How To Have a Good Internet Experience in 8 Easy Steps

#1 – Stop having a bad faith interpretation of every thing you read

If you think something someone said might have been something you disagree with, instead of starting an argument, ask them to clarify or ask them specific questions about what they said

You will be so surprised to find that half the people you assume are being shitty or negative just didn't phrase what they meant very well

#2 – Learn to block people

It's free, it's easy, and it will save your life. Tired of someone tagging your stuff with characters from a fandom you don't like? Don't try to control them by telling them not to, just fucking block them. Less upsetting to them, less work for you, less inflammatory, more effective.

#3 – Don't share your entire backstory with strangers on the internet

No one is entitled to your information – not your pronouns, your age, your sexuality, your location, nothing.

Share the things that you're comfortable with, but remember that the more you share, the more vulnerable you make yourself to attacks. Like, do not share your triggers in your bio. You are giving abusers and harassers a to do list. Keep that shit private for your own safety.

You can get harassed, you can get stalked, you can get doxxed. Internet safety is real and necessary and the less we care about it, the more we set up future generations to get hurt through the internet

#4 – Learn to say, "It's none of my business."

Don't understand someone's desire to use neo pronouns? None of your business. Can't understand why someone is a furry? None of your business. Curious about how someone who talks about being poor can have a Starbucks in that last selfie they posted? None of your damn business.

If you don't like certain things on your dash, unfollow or block people. If you don't understand how someone can identify a certain way or do a certain thing or like a certain thing or feel a certain way or literally anything, just remember, it's none of your business.

If you have genuine questions from a place of good faith (i.e. what inspired you to use neopronouns?/what do you pronouns mean to you?) Go for it. But if you're only asking questions to draw negative attention to someone or make them feel bad or to other them, you're just being a nosy asshole.

Minding your own business is also good for you because – and I mean this genuinely – feeling entitled and superior is fucking exhausting. I know, because I've been 20 before. You will have a way better time online if you just stop caring about shit that doesn't concern you

#5 – Learn to lurk

Lurking is frequently seen as a bad thing, like someone who's lurking is somehow being creepy. The truth is, lurking is a great way to learn. More people should do it.

For example, if you're new to a community, spend some time consuming content and information from that community without saying anything. This goes for fandoms, queer spaces, disabled spaces, cultural spaces, etc.

Nothing is worse than being in a community for years and someone popping in for the first time in their life and airing their opinions loudly and with zero respect for the space. A great example of this is that post someone made about the leather pride flag. You know the one.

(If you don't, basically, someone said that the leather pride flag is embarrassing and insulting to the queer community and has no place at pride and then got schooled by hundreds of people about how the leather pride flag is one of the oldest flags in the queer community and leather daddies and leather dykes were the people on the front lines protecting other queer people from cops back in the 80s and 90s)

So basically, learn the history of a community, research your opinions before you decide they're your opinions, and keep your ignorance to yourself until you're not ignorant anymore. Not only is this better for community spaces, you won't have 9000 notifications of people telling you to shut the fuck up

Learning to lurk to educate yourself about a space also makes actually speaking in that space a lot easier

#6 – Stop believing everything you read

I'm not talking about stupid funny stories. Believe them – it's not hurting anything to get a laugh out of something that may or may not have happened.

I'm talking about news and current events. If you hear that some celebrity did something and there are no receipts, go and find the receipts or discard it. People spread misinformation on here all the damn time. It's like a game of telephone and, unfortunately, a lot of small creators end up getting slandered and canceled because of it.

#7 – Quit wasting energy on hating random shit

Being annoyed by a certain fandom is one thing, but actively hating things that other people do just because you're not into it is such a waste of your energy. Not only are you actively putting more negativity into the world, you're wasting your own time on things that upset you.

Focus your time and energy on the things you do like and quit scrolling through Tumblr user AnimeIReallyHate7648's discourse blog. You might think it's fun, but there comes a point where hating something goes from kind of fun to actually obsessive and unhealthy for you as a person.

#8 – Unlearn purity culture

This is a big one guys. What is purity culture? It's referenced a lot, but I think a lot of you don't know what it is.

In short, purity culture is when people take many nuanced situations and try to divide them into black and white categories. There's the Good category and the Bad category. The problem is, life is not in black and white. You can't put a neat line down the middle between good and bad. This kind of thinking is extremely regressive. Ask any therapist alive and they will tell you that black and white thinking is unhealthy and often a Symptom of Something.

So, what happens is, someone sees something on the good side and spots something they think is morally objectionable in it and says, "this can't be here, it needs to go to the Bad side." (Cancel culture). The problem is, people are always on the lookout for anything wrong in the Good – constantly looking for impurities so that they can completely sanitize things and therefore be free of sin. So they will look harder and harder and harder and keep moving things to the Bad side of the line until there's basically nothing left on the Good side.

This ends up meaning that perfectly good media is canceled because every character in it didn't make the perfect, right choice every time. It damages media in that it demands characters be completely flawless – something no human is. When a character does something that's actually problematic, even if the media doesn't condone the behavior, instead of engaging with it and using it as an opportunity to learn and teach other people why that wasn't okay, people who subscribe to purity culture throw the baby out with the bathwater, saying the entire piece of media should be canceled because its creators support the problematic action of that character (even if they don't).

This entire line of thinking is extremely unhealthy, heavily informed by Christianity, infantilizes adults, assumes no one can distinguish fiction from reality, and promotes censorship, which has a long and sordid history.

I could go on about this at length, so if anyone wants a full post, just let me know. But the point is, purity culture is bad for community, it's bad for media, it's bad for healthy emotional and intellectual development, it's bad for interpersonal understanding and empathy, and it's bad for you.

Unlearn purity culture and you will be a happier person. If all else fails, remember step #4.

[Source]

January 11, 2020January 11, 2020

Fool Me Once, Shame On You. Fool Me Twice…

I have a real problem with Instagram ads.

When they first appeared in my timeline they weren't all that offensive. In fact, I ordered a phone case through one of them.

Said phone case never shipped, and the only way I was able to get my money back was through my credit card company.

Since then I've been very gun shy about buying anything via Instagram, but last fall I bought a T-shirt that actually shipped:

Maybe things were looking up. Still, that memory of the phone case stayed with me, and it was only reluctantly I ordered this ODBII reader about a month ago though an ad on Instagram. I'd had a reader a couple years ago but it's long since been displaced, and the ad showed some amazing software for my phone that looked really useful in monitoring what was going on in Anderson.

The first red flag was notification that it was shipping directly from China, but I'd ordered other things (admittedly through Amazon) that shipped from China and never had a problem. After a small delay, it finally arrived last week. It was as described in the Instagram ad except for one glaring omission: you need to jailbreak your phone to install the native software.

WTF?

First of all, I'm not going to jailbreak my phone, and even if I was willing to do that, I'm not going to jailbreak it and install an unknown piece of software from China. I'm an I.T. professional. Call me…cautious.

I wrote the company asking for a refund—knowing damn well I'd never hear back from them or end up with some lame excuses and this would probably be another credit card company refund. Additionally I starting going through my feed labeling every damn ad with "scam or misleading." I'd had enough.

Surprisingly, I received an email from the company this evening. They included a different QR code from the one printed on the box to obtain the software. The QR code took me to a web page with links (all to legitimate App Store offerings) for a dozen or more different apps that work with the hardware I purchased.

I haven't had time to check it out, and I'm not going to stop flagging the flood of advertising spam in my Instagram feed, but this may yet work out and I won't have to get my credit card company involved at all.

October 19, 2019October 19, 2019

Some Thoughts About My Instagram

(To be filed under shameless self-promotion.)

Whenever I request to follow someone on Instagram—especially if its someone I know in real life—I always do a quick run through my own Insta. (Link at right.) It's not that I'm ashamed of anything I've posted—and anyone who knows me knows me—but rather just to get a sense of what I'm presenting to the world; what kind of artificially beautiful view of my life I'm putting out there.

I did the same thing last night after accepting a follow request from my old boss in San Francisco (I'd been following his nearly empty account for quite some time). I wondered what he'd think of the boy (and by boy, I mean I was 39 the last time we had any interaction and was ten years younger than that when he'd hired on as an architectural drafter in that tiny 3-person office back in 1987.

I have to say that I'm quite happy with what I've put out there. I spent quite some time scrolling back to the beginning, back to 2012 when I recreated my account after, in a fit of madness, deleted my original account when Facebook took over the platform.

My only regret is that there are a lot of duplicate images, mostly of the #tbt (Throwback Thursday) variety. I mean, when you've posted nearly eight years of photos there are bound to be duplicates, right?

I removed myself from Facebook years ago. I gave up Twitter back in July. The only remaining social media platform I'm still on is Instagram, and while I know it's probably just as evil as Facebook, I just can't give it up yet. (Although the constant barrage of random ads for absolute shit that pepper the feed on the mobile app is pushing me in that direction.) I enjoy my feed of "bears, vinyl collectors, men who apparently don't own a single shirt among the lot of them, drag queens, d-list celebrities, and alcoholics" as I like to call it. And where do you think a lot of the menz I post here come from. C'mon…

My account is locked down, but if any of you want to follow along, just send a request and maybe leave a comment here or send an email (link at right under "Warning") to let me know its you. Maybe you're already following and I just don't know…but I'd like to!

July 7, 2019July 8, 2019

What Does Social Media Do To Improve Your Life?

Do kids need social media accounts?

I'm not a parent, but this is a question I've often pondered vicariously. I wouldn't even know how to navigate raising a child in today's always-on, always-available, always-connected-and-posting environment.

I ran across this article earlier today and it really resonated, especially since I'm considering dumping my two remaining social media accounts, Instagram and Twitter, completely:

From Bradley Chambers at 9to5 Mac:

A few weeks ago, I got asked by a local church to talk to their parents about strategies to help monitor their kids' social media use. This topic is one I get asked about a lot, and I know that a lot of parents are struggling with it. When they brought me up there, they were looking for a silver bullet of an app, service, or method to use to help make sure their kids don't get into trouble on social media. I started the talk with a simple statement: your kids don't need social media accounts and you don't either.

Do kids need social media accounts?

Before you immediately close the page, hear me out. Facebook has now been around for 15 years, Twitter has been around for 13 years, and Instagram has been around for 8 years. These services have become engrained in our lives. My oldest son who is almost nine doesn't know a world without them. All of my kids have grown up with Wi-Fi, super-fast internet, iPads, and iPhones. For them, technology is a way of life. For me (I'm in my mid–30s), I grew up without so much of it. That's not to say we didn't have computers in the house (we did), but I didn't grow up with social media, mobile devices, or much of what the current generation has. I grew up playing computer games (Quake, Doom, etc.), Nintendo 64, PlayStation, Dreamcast, etc. We didn't feel the pressure to get likes, retweets, or become a social media influencer. We had the pressure of knowing the best plays in NCAA football. In hindsight, we had it much better. How did we get here? How did we get to a place where you have document everything for the world to see?

As I continued the discussion, I asked one of the parents, what are your goals for your life? They gave me a few things, and I asked how Facebook or Instagram helped with that? They said it didn't. I then asked the same parent about their goals for their kids. They gave me a few answers, and I asked how a Facebook account helped with that. They agreed it didn't. My next question was how many people have read something on Facebook that made them mad? Basically, the entire room had their hand up. I think that was the eye-opening moment for a lot of them. They realized that social media wasn't helping them accomplish their goals, and it was making them angry.

As I proceeded, I discussed the dangers for kids using social media. I mentioned that the parents of the 80s and 90s kids were concerned about their kids having computers in their room. Now, we give kids free access to the internet with a device that fits in their pocket, and we're surprised when they make poor decisions? Let me say this plain and simple: kids can ruin their lives by what they say on social media, and they don't need it. I mentioned this to a friend, and their response was that we need to let kids have access, but help them to learn how to handle it. My response was why don't we let 14-year-olds drive? We need to realize that giving kids the ability to say whatever they want to the world is a recipe for disaster. When kids screw up on social media, why are we surprised? I know that I would have said some absolutely stupid things on the internet if Facebook had been around when I was a teenager.

For my three kids, my wife and I have made the decision that they will not have social media while they are under my supervision. If they want to get a Facebook account when they are in college — so be it. They will be old enough to understand the consequences of their actions (and deal with them). I just don't believe a 15 or 16-year-old kid is old enough to handle it. I am going to help my kids avoid growing up in a digital world that is unrelenting in its ability to warp your vision of self-worth. I don't want my kids worrying about if they got unfollowed by someone or got enough likes. I want them to worry about making good grades, having fun, and enjoying being a kid. I've had a lot of people say that they will sneak and do it on their own. That is a good possibility, but as soon as I find out, there will be swift punishment. Having social media accounts is not a human right (nor is having access to technology). We are the parents, and we will make the rules for our house.

Wrap-up

So to recap, for all the goals I have for my kids, social media doesn't help them accomplish them. My wife and I haven't had a Facebook account in almost a decade, and I've never missed it. I deleted my Instagram account years ago. I keep Twitter and LinkedIn around for professional reasons, but if you told me that my future income wasn't based on having some sort of online identity, I would delete them as well. I am setting an example for my kids that we'd rather look at a beautiful scene of nature to enjoy it rather than having to "snap it for the 'Gram". We take family photos for ourselves rather than having to post everything we do for the world to see. Try signing out of Facebook and Instagram for a month and see if your life improves. I also encourage you to listen to this episode of Analog(ue) where Casey Liss and Stephen Hackett discuss posting photos of your kids online.

For all the parents looking for ways to help manage and monitor your kids' social media accounts, ask yourself if they really need them. If it's something you have to monitor daily, is it really a good idea?