltered LJ post), and I can't completely curb the instinct to avoid posting at all, I try to find a filter to post it to that will encompass people that I think will be supportive or appreciative of my quirks/personal failings without causing more stress than I'm already under.

However, over time I've noticed that this ends up in a particular cycle. First I get angry, and feel the need to write to get it out (1). Then, I start to consider which of my filters to post to (2). As my filters get tighter and tighter, I realize that the snark I intend to post is more and more inflammatory, and therefore less and less worthwhile to post to the Internet in any form. However, the more inflammatory the post, the more likely it is that the issue is one that I feel strongly enough about, rationally or otherwise, that I have to come to some sort of terms with it before I can comfortably proceed (thus usually requiring the combination of writing structure and friend head-check that such an LJ post provides). I then typically end up at 4 [footnote 2].

Ergo, the more likely it is that LiveJournal would be useful for my own purposes, the less likely it is that LiveJournal is the best forum for such purposes in the long run. Or to put it another way, the cost never quite meets the benefit.

I expect that most people have different experiences. However, given my mood recently, I've been more self-aware of personal strategies to deal with stress, and this one struck me as particularly eccentric.

Edit: jaka_merriman brought up a good tangential point, regarding LJ use in the context of free speech. I've summarized my opinions on that matter in a comment.

Footnote 1: Brave souls like naamaire excluded. This isn't a blanket statement, but a perception of trends.

Footnote 2: Although sometimes after having actually initiated 1 and/or 2, resulting in the "Where Did Your Post Go?" syndrome.

Between rereading The Tao of Pooh and The Te of Piglet and reading over Peter Merel's interpolation of the Tao Te Ching, I'm currently in an extremely philosophical mind right now, so I'll likely be posting passages that resonate with me.

9. Retire

Fill a cup to its brim and it is easily spilled;
Temper a sword to its hardest and it is easily broken;
Amass the greatest treasure and it is easily stolen;
Claim credit and honour and you easily fail;
Retire once your purpose is achieved - this is natural.

This is directed at many people (including myself):

Childhood Lesson #312

I hate the rain.

Today, as I was driving to class, I heard about a severe thunderstorm warning lasting all night. Of course, I had no coat and no umbrella. Throughout class it was fine, but thunder rolled just as class was letting out. I stepped outside, and it was pouring rain. My Czech map case (containing notebooks, a PDA, books, and all sorts of water-soluable goodies) slapped into my side as the wind kicked up. I looked out at the solid wall of rain, and thought for a minute. There was nothing I could do. My car was in a distant parking lot. I was going to get wet.

So, I calmly stepped out into the storm and walked to my car.

I'm drenched, and I'm still working through a nasty head cold. The rain was freezing. I had no coat on. If I get water in my ears, they could become seriously infected. I had a lot of irreplacable things in my map case that water would love to destroy. This is a list of things that completely failed to pass through my mind. I simply walked in a slow, steady pace. My mind was clear. I didn't notice my discomfort. The chaos of the past day, the past week, the past month wasn't there. I simply walked, in the rain, to my car.

It was a sense of peace I've been missing for a very long time now.

And now I have a nice warm cup of tea. Simple pleasures.

http://sean.chittenden.org/humor/www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html

Thanks to elissa_carey for reminding me about this document.

So there's this meme that's been going around, which is a questionnaire. It starts off pretty tame, but soon starts asking detailed sexual questions ("Would you kiss me? Do you think I'm sexy? Would you have sex with me?"). Answers are traditionally screened.

I don't discuss my sexual life in my LiveJournal (or when I do, it's a very, very rare exception), but even on a theoretical level I can't think of positive ways to answer such questions. I mean, if I say "Yes, I would sleep with you," wouldn't that just lead to a sense of awkwardness on the part of one of us (or both)? And if I take the time to say "No, I wouldn't sleep with you," isn't that cruel? And let's not get into what would happen if I posted such a meme myself. The people I already know want to get into my pants would probably reaffirm their interest in such, the people I already know have no interest in my pants would also reaffirm their stance, and the rest would lead the same sense of awkwardness.

So does the benefit one gains from this knowledge outweigh the complexities that result from asking the questions?

Edit: Since I picked up some new users, I should put out my standard disclaimer. Often when I make these kinds of observations, they are comments on a general trend I perceive through my friends list and general surfing around. I don't take one example and turn it into a passive-aggressive "trend," nor do I intend to direct my comments at one particular person.

Enough filler. Time for something serious.

Once again a crop of "It's my journal, so I'll write about what I want" has cropped up. While that's not technically true (as you are beholden to the LiveJournal Terms of Service, and there's probably a chance that certain laws like libel are actionable on blogs and LiveJournals), the intent is usually more along the lines of "These are my feelings."

And the people who say this are absolutely correct. Those are their feelings, and they have every right to offer their opinion on the Internet. It isn't stopping billions of other people, so it shouldn't stop you either. You have the right to speak your mind, to speak freely... free speech. But then I think of Mark Twain. "It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either."

When you speak freely, you have that right (in most places, but since the majority of my audience lives in places where they can, forgive me the American-centric conceit). However, you also have the responsibility of that speech. If you talk about your hobby of having sex with goats, and someone is offended that you like to have sex with goats, they can't take away your right to talk about goat sex, but neither can you say the other person has no right to be offended by your commentary.

You have the right to speak. We have the right to react. The freedom to speak goes both ways.

Of course, LiveJournal allows you the ability to censor and filter who can react to you, and that's also your right. You can choose only to speak to people that share your opinion. Whatever floats your boat, that's fine by me. I've unfriended someone simply for not using an lj-cut before, so far be it from me to claim someone else's pruning of their LJ is petty.

But don't shove responsibility for your words onto your audience. If you post something and someone reacts negatively, don't tell them they don't have the right to disagree with you because it's your journal. Don't say that someone shouldn't have forwarded a public post of yours to a forum (filtered posts are a bit trickier, but still you're putting out for semi-public consumption). You respect my rights, and I'll respect yours.

Disclaimer for the easily offended: As always, I reserve social commentary on my social group (extended though it is on LiveJournal) to when I notice a trend. As such, my commentary is almost never directed at any one person, and may have nothing to do with anyone's actions in particular. People will likely still get defensive about it, but on my end it's not personal.

I had written a fairly long post about my disappointment in people regularly proving my worst predictions about them correct, but I swiped and deleted it before I pushed "Update Journal." I did this mainly because my own opinions on the topic are very complex, and would likely cause the more paranoid readers of my journal to think I was talking about them. However, it has prompted a question that will generate more discussion than my original post would have:

Which would you rather have: that people surprised you more often with their actions, or that they could predict them more frequently?

This has been banging around in my head a bit, and a recent post by pisceskitty prompted me to bring it up here for discussion.

What constitutes being a lady or gentleman in the 21st century? Do such concepts exist at all anymore? If so, what makes someone a modern lady or gentleman? If not, should such concepts exist in our global culture? How do different cultures value these ideals?

This stemmed from a conversation I had yesterday, which came from a previous LJ entry, and rereading my philosophy entries (go LJ tags), I decided to expand on this point. ( Putting people in boxes )

This has come up a few times, so I thought I would open the topic for discussion.

What is the difference between morals and ethics?

My head has been buzzing with unsolicited compliments. Since late October, in fact, I've been getting quite a lot of them. People respect me. People are attracted to me. People value me as a friend, as a partner, as a peer.

Historically I have been very, very bad about accepting compliments. I usually blow them off, and make some sort of self-depreciating remark. In this, I am in good company, as most of my friends are just as infuriating in their inability to accept compliments unless I beat them over the head with them. (Yes, it's a double standard, but it's my double standard, damn it.)

My problem with compliments has always been two-fold - I enjoy getting them, because they make me feel good, so I like to get more of them. However, I'm afraid of getting more of them, because I don't want to become arrogant. What's worse is that, at ICC, I learned that I do have a distinct capacity to be arrogant, so the influx of compliments has been putting me in an increasingly interesting position. That's part of the reason why nickebon is arrogant. I have had success in the past transposing my negative qualities into fictional characters, so that they don't impact me personally as much.

(Of course, knowing the jokers that read my LJ, I expect a flood of depreciating comments to help "balance me out". I'm already on to you.)

Unlike a lot of my philosophical posts, I don't have a real point to this. It was prompted by a number of compliments in short succession, and I thought that maybe barfing up my headspace in LJ might cause it to make more sense to me.

Over the past few days, I've idly debated hanging up my LJ, since I've had the amazing knack of pissing off three completely unrelated people based on my commentary alone. Don't worry, I'm not going to, so don't bother posting comments with pleas to keep posting, or even to follow my initial impulse and stop cluttering up LJ with my tripe. However, I have been looking at my own words, and while I thought I was trying very hard to express my opinion in clear, objective prose, I apparently wasn't all that clear or objective sounding to the people who read it.

This thought process touches on a previous entry I made about what I feel I will and will not post in my LJ. This isn't the first time a conversation about what is acceptable or not acceptable to post will be had, and I don't expect it will be the last, but a response I see regularly to this sort of conversation is "It's your LJ - you can post what you like", leaving the implication that others should meekly accept this right, invariably lumped under "freedom of speech".

Perhaps watching Mark Twain recently has stuck in my head, but this quote of his always comes to my mind when this opinion comes up: "It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them." And thus we come to my thought for the day - a rebuttal, if you will, not to any particular journal user or comment or conversation (switch those paranoia meters off!), but to this opinion as a whole that LJs are somehow inviolate.

Yes, you can post whatever you like in your LiveJournal (within the Terms of Service, and all that). You also take responsibility for what's in that journal.

That makes for a rather boring entry, so I'll expand on it a bit. Hypothetically, I know a fellow LJ user named Joe Smith, and he's a buddy of mine who recently pissed me off. There's some confusion on whether I have the legal right to post "Joe Smith is a pigfucker" in my LJ, but let's assume that I do (ignoring libel for the moment as well). So, in some form or fashion that allows me to bypass the LJ Abuse Team, or by going to another blog provider entirely, I post that Joe Smith is, indeed, a fornicator of swine. I've done it, it's in my journal (blog, whatever), and no one can stop me, as per the argument presented above.

Let's make the further natural assumption that Joe Smith isn't happy with being publically revealed as one who does the horizontal mambo with his pork. He gets mad, and the traditional 40 or so comment long flamewar erupts, as Joe retaliates, and people on both sides of the issue chip in. "Ah," I say to the journal users fanning the coals of my initial shot, "but I have the right to post that here. There's nothing you can do about it. I can also ban you from my journal, like so, restricting your ability to speak as well." *poink*

The war continues from this point in predictable fashion, as most Internet flamewars do - he goes to his site and states his side (as the entry "No Pork For Joe" gains a respectable 14 comments), friends on both side write up their opinions, somewhere along the line a humorous website at joeisapigfucker.org is put up, and eventually the whole thing is buried somewhere in LJDrama.org, where people unconnected with the situation can point and laugh at everyone involved.

Three months later, I run into Joe at a party. As the guests are peeling Joe off of me and taking the knife out of his hands, I innocently protest that I had the right to post that.

Does that mean I should have?

My extreme example is just that - taken wildly out of proportion to illustrate the situation. However, I'm sure we've all seen times where someone posts something that, directly or indirectly, takes a shot at someone else. Discounting those who simply don't care what people think of them, the rest traditionally use two forms of defense - "I was venting" and "It's my space". While both of those are true, that doesn't mean that you didn't write those words. It's right there, in black and white (or pink and orange, or whatever mindbending color scheme you have in your journal this week). The only difference from saying it at a party and writing it in your journal, outside of the obvious technical differences, is that millions of people have the chance to stumble across your journal, possibly even months or years after it has been determined that while Joe's been curious before at parties, he hasn't actually had intimate relationships with farm animals.

Even behind a filter, those are your words. While it hurts and it always sucks when someone takes your words from a private group and sends them somewhere else (say, alt.sex.pigs.joe), others will still hold you responsible, or at least accountable for your words. If there's one way you can absolutely assure that what you write will be sent all over the world in the worst possible context, you can't pick a better choice than putting them on the Internet (except maybe politics).

As always, I'm not poking at anyone in particular, but commenting on a trend I've noticed before. Feel free to make up your own mind on the issue.

The network at work went down last night around 4pm, and while the Internet connection is up, the actual inter-office network is down. I have a couple tasks I need to do that I can't. So, I surf the net while mindless clicking on my Outlook button like a monkey on... No. I use that analogy too much. I click on the button a lot.

One of my "bored on the Net" routines is to go over to RPG.net, plug in "CAH" and "Cartoon Action Hour", and see what people are talking about, and I ended up on a thread about which people in the gaming industry others respect. It was cool to see a few names of people I know (like memento_mori and jasonlblair), but that in combination with a conversation last night about greebotrill's extensive contact with various metal musicians in the 80s had got me thinking about celebrity, and its application to me specifically. (EDIT: Also, reading "Idoru" by William Gibson is a contribution, as it discusses in the story the nature of celebrity.)

One of the things that I don't think I mentioned about my GenCon experience was that I was asked to autograph some Cartoon Action Hour books. While I had done that before for some of my friends (who I think were just being polite, or banking on the fact that I might "make it" someday so they could sell it for ph4t c4$h on eBay), I had three complete strangers ask me. One seemed so absolutely stunned when I was running a CAH event that I was actually "that guy" that he trembled while I signed his book. Further, I was approached by one of the RPG.net denizens that I know (who goes by the handle of Dr. Rotwang) about contributing to a documentary he's shooting, and I agreed more out of a desire to help a budding director than anything else. However, he seemed continually apologetic and concerned that he was wasting my time. I even had one of the guys who works for White Wolf (via Sword & Sorcery) find out from greebotrill that she was my wife, and ask to meet me, because he was a huge fan of CAH.

I suppose that I knew this would happen to some degree. I mean, it's hard NOT to get a degree of fame in such a small industry. However, I have very mixed feelings about it, and I still feel weird when people I've never met come up to me and tell me that they read my LiveJournal.

One thing I continually state and people seem to continually not believe is that I am rather shy. I don't often know what to say in social situations, so I end up not saying much. I do a lot of listening, and a lot of watching, but that also means that people don't pay a lot of attention to me. Celebrity, by the very nature of it, goes counter to this - instead, people are watching and listening to me. I can't conceive of how real celebrities cope with it, or even minor celebrities.

It's also weird on what perceptions different people have of a person. Lots of people know learsfool as a "name", usually from her hard work on L5R. To me, she's the sweet friend who has always had time for a hug and a smile for me. It wasn't until much later after I met people like bull22, adamjury, elissa_carey, and Jon S. that I found out that they were "known" - they were just cool people that I like to chat with online here and there, and I look forward to hanging out with at conventions.

And I suppose the reverse is true. For every person who sees me as "that guy", there's a dozen others who seem me as just Eddy; their friend, or fellow gamer, or online buddy, or whatever. I've heard vague accusations (mostly within the Cam) that such people cluster together because of their desire to be "elitest", but I don't think that's the case.

I'm rambling, and the IT department just found a back door, so it's back to work. Feel free, as always, to put your thoughts here, so maybe I can figure out my own thoughts more on this topic.

This past week has just sucked. I've been meaning to talk about it, but it's really safe to say that it just sucked all around. From work kicking me in the ass and my regular trips across the street to getting no writing done at all all week, I'm content to just say my farewells to the week of March 9th, and move on. So, this entry isn't about my week, but about my move, and ( some thoughts that have come from it. )