“This whole sassiness thing – everything's got to be sarcastic, everything's got to be knowing, everything's got to be cynical. You've got to be on top of your shit twenty-four hours a day. THAT is exhausting. It's just far better to go, you know what? I'm just basically a monkey in a dress, and the best I can hope for every day is just to be nice, to smile as much as possible, to be gentle, try and be a bit understanding, work really hard, go and smell some flowers, have a cup of tea, ring your mum if you get on with her, just kind of dial it down a bit. ”
—Caitlin MoranWe Tracked Down Our Biggest Troll… and Kind of Liked Him
motherjones.comEver wonder what an internet troll is like in person? We met one in his lair.
Why Tumblr needs to fix its transparency problem
dailydot.comAre Tumblr’s transparency issues just poor organization, or a symptom of something more troublesome?
While yesterday’s tag search fiasco could be simply an issue of a glitch quickly fixed, it seems that Tumblr could have benefited from a quick update to its staff or support blogs to inform users about what was happening.
Instead, the lack of transparency points to a larger elephant in the room: Tumblr’s sudden stagnation in the face of tremendous growth.
In the last year, Tumblr quadrupled its userbase from 20 million blogs in late 2011 to 103 million as of this week. With over 70 million posts and reblogs a day, the growth of Tumblr is nothing short of staggering. After its latest round of venture capital, Tumblr is valued at somewhere around $1 billion.
Instead of expanding its functionality and communicating more with its userbase, however, Tumblr seems to have grown even more reticent and has alarmingly halted many of its services.
In addition to last week’s much talked-about closure of Storyboard, Tumblr’s award-winning editorial branch, Betabeat noted that Tumblr’s leadership has been floundering recently, characterized by a revolving door of executives around CEO David Karp. In addition to the Storyboard layoffs, Tumblr has seen a long line of departmental heads come and go—most recently the executive vice president and vice president of engineering.
And it’s not only Storyboard that’s fallen abruptly silent: Gifwich, Tumblr’s in-house GIF blog, abruptly stopped updating two weeks ago. Reblorg, Tumblr’s official hub for spotlighting user’s original works, hasn’t been updated in five months. Yet no official announcement about either of these projects has come from Tumblr. [READ MORE]
Some people say that the internet has created a more angry, selfish, aggressive culture.
I disagree.
Today alone I have experienced so much through the internet that has revealed more support, goodwill, and empathy than would never be possible without such a large, international network.
There’s this interview with author John Green about his new book, which was inspired by his work with child cancer patients and his encounter with Esther Earl, another cancer patient that passed away recently, whom he met through the online community that he created with his brother. The community itself is an excellent example of the kind of positive support that I’m talking about, but I’m choosing to focus on his interview in particular because John says this: “…in 2008 I met a young woman who had cancer who was a reader of my books, and through knowing her it became possible to write that story.”
Then there’s this blog post by Jenny Lawson, who recently, tentatively admitted to performing self-harm, which is something that’s difficult to live with (to put it mildly) and even more difficult to confess. The post that I’ve linked to is the post that she wrote in the aftermath, out of gratitude to the many, many, many people who wrote her emails, comments, and tweets of support and appreciation. If that’s not a positive effect of the internet, then I don’t know what is.
I think people have a tendency to focus on the negative aspects of the internet simply because it’s so easy to do so. The internet hasn’t made people more angry, selfish, or aggressive, it’s just made them more vocal. I could open any site with a comments feature right now and find any number of negative, vicious comments. They’re highly visible and numerous, which is why they’re easy to focus on, but what people forget is that these comments hold no weight in the world. They were written in a flash of hatred and adrenaline and will disappear just as quickly.
What will last are things like John Green’s book, the real life community brought about by the Green brothers’ virtual community, and the positive effects on Jenny Lawson’s life brought about by her readers. People have been able to reach out to others, to achieve lifelong dreams, and to create all kinds of art that is shared with millions of people every day because of the internet.
In closing, I just like the internet okay. I think it’s like pretty cool and junk, and uh that’s a bunch of reasons why.
“The Internet is creating markets that enable us to own much less. The winner of the ebook sweepstakes will be the bookseller who becomes a bookrenter. I don’t want to own hundreds of books on a Kindle at $10 a pop. I want to Netflix them — pay for access to every book ever published. I’d rather be a renter in Borges’ library than the owner of my own.”
—Wired, Abandon Ownership! Join the Rentership Society!How I choose fanfic, part 2
- Me: Reads through rec-lists, finds a promising story.
- Me: Hovers over link, notices it goes to fanfiction.net.
- Me: Rails at author for not posting either on AO3 or LJ.
- Me: Closes tab, moves on to the next fic on the list, with Adele in the background - "We could have had it all..."
“Friedrich Nietzsche established the “declaring things dead” form, when—after trying about 400 other aphorisms in The Gay Science—he struck gold with “God is dead” in 1882. Fifty percent hyperbole, 50 percent trolling. Well played, Nietzsche.”
—From “Declaring Things Dead is Dead” Via Slate.
Existentialists were pioneers of trolling.
Electracy
en.wikipedia.orgElectracy describes the kind of “literacy” or skill and facility necessary to exploit the full communicative potential of new electronic media such as multimedia, hypermedia, social software, and virtual worlds. According to theorist Gregory Ulmer, electracy “is to digital media what literacy is to print.” (via meinong)
