Mhhm. Yes. I need to stop posting status messages and profile comments! Better put my opinion in the blog:
Technical solutions for social problems aren’t a solution. Reducing a topic on common, concise buzzwords often isn’t enough for arguing something. In this case the buzzword would be echo-chamber – which isn’t a completely wrong word, but doesn’t explain everything.
I have seen (often young) people who are unable to cope with disagreement in any form in real life. They seem to take anything but 100% agreement as a personal attack. Short of a “block”, “ignore”, “kick”, “ban” or “I don’t want to concern myself with that” button in real life they went nuts: This can be running away. It can be screaming. It can even be crying.
On the internet they simply suppress deviating opinions with the help of such buttons. It is very convenient to silence critics this way and assuring oneself that you only use it in extreme cases after everything else failed. There are people who are unpleasant for oneself, people who have opinions contradicting all our believes, people from other cultural areas, different educational background, different Weltanschauungen [world view] (wow, I just saw dict.leo.org telling me I can use the German word in English as well)… and even people that can be called plain “assholes” (yes, I did think about this before using that strong word). Those people are part of world.
Closing the eyes will not make them go away. Closing the eyes will not make the differences go away. Closing the eyes will not convince anybody. Closing the eyes will not solve a problem. Having seen young people being unable to get along with negative feedback makes me think that these blocking abilities even do harm.
Sure, there are situations when I don’t want to discuss a thing… or a person that repeatedly got on my nerves and I see no basis for a dialogue with them. In real life, when forcefully confronted with this, I express my decision and provide a reason for this. Sometimes we can’t evade such situations. We have to deal with them.
On GBAtemp it is much easier: I ignore the person (and their posts). Not by clicking on “Ignore Member”, just by not replying (anymore) and by… yes: simply ignoring them. A task that feels so easy for me on the internet – at least when my true identity isn’t known by the other side. Compared to confrontations in real life, internet posts by strangers can’t even remotely hurt me. Quite the contrary: Posts borderlining a personal attack or poorly disguised personal attacks made me literally laugh out loud. The overused “lol” really happened whenever I got such a reply (not very often on GBAtemp). Taking a post on a forum that serious that it could hurt me… I don’t see that happen any soon.
I do not want blind spots (“ignored content”) – which is tempts to click on open ignored content anyway (“What nonsense did they post this time?”). I do not want a computer (in this case the GBAtemp server) to partially do my job of dealing with social problems.
What I have to add: I don’t use any big social media like Facebook or Twitter (never did). I can see a sensible usage for block buttons as a defense against spam. No idea how severe spam problems on social media are.
Blocking actual people, no matter how much they are getting on my nerves, is not gonna happen. My ignore list is empty and will stay empty!
Now… kill me for disliking ignore and blocking functions!
Anybody got through the text? Thanks for reading!
Technical solutions for social problems aren’t a solution. Reducing a topic on common, concise buzzwords often isn’t enough for arguing something. In this case the buzzword would be echo-chamber – which isn’t a completely wrong word, but doesn’t explain everything.
I have seen (often young) people who are unable to cope with disagreement in any form in real life. They seem to take anything but 100% agreement as a personal attack. Short of a “block”, “ignore”, “kick”, “ban” or “I don’t want to concern myself with that” button in real life they went nuts: This can be running away. It can be screaming. It can even be crying.
On the internet they simply suppress deviating opinions with the help of such buttons. It is very convenient to silence critics this way and assuring oneself that you only use it in extreme cases after everything else failed. There are people who are unpleasant for oneself, people who have opinions contradicting all our believes, people from other cultural areas, different educational background, different Weltanschauungen [world view] (wow, I just saw dict.leo.org telling me I can use the German word in English as well)… and even people that can be called plain “assholes” (yes, I did think about this before using that strong word). Those people are part of world.
Closing the eyes will not make them go away. Closing the eyes will not make the differences go away. Closing the eyes will not convince anybody. Closing the eyes will not solve a problem. Having seen young people being unable to get along with negative feedback makes me think that these blocking abilities even do harm.
Sure, there are situations when I don’t want to discuss a thing… or a person that repeatedly got on my nerves and I see no basis for a dialogue with them. In real life, when forcefully confronted with this, I express my decision and provide a reason for this. Sometimes we can’t evade such situations. We have to deal with them.
On GBAtemp it is much easier: I ignore the person (and their posts). Not by clicking on “Ignore Member”, just by not replying (anymore) and by… yes: simply ignoring them. A task that feels so easy for me on the internet – at least when my true identity isn’t known by the other side. Compared to confrontations in real life, internet posts by strangers can’t even remotely hurt me. Quite the contrary: Posts borderlining a personal attack or poorly disguised personal attacks made me literally laugh out loud. The overused “lol” really happened whenever I got such a reply (not very often on GBAtemp). Taking a post on a forum that serious that it could hurt me… I don’t see that happen any soon.
I do not want blind spots (“ignored content”) – which is tempts to click on open ignored content anyway (“What nonsense did they post this time?”). I do not want a computer (in this case the GBAtemp server) to partially do my job of dealing with social problems.
What I have to add: I don’t use any big social media like Facebook or Twitter (never did). I can see a sensible usage for block buttons as a defense against spam. No idea how severe spam problems on social media are.
Blocking actual people, no matter how much they are getting on my nerves, is not gonna happen. My ignore list is empty and will stay empty!
Now… kill me for disliking ignore and blocking functions!
Anybody got through the text? Thanks for reading!
Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory
