
Unfortunately, the media isn’t super helpful on the education front, because more often than not the whole industry is like if a circle jerk and a country club merged. The people who write with and to and for one another sometimes enter their club and jack off about …
I don’t want to make the internet a super serious place, but I cannot stand the fact that right now it’s a mean place. I build internet communities for a living, for god’s sake: I am in this line of work because I love the connections the digital world has given us and I think it is hugely powerful and essential for us to move forward in the future. I see the broad expanse of what internet culture and connectivity is doing to us and while I do see immense good, the ugly snarl of negativity, hate, and anonymous shittiness is a normal fact of life that humanity needs to stop accepting. “Have you been on the internet?” should not be a rhetorical question that means “of course bad shit is going to be said.” And we should not laugh when that statement is uttered: we should all be really, really fucking depressed with ourselves and our fellow humans.
There are a thousand ways to shoot down, belittle, and deride a topic a person cares about and only a couple (usually uncomfortable) ways to listen and respond respectfully. The former gets upvotes, shares, likes, and laughter from other like-minded people. The second take…