That One Person

That One Person

Yeah, I haven’t been blogging for a while. For many reasons. Per my post-post-modernism epiphany last bloggage, a lot of things in the world that inspired me to spew inches and inches of text have morphed into far less objectionable forms. For example, this blog sort of started out aimed at games and gender; and while the situation isn’t utopia yet, we now have lots of facebook games and iphone games and female gamer communities, and more gender balance in WoW. And there are far less media scares blaming online gaming for the decline of civilization. Which you probably wouldn’t realize from reading a lot of more alarmist-centric journalists, who have moved on to complaining about other things than writing pieces about “hey, you know how we were complaining about this back in ’02? well, things have gotten better!”

It’s basically the industry. If you can write a piece from an “omg! read this or you’ll die!” angle, publishers will write you checks while incorporating your message into “pay attention to this publication or you’ll die!” buttressing the line between “freelance journalist” and “opinionated person who can type.”

There are plenty of subtopic areas, like “omg, that harmless-seeming, mainstream activity is actually bad!” and “omg, people with scary ideology are conspiring!” Reminds me of an old interview with Stephen King, back when he could write a decent book, talking about how he found a way to make irrationally being scared of everything profitable. Given the properly neurotic mindset, some authors can turn a trip to the grocery store three blocks away into a soul-shattering voyage of doom. But do we really want to give all the microphones and soapboxes to the chronically terrified, or depressed, or alienated?

Even this is changing as I type. I read an interesting editorial from Craig of Craigslist today about how credibility and fact checking are the new journalistic gold standard, and media outlets that manage to refrain from hysteria will be able to take that reputation to the bank (plus some of the non-working journalists might be able to find new careers as fact checkers).

And meanwhile, some of these journalists have (finally) read their comments and discovered meanness on the internet. There is plenty of talk about disabling comments on news sites, or journalists reacting to internet toxicity, like this recent one in the NYTimes, in which the author explains that she is not “evolved” enough to take the negative comments with a grain of salt.

(Thus providing a hint to why so many people would rather believe that Jesus partied with dinosaurs than accept evolution. In my decidedly unhumble opinion, people need to start separating science from quasi-mystical ideology that makes just as little sense as Joseph and Mary riding to Bethlehem on a triceratops. Can we get a fact checker in here to figure out if there are any desperately unemployed evolutionary psychologists out there asserting that evolution brings less sensitivity to insults in print – maybe with some accompanying studies involving newts and rhesus monkeys?)

I’ve written many square feet of text about rude internet behavior before, and I hear about internet meanness all the time, in WoW. On the forums there are many threads each day that start out with “I ran into this random stranger, and he said something mean/dumb/uninformed/rude to me!” Talking to my friends and guildies, there are plenty of occasions where somebody encountered a person who gave wrong advice, or said something thoughtless or clueless. I’ve definitely been subjected to it a few times. Have I performed any myself? Only in retaliation (like the other night when that hunter kept talking smack about blood elves, inspiring me to mock his feeble damage, which was below the tank).

But it’s not just in WoW. It’s also in the New York Freaking Times. “OMG! Someone said something mean to me!” Never mind the hundreds of people who didn’t say anything mean at all when encountered.

And I can sort of get behind that sentiment too. After getting pickpocketed on public transit a couple of times, I’m still doing cloak and dagger stuff like carrying my bank card and cash and keys separately, despite the fact that the vast majority of times I’ve ventured out in public, nobody has robbed me. All those reasonably law-abiding citizens out there suddenly got displaced by the two bad apples.

Granted, some of the mean-thing-sayers are pretty mean (and running around replacing your ID after some creep steals it sucks big time). It’s probably wise to guard yourself against people with an unusual personal definition of “boundaries.”

And moderation is something that didn’t occur to the early internetters, in their safe enclaves like Compuserve, and WELL, where it was safe to assume that everybody was a nice person. It didn’t occur to the designers of SWG when they allowed player housing without realizing how many players would just use it as a chance to post rude billboards. It didn’t occur to the designers of Sims Online that players would spend more time copying trademarks and thinking of creative censor-defeating ways to spell naughty words on their roofs. It didn’t occur to Craig that disgruntled exes would post fake ads inviting stupid people to non-existent orgies, and nobody even guessed in their wildest science fiction dreams that four chan would ever “evolve” (does that make them more advanced than science fiction? can we get that evolutionary psychologist back?) It didn’t even occur to the makers of Spore that all the user generated content they seemed certain would be gaming’s Next Big Thing would consist of crudely rendered wangs ‘n gazongas. Visionaries usually don’t travel in the same circles as thugs (except for the visionary thugs, see four chan).

And it doesn’t occur to a lot of writers that their tone isn’t universally palatable. For instance, I’m harping on the NYTimes author’s use of “evolved.” Which is a popular usage, especially in California. In other locations, a writer might say something about not being Christian enough to turn the other cheek, or mature enough to shrug off playground insults, or phlegmatic enough to withstand conflict with the ragingly sanguine. Or whatever.

I think this has to do with the nature of being able to sit on your butt in your living room talking to the whole world. It ain’t natcheral. And when one of your billions of planetmates casts Aura of Doubt on your own perceptions, it’s tempting to take it with the same amount of seriousness as you might take your significant other’s criticism of your cooking or bathroom habits.

And it’s everywhere. Mainstream newsblogs frequently fill up large amounts of editorial space with extended meditations on “OMG, some celebrity/rural mayor/blogger in New Zealand/anonymous commenter said this!” With every bit as much outrage as some WoW player posting about what some rude shaman said to him in a pug the other night. In fact, I was just reading a blog about WoW, WoW Insider, which usually takes a metagaming approach to similar complaints, and found a diatribe that boiled down to “I was in this pug, and some tank told me I wasn’t doing a good job, and we wiped, OMG!”

That One Person.

Here you were, cheerfully going about your day, when That One Person appeared. They unleashed a string of syllables, letters or pictures – usually a small one, comparatively. I mean, you don’t see as many impassioned editorials about “OMG, this guy wrote a whole 300 page book saying outrageous things!” or “OMG, I find that every song Britney Spears has ever done is an insult to life itself!” No, it’s always That One Person, destroying your faith in human goodness with a caustic sentence or two. Inspiring you to vent your outrage so you can attract responses like “OMG, I know how you feel, the other day this warlock told me to stand more over to the left!”

Ladies and gentleman, that one person is an asshat. And might even be wrong.

It still doesn’t mean people won’t take their asshattery to heart. Especially, well, people who have an inflated opinion of themselves and their opinions. Or people who are accustomed to be treated with deference due to their age or wealth or education or fame that step into an environment where all that is masked. Or, to be more charitable, people who are innocently doing their best and are blindsided by sudden bursts of rude negativity. That One Person and their offhanded remark can easily consume way more attention than they merit; some speculate that this is the whole reason they became That One Person in the first case.

My own theory is that most sudden outbreaks of outrageousness come from people who are acclimatized to it. Packs of dudes especially seem to delight in constantly pushing each others’ buttons, or trying to. Some families like to insult each other back and forth. In some WoW guilds, saying something like “your dps is bad” brings tears and woundedness. In my guild, the proper reply is “your face is bad” (and the proper reply to that is “your face is a face”).

And some outrageousness is indeed over the top. We all agree about that. What we don’t agree is where the lines are. Some societies have dealt with this conundrum through censorship, and some operate under an informal “you must have skin this thick to go on this ride” policy. Maybe ours needs more moderators to ease the transition.