The Shrine

Sometimes I feel reading stuff online is like watching the de-evolution of humanity. I mean I have no illusion about the Net being a place of spiritual enlightenment, but sometimes I think you can find more stimulating conversation in an elementary school than online. Here are two I ran across today that gives me less faith about humanity since they exist.

1. The stupid picture with captions. I think the most common one you see is the special olympics one about how winning on Internet is like winning in the special olympics and shows some mentally retarded person jumping over a hurdle. 99% of such pictures are stupid and don't really pretain to the subject at hand, but people like to use them probably because they really want to use the picture. It's sort of like people who try to purposely invoke Godwin's law to end a debate without realizing that Godwin's law says you cannot purposely invoke Godwin's law to try to end a debate, but at least Godwin's Law is sort of well known compared to some random photoshopped picture with words.

The implication here seems to be like: I have a cool picture -> I better use it -> I win.

2. The 'fixed for you', for example

Don: The world is round

Don said:
The world is FLAT

Someguy: Fixed it for you.

I'd equate this to being in elementary school when you say something and someone disagree citing "Because" as a reason, but at least here the guy saying the "Because" showed a willingness to commit to a stance even if he cannot give any valid reasons to do so.

I have noticed this tends to happen more often in a psuedo-intellectual community. You'll rarely see behaviors like this in say, a system war thread. It'd most likely just be something like "NINTENDO SUXS AND YOUR DUMB" and again, that'd at least indicate a willing to take a stand instead of completely avoiding the issue altogether. I often see people say people online act like children, and I think that's unfair to children. I certainly don't recall any children that are as dumb as some of the people I see online.

Just cuz it rulz.

Everything is on a 3-second time limit nowadays due to people's impatience (as the popularity of Twitter is proving). Also, no one wants to actually discuss anything with any depth since there's the off-chance it may lead to the most unbearable thing in the world: a shred of conflict (or the second most unbearable thing: the feeling of inadequacy). So people resort to insults, comedic tangents, and/or silly pics to veer as far away from that as possible.

It's almost as bad here as it is anywhere else.

I think you're just bitter about two valid forms of Internet communication. (No, I'm not using the term "meme".) Some caption pictures are pretty funny. Being able to use images in conversation means that we get to post pictures with captions that compares with the situation. It gets the point across about 100x times faster than trying to describe a situation for two minutes.

And FTFY? Well, shit, we've been doing that offline for years. "Well, that would be correct if you replaced the word _____ with _____." And other variations. Since it's a written word conversation, it's easier (and in some cases, funnier) if you replace words and FTFY.

Yes, people have valid and thought out conversations, but like the description on Ruminations implies, it's like writing two hour replies to each other. So, many people go the shorter route. To be honest, it's not that different offline. People have small talk type conversation even with important topics, and even when it's serious, it's not thought out at all and just a bunch of uneducated theories and recited talking points. At least with written word, you have the chance to actually say something important, even if we don't always have the time.

I have better conversations about various topics here and on even places like Fark than I do talking to people offline. I think it's just fashionable now to bash on the Internet as being this useless stupid medium.

If you noticed, I wasn't bashing the Internet specifically. I was talking about peoples' mentality in general. It's even worse IRL than on the 'Net

The Internet doesn't give you any indication that you should stop. If you do an equivaelnt of FTFY and everyone looks at you like you're an idiot, you'd probably stop doing it for a while. If you actually have something clever to say, people would approve it.

Don wrote:The Internet doesn't give you any indication that you should stop. If you do an equivaelnt of FTFY and everyone looks at you like you're an idiot, you'd probably stop doing it for a while. If you actually have something clever to say, people would approve it.

Having something clever to say or making a good point often requires more than 2 sentences or 4 seconds. The vast majority of people I've encountered - even myself on a semi-regular basis - do not have the attention span to read that much or wait that long. There's tons of conversations that don't go anywhere because of that. Hell, I give a very Coles Notes version of anything I want to post here 'cause if I don't, no one will read it (and even then they don't read it 98% of the time 'cause it exceeds 2 sentences; I can only condense so much without losing the point).

Don't use yourself as an example, you're an exception to the rule.

I'm not using myself as the norm. I'm well aware I'm outside of the norm, but it really bothers me that some people seem to put less effort in writing than a console war flame post. I've seen plenty of post that apparently have no thought in it but at least the result vaguely resembles English and that's okay. It's when people put even less thought into a post that really bothers me. I also recall seeing people just quote each other 10 times without even adding anything because it's fun to make a pyramid of quotes. There are posts that have no thought in them, and then there's posts that seem to be just a waste of bandwidth.

Don wrote:I'm not using myself as the norm. I'm well aware I'm outside of the norm, but it really bothers me that some people seem to put less effort in writing than a console war flame post. I've seen plenty of post that apparently have no thought in it but at least the result vaguely resembles English and that's okay. It's when people put even less thought into a post that really bothers me. I also recall seeing people just quote each other 10 times without even adding anything because it's fun to make a pyramid of quotes. There are posts that have no thought in them, and then there's posts that seem to be just a waste of bandwidth.

That's laziness, the lack of attention span and fear of conflict. That's what we have to deal with as most people are like that. These same factors are what allow our politicians to do whatever they want with little to no regard for the public.

Don wrote:I'm not using myself as the norm. I'm well aware I'm outside of the norm, but it really bothers me that some people seem to put less effort in writing than a console war flame post. I've seen plenty of post that apparently have no thought in it but at least the result vaguely resembles English and that's okay. It's when people put even less thought into a post that really bothers me. I also recall seeing people just quote each other 10 times without even adding anything because it's fun to make a pyramid of quotes. There are posts that have no thought in them, and then there's posts that seem to be just a waste of bandwidth.

Well, a lot of that depends on the audience. There are websites where the intelligence just isn't there.

I thought YouTube had bad commenters, but the guys at FailBlog are stupid childish dumbasses. It's annoying when you expect a Fark-like audience and get comments that are absolute garbage. YouTube has actually improved at bit, and Fark has surprisingly intelligent commenters for the kind of site it is.

Youtube is a good example. "This is great" or "This sucks" is a perfectly valid response and while they might not say much, it's not going to make you question the state of humanity. And then there's the stuff that does make you question the state of humanity.