anonymity

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World: Brexit: MPs debate next steps ahead of indicative votes (My two pence: If they don’t give us another vote, they’re ignoring democracy for their own ends)

I’m going to be honest with you, reader: I’m pretty mad right now, and it’s for the most asinine reason. I’m mad because I presented a simple question to the internet and was met with hostility. Crazy, right? Who’s ever heard of that happening before? But when I asked r/PS4 if there was any way to boost the visibility of demand for the Ratchet and Clank original trilogy to be ported to the console, I was mocked for not knowing how game development works or how businesses are run.

“Well, it is reddit.” Right, yes, reddit has a proven record of being infested with toxicity and swathes of psuedo-intellectuals who all think they’re the smartest person around. But it’s not just a reddit problem. It’s an internet problem. Everywhere you look, self-assured cynics are spouting obviouslys and naturallys and generally patting themselves on the back for knowing more about the world than the perceived masses of the stupid and the naive. That’d be bad enough, but anonymity gives them license to be as hostile as they want, and cartoon avatars further distance any empathy these people would otherwise have, burying the fact that the person the spitting venom about videogames at are real people. Teenage Kristian would be mortified to hear me say this, but I would not miss anonymity on the internet if it went away. I’m that tired of people.

Anyway, er… besides that, my week’s been pretty good. It’s April 1st (hurr hurr April Fools, I fooled you into reading my regular weekly blog post) which means we’ve begun the month that has all the exciting things in it. Mostly I’m referring to the final season of Game of Thrones and Avengers: Endgame releasing, but there’s also Shazam!, Hellboy, the Borderlands remaster and more coming out this month. It’s a pretty rad month! And while I can’t think of much happening in May, I know that there’s more awesomeness approaching in the summer. It is a good time to be interested in the things I’m interested in.

Since I know that future Kristian is reading this, I’d like to update him on some contextual information: I’ve just decided to reformat the Roguelike Ramble into a style of livestream after playing Risk of Rain 2, I’m working on my first month of weekly videos where I spend an hour in a game and upload 15 minutes per week (it’s Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, not that anyone knows it yet), and I’m currently binging all of the Legend of Zelda Game Grumps series that I can find. This might be interesting to you, dear reader, but if I’m being brutally honest this is just padding. Once again I’ve been blessed with a quiet week, and little to discuss. Don’t worry; the mind is never calm for long.

I love the internet. Chances are, so do you, considering you’re here, reading this. I’ve always been against SOPA and all the other attempts governments have made to control this place. So believe me when I say that this blog post is not biased against the web.

I’ve heard it said that the internet as we know it today hasn’t been around long enough for us to assess what kind of an impact it’s made on society. There hasn’t been enough research to show any telling statistics; there hasn’t even been reason to prompt research in the first place. Not that I’m aware of, at least. This tells me that we’re still assuming the world works the way it did before we had troves of information in our pockets.

Before we go any further I want to stress that I’ve never done any kind of course in psychology or sociology, and I’m open to being wrong. This theory is based completely on logic.

One of the key aspects of the internet is anonymity. You’ll see this in the form of usernames; quite sensibly, people don’t want to tell absolute strangers who they are or where to find them. This does, however, give birth to a new kind of freedom. My favourite point of reference here is the Youtube comments section. Look on almost any video, whether it’s to do with music or gaming or even science, and you’ll get the same twelve year old children calling each other derogatory names with enough spelling and grammar mistakes to make an English student quietly shake his head in disapproval. Without any kind of reprimanding, people say what they want. Chaos reigns.

I have two favourite examples of this being different; Facebook, and Reddit. First and most simply, Facebook. You’re far less likely to find such unprecedented insults on Facebook because people are heavily encouraged to use their real names, and have to accept friend requests before they do. My other example, Reddit, is an interesting one. People can take on any username they want – causing interesting scenarios in which I’ve spoken to people such as I_SMELL_FARTS – but there is still less chaos to be found. This is because of the karma system. The clever way in which Reddit is designed heavily discourages those with less karma. You can either upvote or downvote what people submit and say, and generally this causes the atmosphere to become more controlled and sensible.

I may have gone on a slightly longer tangent than expected, but I’m getting there.

Anonymity combined with social networks is a strange phenomenon. More likely than not, you’ll find that the minority voice suddenly becomes the majority, for reasons which I can only speculate; I’d wager that the lack of regulation sees more like-minded people from varying locations able to communicate for the first time, and subsequently become more excited and driven about their previously solitary-seeming motives. I’ve noticed that websites which utilise a follow system, such as Twitter but more particularly Tumblr, are heavily important to this idea. I find that depending on who you follow, any minority voice can easily have the illusion of seeming like a majority. Ideas such as extremism and more emotionally-charged conversations will take place, and an aura of negativity and weight will surround the subject. As the user is sucked deeper into the minority voice, they end up following more users who are contributing, and none of those on the opposing side. This causes a kind of tunnel-vision, making certain issues seem more prominent than they really are.

The world around you changes based on your perspective, and your perspective is derived from the opinions of others.

Basically, my theory is this: In the long run, people’s perspectives are going to become more based on what the internet tells them than what the world around them suggests. Anonymity will cause these opinions to be more charged, whereas the nature of the websites themselves will cause the opinions to seem more widely supported. Whilst some may consider this a good thing, I can’t help but believe that the minority voice is a minority for a reason, and when given the illusion that it is major, may make the world seem like a much darker place. This could cause the general public to become more pessimistic as a whole, and perhaps crime rates and extremist actions will go up. What doesn’t seem like a pressing issue today might do tomorrow, and the world might change before it realises that what it thinks is happening for the greater good is actually happening because of a minority group who are emotionally charged.

I love the internet. It allows like-minded people to come together and create wonderful things, for an easier distribution of entertainment and a louder voice for world leaders to hear. But I can’t help but feel that everything I’ve gone over in this blog post is already starting to become true.

I’d like to reiterate one last time that this is nowhere near my area of expertise, so my wording may be questionable and my metaphors clumsy. I hope I’ve managed to write about what I thought I was writing about, and not something else by mistake.

Perpetually Perturbed

Kristian Richmond's Musings and Meanderings

Year to Year: A Journal Through Time #11 – A Small Rant (4/1/19)

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Further reading:

The Impact of the Internet on Modern Society