Social Media, Soup and Sympathy

Valerie
Valerie
Jul 22, 2017 · 5 min read

As nerds or Geeks, we’re all familiar with the way things went down in high school. Odd personal habits, poor social skills from long duration of focus on esoteric subjects, strange topical obsessions and a curious attachment to leisure activities in the form of games and enjoyment. That is to say, none of us are strangers to the sense of being outcast.

I’m sure many of you, in your tender years, found more than momentary stretches of silent reflection, and likely more than a few mulled at length on the pain of not fitting in. Wanting to be liked by those you admired. Wanting not to feel alone in your own skin. Depression was an old friend to many of us.

Bullied and demeaned at school, the only solace we found before the internet was in the company of those just as strange and querulous as ourselves. Akin to the proverbial moth and flame. I certainly was no such exception to the rule. A fan of anime in the nineties, a player of tabletop roleplaying games. A Drama nerd, and someone who didn’t feel right in their own skin. Gender dysphoric.

I ask that you bear with me on this journey at length to a short thought… you see, as the internet began to be birthed, those of us growing up with it were on the frontier. Programming our own HTML by hand in garishly ugly, but functional, websites. Participating in “Web Chains”; Websites that had banner links that lead to a master list website for that same interest. An anime series, a book series, or other common interests. Extensions out of the mailing lists that existed between the BBS days and the modern web.

Forums were there too, a more formalized discussion medium than mailing lists. And it is with mailing lists and forums that I began a lifelong pilgrimage, to this day… that is also not unfamiliar to those of us who grew up with this medium. The rising and falling of communities, sometimes falling out of our own favor, or vice versa as we found ourselves ousted once more from social circles.

My own journey of community started in two places; the Ranma 1/2 anime community and mailing lists, and a place called Dragonsworn. A Website for Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time fans.

And these two places adequately demonstrate two aspects of my personality; my carefully guarded idealistic center, where my heart is exposed and vulnerable… and my curmudgeonly humorous exterior, where wit and levity is used as a de-escalation mechanism and safety valve.

It is from one of these that I was introduced to two roleplaying mediums; at the time, WBS chat and the D&D wizards of the coast roleplaying chatrooms (When they still had those). And from the other, I learned of IRC and the IRC chatrooms (In that order).

I participated in various open roleplaying groups (The kind who are very rules light, nothing really defined such as statistics), and the recurring death of friendship communities. I also fell in love a variety of times with numerous people, every one coming to a rather egregiously volatile end in the relationship category. In my youth I was much more narcissistic, tempestuous and my insecurity was magnified about my Gender Dysphoria.

From IRC, I joined the Xenosaga forums and participated there, which is where I adopted the current handle I go by on twitter… a combination of both my love of the original Xenogears as well as my philosophy courses in college, which I was in the thick of at the time.

This is only about half of the journey I’ve gone through, in various different communities. I don’t touch upon the years long nuances of friendship, love, romance and complications that any relationships invariably go through. Just like when I was a child, the feeling of social cohesion has always appeared ephemeral and slightly out of reach. Communities come and go…

Throughout all of it, a principal concern of mine has been the treatment of other people, and how the ease by which electronic mediums can bar a person from their social groups might play havoc on the emotional stability and sense of well being of people. I was always the first to bitch and chastise at moderators in IRC for kick/banning people they didn’t like, for the simple reason that they didn’t like them or had an argument with them.

It was an ugly nature I saw repeated more often than I’d care to admit. It’s the same nature I’ve seen in every moderator since then… the excuse proffered being that it is their community and they can moderate it as they see fit.

Which brings us to the current day and age. The age of Twitter and Facebook. The age when corporate concern for congeniality and usefulness necessitates the elimination of the ugly and the sanitization of the surly. Blue checkmarks and verified accounts… from Plus, to twitterverse and all across the internet, the current r’aison d’etre for corporate owned media ultraconglomerates is turning the free web into something USEFUL to them.

What isn’t useful to them are things that threaten to cost them profits. Such as language, imagery and opinions that parts of the world find offensive and objectionable. Parts of the world which serve as markets to their gluttony and greed. In a truly global system, there’s no motive to adhering to American principals of freedom. Not when Iran and Germany have objection with portraying a man dead thousands of years or favoring Nazi sentiment.

It is not merely a few countries either, no. There are very few countries with as broad a disposition towards free speech as the United States, and always something worth censoring in them. The call for hate speech here in the United States is merely a push to popularize the sentiment so that the United States can itself be brought into alignment with what is profitable and useful to the deep pocketed financial interests in our interconnected world.

And somewhere, in a room unknown and unnamed, an emotionally fragile and lonely person finds themselves suddenly cut off from social media. Perhaps it was the only place where they felt like they had friends. Perhaps they were autistic, or had agoraphobia, or crippling social anxiety… but in the wake of a petulant blue bird, their world is suddenly silenced and erased. Mere pieces remain, cobbled together from the threads of other social media.

As big as the world gets, it is closing in around them, and their functional erasure is far more complete and isolating than the days when bullies threw you in a locker for being a little different.

We’re all human… and we all shatter like glass when dropped. It’s just a matter of how high we fall. And like soup, once brewed, can’t be separated… it’s terribly difficult to put the pieces back together when a faceless corporate selfishness decides you no longer deserve a voice.

@TheHereticOfEthics

Valerie

Written by

Valerie

A philosopher, a Writer, a general public nuisance and Heretic of Ethics. The Demon of Elru.

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