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
…
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.)
If you check that link, you’ll see not only did Pat Smith from Hikiculture made a comment on a post I made and not only did I reply but the comment has nothing to do with the post I wrote so for this writer to suddenly imply that I won’t say anything when according to the HC blog it was written April 16, 2010 - it just crossed the line. It was utter hypocrisy. If I was considering commenting on that post initially, ahh… I just got so pissed off after reading it that I just wanted to ignore that post for fear that it would yet again be misconstrued into another Foolness attempting to flame Chair kind of attention whoring or something… (I didn’t actually know what the accusation against me was but in the earlier Hikiculture topics, when I was asking for clarification in the hiki section of AnonIB because of the things Chair wrote, the line of comments I got was along the line of “don’t make things worse” but the more frustrating thing was that when people searched for “Hikikomori StopGap” in a search engine, one of the top links would be one of the HikiCulture posts and I was worried it gave the impression that Hikikomories online bickered more against each other rather than talking about issues important to them.) At the time though, all I was thinking that I was writing for Hikikomories and even if it wasn’t anything major that could change their lives, that was what kept me going despite the accusations. After all, I didn’t promise I could do anything major with this blog other than sharing my thoughts as an individual who is a hikikomori. This post though, it seems minor but I’m legitimately pissed off. More so than that, I feel trapped.On one hand, I don’t think it’s my business. Preservative Woman and “…” can reply to that post and even if I wanted to reply, I don’t know the reality either. I don’t know those two people enough nor have I talked to them enough to have a sense of whether they are the same person. On the other hand, my silence seems to go against the transparency and openness I want readers to feel about this blog. It’s obvious that there’s some indirect connection to me when the author writes:
Sure they can clarify how they know me or are friends with me without my input but if it isn’t clear enough, I value and emphasize looking through all perspectives of the related parties mainly because as someone who has a hard time communicating and interpreting signals back, sometimes that’s the only way to receive some clarity and some semblance of “truth” especially in the internet. So I felt trapped. Not only because this was a minor issue to clarify from my side thus silence seems unnecessary but because I wasn’t going to keep readers from not knowing how the post affected me so I was obviously going to go off and make a longer post than I intended to. Worst, I get the sense that the author was merely baiting one of us three people to reply and by making a blog post rather than just a mere comment, I was increasing the popularity of said blog post. Even though this isn’t how it works and this is still a reply, I settled for the blog post because I want to feel like I’m sticking to my principles and not replying directly to the author but more to a reader who might wonder what my say in the post is. In terms of friendship, I’m no more friends with Preservative Woman, “…” and other people than I am friends with Chair.The reality is that I rarely socialize with them and even in terms of online conversations, the volume of back and forth messages I have with any Hikikomori doesn’t compare with people I previously feel as online friends. …and even that was way way in the past.This doesn’t seem I hate them or would ignore them but the reality is we don’t talk except on occasion.Even when Preservative Woman was in AnonIB, if the archives is still there, you’ll see I rarely interacted with a specific user and made topics in general. How I ended up meeting Preservative Woman and how she probably followed my blog was because when I left AnonIB, she was one of the two commentors on my blog. This was when I still didn’t have a Posterous blog and also the other commentor was an anon so that’s how we met each other: Her replying to my blog posts. Somewhere along that way, I got a Twitter account and she got a Twitter account and Twitter’s Direct Messaging became how she contacted me privately on occasion. (Like maybe she wanted to talk to me about something not related to my blog post or I wanted to contact her, that’s how we communicated.) “…” on the other hand I met in Miu Nya’s Hiki-PhpBB forum. The irony was that we never talked to each other but I was always respected his/her posts in the forum because it was more related to Hikikomoris rather than social topics like Picture threads, favorite foods and the like. I first primarily contacted him/her when he/she was planning to leave HF.Ironically at the time, I was just pming “…” as a way to keep him/her from leaving HF. I think, as far as I remember, I wasn’t visiting HF for awhile and then when I was returning, he/she was planning to leave and I was sort of hoping they would stay. He/she ended up staying longer than I did. Even to the point that last I checked the topics, you would see his/her post warning people that the forum was sort of a ghost town or something like that. (I missed the big event where apparently there was a huge argument and the community split off and many felt alienated by each other.) That was it. We never talked to each other ever again.Later when I was talking to Preservative Woman in Twitter, that’s how his/her name popped up again. At the time, I never knew the name translated to tententen and I think it was because Preservative Woman ended up using “…” instead of tententen that I realized who she meant. Still at that time, we never talked or followed each other. Maybe I did after Twitter lists came out where I was adding a/an English-speaking Hikikomori list and only last month (I think) did he/she started following me. (Note: Twitter e-mails you if someone follows you so it’s not like I was monitoring him/her.) Well that’s pretty much from my perspective. Not alot of information but that’s all the info I have of them.