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Too many people have peed in the pool

stephenfry.com

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Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#81

Post by zkhalique »

jgrahamc wrote: post #63
jonstokes wrote: post #38

I have a theory about FB and Twitter -- or maybe more of an observation. Anyway, back in the stone age, people had bumper stickers with little slogans on them. And in the break rooms of various places of work, there was always a bulletin board an on a corner of it there was always some faded-from-to-many-xeroxes bit of humor/racism/sports fandom/sexism/dirty joke or other us-vs.-them thing on it that people would loo…

It's like the way that millennials communicate with emoji I'm GenX and not a millennial. I don't see anything wrong with using some emoji as part of my language. I already speak a language (English) which is some bastard child of French, German, Dutch, Arabic, etc. I'm happy to add a (poo emoji) when it's appropriate.

Emojis are fine. But I remember the first times I started seeing "LOL" and "ROTFLMAO". And I realized that the person wasn't really laughing, but they were quietly typing that on the keyboard. If you think about it, before AIM and online chat (way before texting), people hardly ever faked their emotions so much. I mean, you could fake a small laugh, but you didn't outright say that you're rolling on the floor laughing, while you weren't even cracking a smile physically. That would be impossible over the phone, and AFAIK people didn't do it over email, either. It's a product of the instant-message culture.

And it also symbolizes the disconnect between the online persona on facebook, posting all those cool photos, and the real-world person sitting by the computer all those lonely nights. The emotions and the fulfillment of the emotions have become stilted, computers now provide a superstimulus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus) that replaces deep, real-life conversations with a steady stream shallow online interactions. Notifications pull us back in for more like an addictive slot machine. And our kids are ill-equipped to fight it, which is why they spend a great deal of their lives addicted to effectively meaningless communication with people who are not next to them:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/benrosen/how-to-snapchat-like-the-te...

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#82

Post by haberman »

Sanctimonious indignation is toxic. But to be fair, people post really offensive stuff too, and often it's well-meaning people who don't even seem to realize what they are doing.

The best example I've seen lately is Richard Dawkins, who posted a video I won't link to where an Islamist and a Feminist are singing a song together. The video makes a real point that isn't intrinsically offensive. But the highly caricatured portrayal of these two people is, to me at least, a pretty inflammatory gesture. Also it came out that the feminist caricature is based on a real person who has received death threats for her work.

Humans aren't programmed to live together with people who are really different from them. We evolved to preserve our in groups and unify against out groups. We have huge blind spots about how other people will perceive things. We can absolutely learn, but it takes effort and we'll make mistakes as we go. Twitter is all of this happening in real time.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#83

Post by cazum »

KaiserPro wrote: post #65
jgrahamc wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like the way that millennials communicate with emoji I'm GenX and not a millennial. I don't see anything wrong with using some emoji as part of my language. I already speak a language (English) which is some bastard child of French, German, Dutch, Arabic, etc. I'm happy to add a (poo emoji) when it's appropriate.

emoticons were annoying on MSN messenger. I'd hope that people will grow out of it, like they did back then. but perhaps they are here to stay.

I don't think MSN users grew out of emoticons, they just stopped using MSN. Facebook chat, Skype and SMS picked up where MSN left off, and all three of those have a strong emoticon game.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#84

Post by cubano »

willvarfar wrote: post #13
lordnacho wrote: post #4

It's a wonder he lasted as long as he did. I've joined a number of online forums through the years, and I've always ended up leaving them due to a spiral of "tone gets rough / the good people leave". I'm still in this one, but I guess we'll see how long it lasts here. Seems different somehow, but they all do in the beginning. What are some innovations in solving the asshole/quality spiral? There's lots of takes on mo…

Joel Spolsky wrote an excellent post on building a community: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BuildingCommunitieswi... Of course he later closed his flourishing community suddenly. Very suddenly. Everyone was confused. And the worlds he's built since, such as StackOverflow, are deliberately completely devoid of all community. The smallest remnants of the community survive and evolve at http://www.crazyontap.co…

Is it just me or is Joel's insightful article really depressing?

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#85

Post by freehunter »

KaiserPro wrote: post #65
jgrahamc wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like the way that millennials communicate with emoji I'm GenX and not a millennial. I don't see anything wrong with using some emoji as part of my language. I already speak a language (English) which is some bastard child of French, German, Dutch, Arabic, etc. I'm happy to add a (poo emoji) when it's appropriate.

emoticons were annoying on MSN messenger. I'd hope that people will grow out of it, like they did back then. but perhaps they are here to stay.

I don't think they'll ever go away, and that's because of the nature of short-form text communications. You need to express emotion, something language is bad at doing in short-form. Longer expressions can have great flowery emotion, but "im gonna kill you" can mean a lot of different things depending on the emoticon or emoji that follows it. And that's really important.

Some people write long messages to convey emotion. Others use ambiguous phrases and follow it up with a quick expression of emotion to set the context.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#86

Post by rblstr »

I watched the BAFTAs with my girlfriend last night and I have to say, when Stephen made that comment we both said 'woah that's a bit mean' out loud. Of course, being the general public we're not aware of Mr Fry's relationship with the lady who won the award but from an outside perspective it came across as a bit bullying.

I only found out today about the twitter backlash and I don't think it should be lumped in with so called SJW movements, or the anti-anti-offensive movement, it really sounded like a hurtful unnecessary comment that he shouldn't have made without context or clarifying their relationship. It really seemed un-characteristically mean for Mr Fry.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#87

Post by monksy »

reitoei wrote: post #32
seren wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if it will prevail in the end, but I think that Reddit approach by splitting the community in small subgroups/communities has a better chance to last in the long run. Of course, you'll create feuds between communities but at least it is somewhat confined and not always spilling in the common public space. Unfortunately it also greatly increases the echo chamber / filter bubble but it seems you can not ha…

In-fighting within communities is one of reddit's biggest problems.

There is bleeding over from one extremist community to others. (Namely SRS)

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#88

Post by tomku »

bshimmin wrote: post #44

Probably worth noting as a bit of context to this that Fry was presenting the BAFTA awards last night, said something offensive about someone who was a friend of his (but the public wouldn't necessarily have known that), and people on social media reacted badly.

People on social media reacted stupidly, but then he tried to engage the horde and prove that they were wrong to be offended by retweeting dozens (hundreds?) of people who backed him up. That was a strategy that could not result in anything but defeat and misery. He worked himself up into a rage trying to change the internet's mind, and when he failed, he took his ball and went home. I was and still am a fan of his, but for his own mental health, I'm glad he's not on Twitter any more.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#89

Post by fideloper »

doktrin wrote: post #35
fideloper wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. You can't choose your followers, nor stop them from @mentioning you. 2. That statement is awfully close to (if not outright) victim blaming.

> You can't choose your followers Can't you? I thought protected feeds were a thing (wherein subscribers would need the account holder's permission to follow / view their tweets)?

You're (willfully?) ignoring the implication of a private feed: lack of discoverability (finding new followers), for those of us who use Twitter as a source of promotion for our side projects/businesses/careers.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#90

Post by hnlogics »

It is never acceptable to attack and use violence against other individuals.

The fact that you perceive them as making money from their marginalization does not make it acceptable for you and others to attack them to send death threats, and to engage in other horrific and violent behavior.

It is reprehensible and disgusting that you think your hatred and bigotry is acceptable... because somebody might've made money. (and it's only marginally worse when you realize that they almost never make meaningful money anyway).

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