Join The Movement...

It seems I may have been an influencer in social media!  Well, I suppose I was when I left Twitter a couple years ago and didn't say anything about it...

But I found this article on CNN today that had the author celebrating her new freedom.  Can't blame her.  

I think it may have been around 2015 or 2016 when Twitter really started to stink.  I got on that platform back in the early 2000s, if I recall correctly, another option to dip my toes into the then-new "social network" stuff that was happening.  I very quickly followed my friends who had intrigued me into joining the ... well, back then it was a sort of small club.  I did follow a few celebrities I thought were interesting.

And the one fellow whom I followed who really helped to clear my sinuses was Chris Kluwe.  Mr. Kluwe was a punter for the Minnesota Vikings.  Back then, anyway.  He was also something of a gamer.  As in, when we used to use that term to apply to a specific range of people, he was a fellow who enjoyed both playing video games and other games - board and RPG, if memory serves me correctly.

So there I was, with a lot of my friends, a few family members, and some other celebrity-type accounts where I followed along.  I followed some news organizations as it seemed that some times news broke more quickly on Twitter than anywhere else.  As I was in a job hunting mode at the time, I thought it made sense to be as connected as possible to potential new opportunities.  While watching the rest of the scenery flow by...  Then the rocks started hitting the metaphorical windshield.

I remember that Twitter was the first place where I learned the term "Swatting".  I learned that it was when someone might spoof their location, call a police department, or 911, and let them know a dangerous situation was evolving, there were unauthorized people threatening others, that sort of thing.  In some occasions the police appeared at the location with heavy armaments and armored vehicles, to find a mother playing in the back yard with her children, unthreatening, unless you're small rodents or someone with a seriously deficient IQ.

That was what first started me to pull back from the platform, then Gamergate broke wide open.  

I no longer recall the exact specifics, so I do apologize for missing some details.  But I do recall that the actor Adam Baldwin from the TV Series Firefly seemed to play a part in opening up a whole misogynistic mess when girls dared to enjoy video games.  It takes someone with a small penis and an even smaller brain to get all bent out of shape because girls go into the clubhouse, but I guess I've known a few knucke-dragging cave apes over the years, I'm not too surprised a few managed to hang out in the trees until now.  It took me a few years - from maybe ten until about 19 - that I saw girls as different people.  Bottom line is that we're all people.  The key is that we all have slightly different perspectives.  Some folks have more insight, more intelligence behind the eyes, and some are just driven by muscle memory and a desire to keep things from changing.

My wife will tell you I don't like change.  Which is, in part, true.  I like it when things work.  I like them to keep working.  I don't like it when things that are working stop working for whatever reason.  I accept that sometimes things wear out.  I will tell you that for the most part, when a web site undergoes a significant change, that's where I get my teeth set on edge a little bit.  Sometimes, it's a big improvement on operation.  In my day job, over the past 18 months or so, we've gone through a massive upgrade.  Our daily process involved logging into one system to find the tasks we needed to do.  Then we logged into another system to obtain more information and confirm details.  We'd then head into a third system to check for documentation which we would then use to prepare ourselves for the gigantic next step.  For some tasks, we'd log into another computer system.  Others, we'd prep some specialized forms and fax them off.  The worst, you'd have to pick up the phone, call, and wait anywhere from five minutes to three or more hours before you passed all of the gatekeepers and got to the one individual on the planet willing to help you.  In that organization, at this time.  And God help you if your phone disconnected - then you get right back at the end of the line. 

18 months ago we implemented a new system.  I'm part of the test group.  We got to experience the growing pains and the inevitable "well, that didn't effing work like we were trained to expect..."  And so on, so on, so on...  

But the beautiful part is that in one piece of software, one screen, I see what tasks I need to do.  I open the task, and within the same system, look at the information I need, check for documentation, and I can even us it to obtain additional documentation I need.  I still get to log into those other systems, fax forms, and play phone tag - but the process of collecting the information is greatly reduced.  In our previous process, once you managed to get all the information together, including knowing that the payer would seriously consider paying us for our services, I had to enter it in two different places.  Now, only one.

So that's a great positive change - which I like.  I like changes like that.  I like change when the change brings improvement.  I do not like change when the change is because it hasn't changed, and someone needs to change it in order to get paid.  If the sum total of your contribution to the rest of the population on the planet is to introduce new, more difficult ways to do that which we've been doing just fine for a while now, I'd suggest you might be one of those folks fairly close to the door if a "reduction in workforce" comes to call.  Or certainly should be.

But getting back to the whole gamergate thing, I do recall Mr. Kluwe being fairly upset by the behavior of Baldwin and his cronies, directing insults and typically childish behavior towards people who didn't deserve it.  I get it - some folks are genetically predisposed towards disliking "others" in "their world".  I understand.  Look, I grew up in an area which was quite literally SO White that anyone of any ethnicity which deviated from the predominant color got stared at.  How bad was it?  A few years after I'd left the area, a good friend of mine who moved to the area reported that she had been confronted in the grocery store because her Italian ethnicity apparently threatened some of the folks who aspired to ... well, let's just say their confusion came from discovering someone "of color" in the local grocery store.  Said color being slightly more tan than themselves.  Never minding the fact that many of the people owned their own tanning beds, took advantage of tanning lamps, etc., and suffered the inevitable consequences, but it was what it was.  A fairly homogeneous area which looked pretty much like a milk convention.  Not a milk man, or milk person, convention.  Just a couple hundred thousand containers of ... milk.  No flavors allowed.

The sad truth is that it certainly seems to spring from certain groups of ... well, we'll say "political thought" rather than get a bit more explicit, but it sure seems like the people who have the most problem with others who do not look like them doing what they do seem to also have a few rather funny ideas about the world at large.  I would like to think that it's because they've thought things through, but for the most part, most of them seem to be about as deep as a sheet of paper.  And I'm not talking twenty pound bond, either, I'm talking tissue-paper thin.  The sort that when confronted with a fair amount of wind tend to disappear - or blow back.

But to get back to my point, when I started following the stream of thought and the growing amount of ... well, smelly stuff in the corners, I looked around Twitter.  There were a few folks whom I really enjoyed reading their stuff.  There were more who caused me to want to avoid them like the plague - among other nasty things.  There were more that I flat decided I didn't want to even be seen having passed through the same room.  You know the old "guilt by association" deal, sort of like getting busted for smoking in school because you had to take a ... well, a dump in the bad bathroom.  You know the one.  The one that you didn't use unless you were truly, utterly desperate.  It happens.

But leaving Twitter was one of the smarter things I've ever done.  I did miss a few people, but I found myself less angry over time.  I was less easy to provoke into bad moods.  I didn't feel the need to remain attached to my computer for the latest updates in the past ... thirty or so seconds.

So I swam out of the swamp, walked onto dry land, cleaned off the muck, and kept on moving.  I'm not going to pretend I'm a paragon of virtue.  If anything, I'm probably a pretty good bad example of a lot of things, but I do want to make it clear that I do not give a flying wet fart who you are or who you love, etc.  I don't mean that in a disrespectful way - you are you, and the world needs every single diverse voice.  Holding a viewpoint that is your own is a heck of a lot more important than the ability to repeat a different viewpoint verbatim.  I think we've all seen enough over the years to be able to point out the real douchebags who want to jump up and down on the different one because, well, they're the different one, it's all their fault.  

I'm please Twitter seems to be moving out of the center of a lot of things, except for the cesspit.  The more folks we can pull out of that pit of despair, the more people we'll have on the shore, looking to help the others.  Eventually, that festering hole can be left to the festering, and not Uncle Fester, but the real diseased and twisted folks.  Let them fart in their own empty, unfurnished rooms and listen to the echoes.  Maybe, some day, we might even see a general reduction in their numbers as the good people who follow the loudest voices realize that screaming doesn't make you right - it just makes you annoying.  If shrieking could make you great, well, the Orange Jesus would be great, not a zit on the butt of the world.  

It takes more than volume to make greatness.  It takes wisdom, the ability and willingness to listen, and to do something with the knowledge.  I hope to some day approach that ideal.  I doubt I'll ever get there.  But I can dream.  And think about it.