I am laughing at the idea that there is a morally superior way to ignore people on an internet forum. Everything is political nowadays, I guess.
Depends on if you subscribe to the idea that the internet is the way it is today because people insulate from opinions they disagree with, or not.
I have a real-life friend whose opinions, if I were to hear them on a forum, would severely reduce my enjoyment of the forum. He's a friend from before we even ended up going to the same school, and as such I enjoy his company in other matters enough to remain a friend despite said opinions. Starting from scratch, I'm sure I would dislike my first impression of his character. It's a tough philosophy, knowing that there's either someone whose friendship is conditional on a certain amount of filtering, or else that I'm potentially filtering other (platonic) soul-mates because of less extreme disagreements than in the former case.
As far as I know, though, he occupies his own echochambers of opinion and I (so he would say) frequent my own echochambers. I don't expect to meet him in 'opinion-based' areas, because the kind of opinions around which such fora occur just don't mix. I don't follow his accounts on Facebook or Twitter because I don't follow
anyone.
But that doesn't mean that we might not see each other (probably unknowingly) on a forum surrounding something apolitical (say a game) which has side/lower-forums within which a mix of persnalities who came here for the game end up arguing politics/religion/etc. I'm fairly confident that this isn't happening here (with me and him) because he doesn't play DF (although he knows it exists... and always a
slight possibility that he's cyberstalking me).
Anyway, I perhaps use my experiences in the real world to try to pursue a policy of not pushing my opinion on others (not the same as not
exhibiting my opinions, please note) and trying to first understand when there's a disagreement whether the problem is with my understanding of others or the others' understanding of me. I sometimes feel that my 'opponent' isn't appreciative of this, or is but takes advantage of it, and of course what is my subjective reasonableness might will, objectively, be seen as stubbornly missing the point.
But I don't like ignoring people. That's either a virtue (no reagquitting) or a problem (
I don't leave well enough alone), but I
try to look (and actually be!) reasonable, and I do get hurt when it appears my efforts are in vain. That's probably the trigger for this thread and, like others who have pulled triggers, I'm not entirely sure I should have done it. But 'tis done, so...
Sorry, a diversion through my soul, there.
The Internet is a funny thing. (Funnier in some places than others.) People diversly geographical can 'unionise' around a common ideological interest and chat away to their hearts' contents towards making the world right whilst near-neighbours can accumulate 'elsewhere' and create their
own concensus of an entirely opposing kind, all the while never the twain shall meet. In this manner, it is an insulated set of disconnected garherings. And yet all but the most single-minded individuals surely have other interests, which enforce gathering around nodes such as this, a form of the Small World Network
1.
I think it's probably ok to be cliquey, but bear in mind your audience. Cries of
MAGMA!!! rebound fitfully outside of Bay12, the relevent Reddit subfora or quite specifically the DF-related threads created sympathetic but otherwise unrelated BBs. Other localised memes from elsewhere probably don't work too well outside of their core audiences, either. The main complaint I had (finding myself trepidatiously heading back to the issue I may have erroneously originally tried to raise) to start this very thread was that in-joke terminology from a different 'crowd' was being repeatedly used in a (what I perceived as inappropriate) situation outwith the core audience.
To analogise, a guy in a club goes up to a group of girls and says to one of them "I really like your dress.... on my bedroom floor!". A variation on the lad-chat langage he's just been having with his mates on the other side of the dancefloor in the pre-'pickup' male bonding routine, perhaps. The girl says no, rolls her eyes, calls him a creep or perhaps just ignores him enough that he gets the smallest hint that the 'conversation' isn't going further, so he turns to the next girl and, being witty as a newt, says rhe line
again. He's proud of the line. It's his new favourite, and even better than the "how do you like your eggs in the morning?" one, that he can never quite remember whilst drunk. Rinse, repeat. He gets asked by the fifth girl
why he's sayng that, and he says it's because it's funny. Or 'legendary bants', perhaps. But in such a real-world scenario, the group of girls would probably move away or push their erstwhile serial-suitor out of their personal spaces with positive discouragement, whilst maybe trying to catch the attention of the venue staff to see about making a complaint, or at least increase the heaviness of the hint.
Perhaps it's not quite the same, and perhaps 'bants' are to be expected in
this 'nightclub', but what if I came in for the music (there's a live band on tonight, that I like) and it's not a rowdy place. I can chat with the girls or the boys, as I like, above the background of significantly but not over-whelmingly amplified rhythmic bass, and it' s going well. There's this guy trying to chat me up, after a bit too much Dutch Courage, but I don't want to get him thrown out by the door-staff... When I voice my opinion that that I'm not in tne mood for bad pick-up lines, his retort is that they're
good pick-up lines. So I turn to my girlfriends and ask "do you hear this guy?" and perhaps I
do expect some solidarity, or perhaps I'm willing to be told that I just need to chillax a little and have another drink, because I'm several shots behind the others and we're supposed to be here to PARTY!!!...
Awful parable, especially near the end there. I didn't even mean to meander into the original issue again. Consider my arguments about that to be closed, but I'll keep the thread open (just like I didn't want to close the thread after my initial realisation that this might be a mistake) because I can see some side-conversations developing that I don't mind seeing continuing, whether or not I join in with myself). Magmanimous, aint I? Well, I just don't like shutting conversation down, albeit I can see "please don't say that" in private and then bringing it out into the public eye might be interpreted as exactly that...
1 Rather than nodes being individuals, connections being relations and hub-nodes being the more well connected nodes, instead consider nodes as meeting-places, connections being each pairing of places that one or more individuals co-participates in and hub-nodes have more diverse crowds of visitors than a sub-network of "if you're on the Pin Lovers site, then you're probably a contributor to Encyclopedia Acuphilia"
2, whose combined membership is small so that even though the lines between this grouping are equally bold from the weight of the 'shared shared interests', only a few links to
actual hubs are made outwards from either individual member nodes or the constellation of largely incestuous co-membership locales.
2 Both made up/partially plagiarised from someone who
did make up the idea, as fictional examples. But if Rule 34 hasn't yet been invoked, I am dissapoint...
Author
Topic: Am I a grammar nazi? (Should that be a capital 'N'? What about the 'g'?) (Read 9876 times)