{Waves at YogSosoth!}
Sorry, I don’t care much for that font at all. 
I view you all as human beings with whom I have a limited, particular kind of relationship. I know intellectually that people can and do hide behind the anonymity of the internet, but I take pretty much everything here at face value.
Very dimly. Very, very dimly.
There are a few posters here I’ve met and know in real life. There are a few others that I’ve had enough interaction with through Mafia on this board and another that we’ve become Facebook Friends, so I know something of who they are in real life and feel connected to them even though we haven’t met in person. These people are more than just pixels on a screen to me. I interact with them as I would my non-internet friends.
Then there is another level of posters that make an impression and that I enjoy reading (like Nzinga, Seated yourself!). It’s likely we will never meet and you probably haven’t even given me a second thought, but I read your posts and posts of a few others as if I know you. These are people I would never consider insulting, and would it would probably upset me if I thought one of those people was insulting me.
The rest of the internet is just words on a screen.
Food and slaves. Those of you whose brains I don’t consume for nourishment will serve in the new world order.
Well, yeah, we are. Because I came over your house and you braided my hair and I did your makeup.
I agree with this. But this is still the internet, and not real life. It’s the same way if you are a dick, you will also play cards like a dick, or baseball like a dick. It doesn’t mean that playing baseball isn’t just a game with specific rules.
The thing is, even though I don’t consider myself a dick, I recognize that there are dick personalities on the internet. I don’t really care if they are a dick in real life, (they probably are, though) but their internet dickery is what I expect to interact with online. And I can suffer dicks gladly, but if people can’t suffer dicks gladly, then they should probably be careful on the internet. As a matter of fact, I would actually go so far to say it is kind of dickish to go to certain forums online if you know you are going to feel victimized by the dickishness going on. When I take my kid to the entertainment center, they offer many different ‘forums’ for play. Lazer tag, skating, pizza. They also have a rough housing jungle gym section, where the rules are different. If you go in that section, there will be children roughhousing. If you don’t want to do that, you can stay out of there. It is dickish to go in there and then complain that people are jumping all over you. Are the kids who choose to go in the jungle gym dicks also? Yes, some. Nevertheless, it seems they are all playing the same game, and those who aren’t willing to play really don’t have to.
In real life, I would never go into a jungle gym to roughhouse. You know why? Because if one of my real life friends were to get smacked down by me and feel victimized, I would feel guilty. I wouldn’t want to be in an environment where I might hurt real people, for real. But the internet is different. If someone creates a portion of the internet where INTERNET people can go and not get REAL LIFE hurt, then that sounds fun.
The same dynamic IS going on in real life, but the difference is REAL LIFE IS NOT A GAME OR A SPORT.
This is hard for me to explain, but I’m going to try real hard;
In real life, if I meet someone, and they tell me all about their life and their family and their kids, and we click and like each other, and we talk every day, and I admire her and respect her, and support her, and she supports me…and then all of a sudden I find out she lied about EVERYTHING and she is NOTHING of what she said she is, I will be HURT. I will feel emotionally raw. I will feel like my good friend turned out to be a fraud and it would effect my heart and feelings. It would make me re-evaluate my friendships as I try to make sense out of why people I accepted as friends turned out to be utter strangers.
Now, if this same thing happens on the internet; NO BIG DEAL! I literally wouldn’t care at all. I would think to myself, “Oh, I see this internetter is a troll. Huh.” and move right along, because I understand that trolling is an aspect of the messageboarding game. Everyone comes to the internet for different reasons, and trolling is one of them.
This is why the ummkay thing was such an event. Because people were treating an internet personality as if it were a real person. In my opinion, that is a huge mistake.
Whatever helps you sleep at night.
The thing is, there are already people you may verbally “roughhouse” with and be mostly assured that nobody’s feelings will be hurt. Those people are called “your friends”.
The internet is a where you go to vent upon others the bitterness and rage born from the stress of your life and from the gummy blackness that was always in your soul. You can say shitty things to real human beings who you have pre-emptively written off as shadows. … Of course, you know quite well that some fraction of them will be genuinely hurt by your words. Otherwise, what would be the point of it? If you really were just playing, you’d play with your friends.
I know EXACTLY which of my friends that I can crack jokes with, and which ones I can’t, though, colander. Some of my friends are very sensitive, and I would never play rough with them. I have one friend who I nearly lost many years ago, because I thought I could crack jokes on her husband, the same way we did on each other. She let me know that he was off limits, period. And she was a very special girl who had always been there for me and loyal to me. So you know what I did? I not only stopped joking about her husband, but I stopped the darker humor with her altogether. The stakes were high, and I didn’t want to hurt a friend. And there are no family members outside of my daughter and husband that I can ‘joke with no limits’ with. As a matter of fact, I can count on one hand how many friends I have that like to really crack jokes with no limits. Everyone else I deal with in real life, I respect them as real life friends who didn’t sign on for my brand of humor.
Your last paragraph is so interesting to me. You think I only crack jokes on people to hurt them? Then why is it that I don’t get my feelings hurt when jokes are cracked on me? I’ll tell you why…IT’S BECAUSE I KNOW IT’S A JOKE! The person doesn’t mean it.
Look, I have had my feelings hurt before on these boards. I really did. It was in response to someone’s opinion of me and I honestly felt hurt for real. But they weren’t JOKING. They were serious, and nevertheless, I just had to tell myself to shake it off and remember that it’s the internet’s opinion, and not my real friends.
If you can’t take a joke, the pit is going to be a rough place for you. Sorry. The pit is there as an outlet for people who are going to vent or rant or be shitty or amuse themselves with dumb jokes. If you come on in, and play rough and have fun, great. If you come on in and get your feelings hurt over jokes, then you may be confused about how message boards work.
It does matter to me though. I want to still be ‘internet friends’ with people who I have ‘crossed’ in the pit. It does disappoint me if I think me and you are in the pit, going at it, and then, I try to speak to you in other forums later, and you are salty, or ignoring me or whatever.
I may not even remember our ‘argument’! You just say something in Cafe Society that I want to talk to you about, but since you see me as a real person who really hates you and wanted to hurt you in the pit, you damn sure don’t want to talk to me in Cafe Society. That sucks for me.
Thank you so much for posting this. It is so different from the way I view the SDMB that it is hard to wrap my brain around, but I am trying.
I think one thing that was different about the recent thread is that it didn’t start in the pit, which meant that some of us got sucked into the jungle gym inadvertently. Unfortunately, some people were treating it as a pit thread before it got moved.
That is a good point. That thread started in IMHO. But, even though that thread sparked this one, there are many, many threads that have had me thinking about this. That was just one out of many.
And I am having a wake up call, too. I am really starting to understand that lots of people really do take the internet as serious biz.
Me? Ever seen The Guild webseries? You’re all some flavour of those guys.
Don’t ever change.
The perspective you have is, I think, one shared across much of the internet, and (sorry if this comes off as harsh to you) is why most internet discussion are so full of flaming and so empty of intelligent discussion. Because some people are believing that others are not real people deserving of real respect but characters in some sort of fantasy role playing gaming. I wonder if the people who had goaded the person on-line to kill himself had a similar attitude in their minds? “He’s not a real person. It’s just a game.”? They would constrain themselves if a person was in the room with them, but on-line? It strikes me as the same sort of psychological process that makes it easier for a bomber to drop a bomb and kill thousands than it is to strangle a single person. Or the reveal of Ender’s Game.
This is not just like real life; in today’s world communicating and connecting with others via on-line media is real life. Real ideas. Real collaboration. Real feelings. Real people. Not a fantasy land.
On these particular messageboards there is one part of the playground set aside for where the rules allow for acting like a jerk, to some degree. There insult jokes are a norm. That does not mean that speech that some of us consider hateful speech should be encouraged or even tolerated even there. And being a jerk there for the sake of being a jerk is still being a jerk to me. Clever put downs of those who deserve to be brought down a notch or so or slapped upside the head? Venting at things that really do seriously piss you off and that you don’t want to be polite about (me in my Fukken Florida Firearm Fascists thread for example)? Sure. But those who spend much time there just so they can be part of a pack beating up on someone? I think of that as real people desires and behaviors too.
I don’t take this messageboard any more or less seriously than I take any other casual social interactions. But I don’t think of you as a fictional character either. And like other social venues there are people here who I feel I know well enough to care about and whose problems I care about, people who I respect and would like to meet in person someday, and people who annoy me.
I understand that some may not be who they present themselves to be. On this board at least that is frowned upon. If you are actually a dog then on this board you should not be presenting yourself as a physicist in a fantasy role play. I do not expect that someone who does not know me too well will care what I think of them in any social venue, including this one. I do expect that someone who does know me well enough to think something positive of me, does care, including in this social venue.
Bottom line, I think that fantasy role playing should be restricted to places where it is clear that that is what is going on, with explicit rules that state such. Assuming that communication online equals playing with fantasy avatars is ill advised.
For me, this “world” is somewhere between being a game and a collection of acquaintances whom I sorta care about. There are individuals here who I feel I “know”. I wouldn’t fall to my knees and weep uncontrollably if they died, but I’d certainly feel a loss. I kinda felt this way when Askia died. But then again he wasn’t just a random poster. He had posted details of his life that intersected with mine.
Sometimes what people say here does get under my skin. But the difference between this and what happens in the real world is that the sting rarely lasts longer than five minutes, and chances are I will forget who that poster was. I’m not quite so forgiving in real life.
So this is a good question…one that will have me thinking the whole day.
In the early days of my SDMB doings I viewed a few people as friends, as we began to chat off-site through IM, but they have long since vanished from both this board, ICQ, and my life. Now I don’t think anybody on this board thinks of me as anything more than just one of the multitude, and, honestly, I have a similar view of the rest of you guys.
What I know is that most of you still don’t know what country I live in, and if I were to die it would be quite a time before anybody here noticed, if at all, especially as nobody in my real life would know to inform you all.
It’s true - I’m actually Felicia Day.
(Just kidding - Felicia Day would never use Comic Sans.)
Ha! I do. And, by the way, I did ultimately acquire a copy.
I like most of you, I think you are amusing, and I know I can come here for advice, but I admit to thinking of at least some of you as Internet Comic Book Guy.
Some major snippage in the quote. So unless I missed it, I don’t believe a single person has said they take this approach. This isn’t really an attitude I seem to see much of around here either.
I refer to you all as my “Online Buddies.” Not full-fledged friends, but Buddies. Like all social networks, you come with a few friends of friends I’d just as soon not hang out with, but they’re easy enough to avoid. If you let me know you are gathering in a place with a Mosh Pit, chances are I’ll choose to miss that outing.
The few I have met in person seem nice, and a couple were seriously wonderful people who I would like to know better. But the important bit is that when I 'm interacting on-line, I accept you as whoever you represent yourself to be. If I met you in person,I would be getting to know you fresh, as if we’d barely met. I wouldn’t assume that anything I’d read about or from you online was true.
That said, I’m pretty WYSIWYG, and don’t have any interest in creating fake personas. What I love about here is that if someone is in pain, and I’m having a hard time myself, I can trust in the numbers that someone else will be along to listen/advise/etc in an appropriate manner. And as there are many more good than bad people here, I know if someone doesn’t respond appropriately that will get handled without me as well. In my RL social network, I couldn’t make those assumptions, and would have to put my own feelings or energy level aside to provide comfort and assistance.
In terms of Pit behavior MOL you certainly come off that way.
In terms of the rest of it … perhaps I misunderstand Nzinga but what I am reading Nzinga claiming is that posting here is playing game with avatar fronts, characters … fonts, as the suggested neologism … who you do not treat like you would real people because you are playing a game and with what you believe has different rules than normal social encounters.
Do you read it differently?
Meh, if someone’s acting douchey, I tell them, Pit or non Pit, online or off. But that’s just me.
Anywho, I could be reading Bazinga’s comments wrong, but it doesn’t seem to me like she views message boarding as a game of fonts or what have you. Another board she visits refers to people as “fonts,” and I believe she brought that up to point out that it is hard to know who people are online. Hey, I’ve been parading around as a young woman with a great love of whiskey, but for all y’all know, I’m some fat dude named Frank who hasn’t touched the sauce since '78. Yes, we know these words aren’t typing themselves, and that an actual person is behind them, but it’s hard to know who people really are, which makes it hard to get emotionally invested in the whole affair. And so when umkerfuffle took place, some people felt shocked and betrayed, while others were like “Ah, so there are trolls on the internet,” then went and had their breakfast bagel.
Re: The Pit. I think her point was there are different rules there. You can call people names, which of course, doesn’t mean you have to just because you can, but people do. Hell, I’ve said a thousand times before whenever someone goes “Hey, it’s the Pit so I can” that “Yeah, you can, and I can also call your mother a whore. Not going to.” But I know, and you should know going in, some people are going to drop some f-bombs, and sometimes these will be directed at you. Sometimes it’s meaningless Pit barbing and the person doesn’t mean much by it, and sometimes the person really does think you’re a dumb shit who should fuck off. In either case, if you don’t want to read that kind of dialogue, maybe you should stay out. I think her roughhousing analogy works out. Don’t wanna get smacked across the face? Okay, well stay on the handball court.
But I’m probably screwing the point up. She’s a grown ass woman and can correct me where/if I’m wrong.