Ponderance

[textualdeviance]

Maybe I'm just imagining it, but it seems to me that the quality of online discourse has declined at the same rate of improved connectivity to remote areas in red states.

Used to be, when you'd have a debate on some forum or whatever, you'd get a certain quantity of misanthrope trolls, Randian megalomaniacs and far-out space cadets, but overall, things were relatively sane.

Sure, people would disagree, and politics and such were never homogenous, but people knew that a poorly spelled missive with no research beyond "this happened to my cousin's best friend" would earn them a boot to the head. You had to be sharp, coherent and completely prepared to back up whatever you were spewing or you'd be Instant Breakfast for one of the guys who ended up founding Wikipedia or something.

But now that one-horse towns have broadband, all of a sudden, the whole internet's becoming less literate. It's no longer enough to simply avoid users with AOL or WebTV accounts and the back-fence chittering spaces they'd frequent. Any public posting that hits on a topic of interest to mouth breathers with an eighth-grade education and a sincere conviction that gay people and feminists are agents of The Terrorists will, as a matter of course, be flooded with barely readable posts from said numbnuts.

Oh, for the days when it was just the script kiddies, the occasional Ponzi schemers and that one weird guy who kept trying to get you to believe that the Masons are behind everything and you can get free electricity by sticking paper clips into pickles.

And when forums actually had moderators.

Sigh...

Comments

[penguin-attie.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, the good old days when only well-educated rich white nerds had access to the internet.

Well, the internet as a whole is no longer a safe space for us, but there are enough of them still left that I won't bemourn that bit of privilege.

[textualdeviance.livejournal.com]

Eh, well-educated nerds I'll give ya, but I don't think rich and white has anything to do with it (beyond the correlation of those things with access to education.) Easily 75% of the people I knew back in my BBS days were barely scraping by, or had access only from school or a library. Intellectual curiosity and respect for knowledge knows no race or income.

I also wouldn't say that it's true that there are plenty of nerd safe spaces left. True that we aren't persecuted at the same rate or severity as before, but we're a very long way from cultural dominance, espcially in much of the U.S., where ignorance is celebrated as a virtue.

[penguin-attie.livejournal.com]

Well, yeah, I rescind rich, that was mostly for rhetoric effect. White was probably just because I extrapolated from the situation in Germany, where the closest to an ethnic minority would be the Turkish (who are white too if you want to be technical about it) and there are very few Turkish kids who get to college. (Schools fail totally at providing internet even today, and only university libraries would have decent computer pools, the two local libraries I visited as a kid had only one computer and enforced a very strict 15-minutes-only internet policy.)

I'm a bit puzzled as to equating safety with cultural dominance though. Do you mean that you will only feel safe once the nerd way of life becomes the standard?
I'll admit the situation is better in Europe though. The Pirate Party is really gaining momentum over here, and everyone else just doesn't give the tiniest fuck about politics any more, so suddenly political activism is a nerd space...

[textualdeviance.livejournal.com]

The cultural dominance thing was in response to the implications about privilege (and safe spaces.) True that nerdy folk have some measure of privilege in a lot of situations, but I'd hestitate to say that we're culturally dominant enough to be "safe" in general circumstances. (And that's especially true for nerdy women.)

I think you're probably right that respect for knowledge (and therefore respect for nerdiness) is a lot more widespread in Europe. It seems ridiculous in an age when the richest people in the world are often tech titans, but nerdy kids still get beaten up in U.S. schools, and in some subcultures, liking education or "showing off" what you know is considered the height of uncool.