Culture

Geek As Citizen: Your Children Are Ugly And Stupid

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Atomic Bomb Test

(Going to expand GAC a bit to go beyond the abstract and the society-spanning here. I think it’ll be quite welcome).

Once among my many readings, someone said that you should treat every response to a blog or a website as a post of its own, part of your own body of writing or personal brand. I wish I could find where I read that, both because I’d like to quote it directly, and because if I somehow hallucinated it that was a pretty profound hallucination and I want to take credit.

That being said, wherever I read this (or whatever state I was in when I deluded myself) it really affected me. I think a few of our regulars here can recall how some of my blog posting and my commenting changed over the year, and that post was a big part of it. I’ve tried, and worked harder over time, to make sure if I say something it’s useful – and of course reflects well on me.

Any writer – professional or amateur, aspiring or arrived, knows that the words we craft are important. Words are part of being human, and they have an effect on others and affect us as we write them. We can become meander and crueler and make others the same, or we can practice wisdom and share it.

As we all communicate, what we write and say and post is important.  We’re all writers and speakers and so forth. The words we make are our children, really.

However a quick review of many of our linguistic offspring will make us realize a lot of our children are an unpleasant and ignorant lot.

Evil Thread: Army of Dumbness

In the last year you probably heard of Popular Science shut down online comments, noting that it could skew perception of stories. I myself felt mixed feelings on this, of course; I love comments and interaction, and dialogue.

Yet, since that incident, I began thinking about this more and more. It’s frankly not hard to find comment threads degenerating into toxic commentary, non-sentences like “Epic Fail,” and so on. It’s almost refreshing to see a good old “Ron Paul 2012” or something and you feel nostalgic in that at least someone isn’t calling someone else an asshat.

I came to realize that for some sites, posts, and so on comments were probably not appropriate for the intention of said site. Certainly I don’t think of science as a place where random comments about how one has had intercourse with another person’s combat-boot wearing mother as appropriate. There are, in short, different forms of dialogue appropriate for different people, temperaments, and sites.

Still, this stuck with me as well. Over time, as I thought about the value of comments I began to see how things could go downhill in supposedly civil conversations on sites I liked. I began wondering just what people thought they were achieving.

Of course they weren’t focused on achieving anything but catharsis.  It was just ranting and yelling into the void all too often.

THE UGLY MINERVAS*

The aforementioned advice about writing comments as actual writing is sort of the antithesis of catharsis-posts. It’s about being thoughtful, about thinking of what you’re doing, about your personal brand. It’s a deeper expression that’s not just rage, or anger, or whatever spawned the last weird post that accuses the President of practicing Witchcraft with the remains of Neil Armstrong.**

After observing posting and comments online, good and bad, for the last few months, I’m reiterating my support for the statement I discussed at the start; we should treat our public internet writing as real writing, that does something, that connects, and that doesn’t make us look like raging loons (or at least we’re well-written and interesting raging loons). We should in short seek to communicate.

Venting has it’s place, but it’s not a very big one.

Really Communicating

In the end, I think in commenting or not on sites, blogs, whatever is a case of good communicating. It’s establishing a way to talk to people, imparting information, building your brand – and setting the stage for actually talking. Yes, you may deal with ignorant comments, bizarre racism, and of course random postings of “Rand Paul 2014″*** But at least you don’t have to descend to that level – and it’s not like you’ll get much done anyway.

It’s also about how we function. As XKCD notes, someone being wrong on the internet is hard to get worked up on, since so many people are often wrong****. It’s not worth getting worked up for, not worth getting upset, unless of course there are practical reasons and we can do practical things about them.

It comes down to what are we trying to achieve by writing. If it’s only (or always) catharsis, then it’s better to take a run, get drunk, have sex, or play video games (preferably not all at once, you only have two hands). If it’s more, well . . . then that’s writing.

Otherwise it’s just shouting through our fingers.

MOVING ON AND UP

Over the last few months I’ve tried a few things to help me.  Some notes and ideas.

  1. One thing I experimented with between myself and Serdar was writing on posts I liked. That was excellent for my writing and communication, and something I really should do more on with friend’s blogs. Perhaps you’ll want to try this forming of dialogue.
  2. Read the comments sections of your favorite websites – really read them. How much of it is actually useful?
  3. The next time you see someone post something stupid that you agree with, look at times you’ve seen people post with equal stupidity but disagreeing with you. It’ll really help develop awareness of how fast dialogue can degenerate.
  4. Do treat each post, anonymous or not, as a real piece of writing and part of your personal brand. What do you really want to do, what is useful, and how would you react if people traced it back to you.
  5. Contemplate different ways to have dialogue. There’s internet comments, twitter, blog exchanges, podcast debates, etc. Which ways fit your goals best? I think at times we’ve become too obsessed with internet comments . . . says the guy who did a post on them.

Now I should note I’m not against short comments or anything. Sometimes they’re socially useful, saying thanks or acknowledging someone – in their words, polite and a part of communication. It’s just when you get going . . .

. . . make sure it’s worth it.

Less Ugly Minervas.

– Steven Savage

 

* This would be a good band name.
** I assume this is not an actual rumor. I wish I could be 100% confident that it wasn’t.
*** You know it’s coming.
**** Including your humble author at times. At times.

Geek As Citizen: Deep Geeks

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Pit Hole Ladder

One of the things that has troubled me about geek culture is that there’s parts of it that seem strangely alien and disconnected. I’m not talking the stereotype of the guy living in his mom’s basement (he’s probably busy with a startup these days). I’m talking the fact that a set of geeks can be both socially engaged, yet shockingly and even brutally clueless and insensitive.

It’s reading about women’s experience among Bitcoin enthusiasts or ignorant bro-geek activity at Dropbox. It’s wondering how people can spin weird techno-utopian political fantasies with no grounding in logic – because you’ve got the brains to at least spin these fantasies.  It’s every time someone in Silicon Valley says something clueless about the homeless and gentrification and I wonder if they even read the paper or watch the news.

And yet, some of the people I’m discussing seem to be more extraverted and socially engaged. We meet geeks who when they are insensitive, or bigoted, or clueless shock us because they’re the kind of people we don’t expect to be that way. How can someone be so smart and so bright and even social and yet still seem to live in their own world?

I’ve covered my suspicions that marketing has affected bigotry in geekdom. And I still stand by my theory geekdom in general is far more tolerant than its parent culture – but the depths can be just as bad as said parent culture. I just want to know why.

After some analysis, I’d like to propose there’s a subpopulation of geeks, mostly in the technology, media, and gaming sector that I call Deep Geeks. Read on.  I got a rabbit hole to show you.

Read more

Lost In Catharsis

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(By the way if you think Catharsis is a city in Egypt, I am ashamed for you.)

So I’m hoping to get back to posting more than updates here, now that the book is moving forward (final draft coming, I hope . . .) and I wanted to discuss some of my recent observations on culture.

We witness a screaming match among friends, watch an internet discussion degenerate into (or start at) rage and bigotry, a friend or family member appears to start a conversation and then just rant about someone or something. Everyone seems to be busy shouting, yelling, and venting, and you’d kind of like them to shut the hell up (but don’t want to yell about it and add to the problem).

Lately, I’ve been wondering about the state of communication in America, originally centering on the internet and its notorious lack of dialogues and overabundance of flame wars. Having heard how Popular Science cut comments, witnessing sleazy click bait tactics to cause controversy, watching online conversations not be conversations, I began asking, basically, what the hell is wrong with people.  Where’s all the yelling coming from?

Then as I continued, I began noticing similar behaviors outside of internet discussions. Sure there’s the screaming on television, but there’s also the screaming face-to-face, politicians who appear to have their mouths wired to a random idiocy generator, emo posturing that’s more performance art, and columns that are just rants published “professionally.”

It made me wonder is anyone actually talking? Conversing, communicating, interfacing, changing, growing, something? Anything?

Well, of course they are, but it’s sort of easy to note when it’s not happening. So of course, I began developing a theory. A kind of theory.

The internet, and a lot of people and cultures have a catharsis problem.  I think America definitely does.  Here’s the conclusions I’ve come to:

  • First, a lot of people are seeking catharsis. They don’t want to talk, they want to vent their spleen, get it out of their system, and possibly get some attention to boot.  This is normal.
  • Secondly, catharsis is sort of enshrined in our culture, there’s supposedly something admirable about going on a rant/rampage/etc. (as long as it’s on the RIGHT subjects of course).  I think this may relate to anti-intellectualism, that somehow ranty anger is superior to thinking.
  • Third, catharsis is rewarded in attention – including ad hits, power over others people congregate around their own grievances, and even election to judge by some of our more insane politicians.
  • Fourth, catharsis tends to attract confirmation, so it just gets reinforced. Because the people disgusted with you either give up on you or begin venting themselves.
  • Fifth, catharsis is rarely challenged and is hard to challenge, so the mere act of ranting may confirm people’s own biases as no one “calls them” on it (or just calls them an idiot).

So, basically we’re in a society that encourages and even rewards venting over conversation.  A sort of Moral Hazard issue of a**sholeness.

Adopting that viewpoint has made things a lot clearer to me – asking when someone or some group is really talking versus just having emotional flatulence. It explains why many comments sections end up being depressing and unhelpful, or why I enjoyed my experiments in cross-blog communication because they were.  This is a pretty useful theory.

Ultimately this enshrining of catharsis is, obviously, destructive and self-amplifying. We’ve seen many an online meltdown I’m sure, and at times when we watch crazy politicians, pundits, and preachers, we wonder what real-life meltdowns are to come (or have occurred and will only pop up in an embarrassing and traumatic investigation).

But also catharsis occupies the mental and personal space that can be used to do something constructive. Yes, we need catharsis, but catharsis is lancing the wound or opening the door – it doesn’t actually achieve anything beyond the immediate moment. Beyond the moment is when we need to actually do things.

Enshrining catharsis pushes out getting s*it done.

Catharsis’ use in the realm of actually doing stuff is perhaps a purge or a warning sign that you better fix things, but it’s rarely productive.  When it’s encouraged and rewarded, it gets in the way of actually achieving something – like, say, fixing the things that make people so worked up they need cathartic moments.

Now when I look at internet arguments and the like I ask “what’s going to get done here” or “what solutions are proposed” or “what solution can I propose.”  It’s an interesting – and at times depressing – viewpoint.

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.musehack.com/, publishes books on career and culture at http://www.informotron.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.