This is why I don’t mind reading rants:
I can appreciate that painting someone as ignorant, narrow-minded, or generally lacking perspective is a tactic of debate, especially on message boards, because it’s a way of asserting yourself as an intellectual superior. But before, you accuse me of being an ‘idealistic moralizer’ consider the image that you might be projecting as someone who resorts to tired conventions of online arguments.
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From an un-Hikikomori related topic in IMDB.
It’s still surprising how I can talk to people one on one on the internet and they would share something personal but then they would end it with something like “Nevermind. I’m just ranting now.”
The truth of the matter is that rants can be one of the most sincere and honest form of conveying yourself to another person.
Yes, if everyone tolerated every rant, we’d be knee-deep in emo mud but at the same time, to a person who really cares for the substance of what another person is saying — Rants mixed with reasoning can serve as the coup de grace to many doubts on how you feel about a topic.
It is the knife that slashes through the hypocrisy of the sounds coming out of our mouths we call “typing”. It is honest emotion sharpening honest emotion and it unintentionally produces the “grain of truth” that is often ignored and under-noticed when not said; but often becomes “stating the obvious” when unearthed and posted in all it’s simplistic but underrated glory.
In this case, this rant shows how easy it is to potshot people under the traditional rules of the internet. Most internet veterans know what I mean.
The usual “you’re banned from this forum due to flaming, trolling and spamming” was never good enough. Even an internet who read Flame Warriors know it’s not enough.
(Edit: even an internet newb)
The problem is that most internet admins and mods think it’s good enough. So much so that those who try to break the mold often resort to making “subjective” decisions and rules that often end up serving as the flip-toss for the quality of THEIR forum rather than setting up a new standard for people to follow.
The irony though is that by settling on the idea that the old rules are the basic rules and that anyone trying to change them is only being politically correct, the lack of renewed ethical perspective for this view has created the modern day internet version of the “Politically Corrects”.
One that is exclusive to the internet in that depending on what place and what culture you stumble on, you can be a troll for opposing someone’s view where as elsewhere you can go to hell and high water to become a troll — and you won’t get accused of trolling — while the frustrated victim ends up being called the troll and that’s if BOTH of you didn’t get punished. (For Christ’s sake people, trolling is not cannibalism or Saudi Arabian surprise sex! It’s not that confusing to know where the line is drawn.)
This has become a whole mish-mash of subjective nonsense that popular internet surfers like to excuse as proof for the “diversity” within the internet when in reality — like real life political correctness — it’s essentially just a monotonous, parodic, predictable and conformistic-producing mindset that is keeping the internet from improving socially as it has technologically.
http://hikkikomori.tumblr.com/post/176494546/just-a-video-upload-connecting-to-a-recent-post-i
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This; of course, extends beyond our tissues and is more of a general internet issue.
But as Internet Hikikomoris we have a special role in this ecosystem!
…
As a group we are composed of people who like to claim they are just suffering from social anxiety disorder while others want to claim we are doing this for a reason.
If you’re a neutral observer who stumbled upon our community though, would you say we were among the top eschelon for pioneering a better place for discussions over the internet? Even if you lower your standards to “Hikikomori 2 Hikkikomori” discussions?
No.
Even if you just narrowed it down to the ratio of polite users?
No. (Hell, there’s even a HikiCulture topic where some posters said they liked the smaller community because the PhpBB forum suddenly got ruder when a bunch of new posters came in.)
The bottomline, as it stands, is that we’re no better and no worse as a community than most other internet communities.
Now why is that bad?
Because most of us know and admit that we are socially unorthodox.
Now we can be socially unorthodox and accept most people’s assumptions that we are below average pathetic little social creatures or we can be socially unorthodox and use other people’s criticism of us as opportunities to make ourselves socially above average.
The dissenters might counter with the cliche “Why settle for those two choices?”
I would counter by saying it’s because we’re special that way that we can afford to have these two choices pushed against our faces and still be able to afford other choices.
This is nature’s way of asking whether we want to adapt (and accept that we are special) or conform (and accept that we are normal). This is where we as Hikikomoris in our baby form of a community decide whether we want to learn to walk faster than the rest of the babies or go back to being among those who crawl and hope by doing so, we can crawl just as fast as the average baby barring the few talented among us. This is our quest, our destiny to change
…and the crossroads we must make
…and the crossroads we must take
…AS a community
…and NO. I’m not saying we should be a group who becomes stricter with how we treat each other and better at filtering and separating the rude and inflexible ones from the polite and inflexible ones so that we may not start flame wars as much.
…I’m asking of us to push our group, our individual ethical standards and our community to become more accepting of diverse social interactions by being able to welcome both those who are rude and flexible and those who are polite and flexible so that we may start the breeding ground for a community that can be flexible yet intolerable to those who want to toe the line and pretend not to be trolls, flamers, potshotters, “etc. other Flame Warriors” and invoke rightful justice upon them while avoiding causing rightful injustice to the ones who don’t deserve such harsh punishments because we set a goal to be socially unorthodox rather than striving to be the social norm. (or below that.)
