My primary job function is to create databases and websites.  I’m fairly interested in the web in general, and have spent absurd amounts of my life online.  More than ten years ago, IRC used to be my primary hang-out, outscoring physical meet-ups in terms of hours or consistency.

While there is a lot of exciting shit going on, I find that the Internet has been getting more and more dull, lately.  Maybe it’s my use patterns; but the way that information has propagated has tended into an order which is towards less, not more.  I couldn’t help but thinking of the way that Orwell described the control of science and innovation; that its constriction was a result of concentrations of power, society which is bound, not free.

I’m not saying that we don’t have a lot of choice out there; though if we look at the sources by which information flows, it seems to me that there are less people having conversations on the Internet.  We’re too easily found out by the Googles; we’re more cautious about what we post, because people can find it and use it against us.  There’s a lot of benefit that comes from that: there’s a mass amount of hate and distrust and ugly bullshit out there.  The Internet didn’t create it, but it did allow for those elements to spill out, as quickly and as efficiently as the good parts.

The control, then, where we’re at now, is sort of a superego that’s infiltrated the consciousness of our culture.  We inherently know that it isn’t right to post bad shit out there; though there are also some sides whereby the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater.  Just as fear can operate to regulate systems which probably could use regulation, it also has been a paradigm shift in how Internet communications take place; and I feel that the world is a bit more quiet than it was years ago.

The powers that be, now internalized, in some ways might be pulling us backward, by bits and pieces.

Gaming culture and gaming networks don’t follow in this pattern: if there’s one principle bastion of unregulated ugliness and hatred left online, I’d have to say it’s found in online gaming communities.  Tempers flare, people get heated; that’s always been the case, as there’s a certain emotional investment in the game in order to warrant its continued use.  Combine that with an overall younger crowd, and one which is generally blocked from reality in order to create something vaguely like a safe-haven: real names and locations are discouraged, in order to protect the children; yet this situation also allows a bit of Lord of the Flies to slip in by the same facets.

Perhaps the reality is that it’s just that hard for people to be nice to each other; either personally, or by lines of culture or background or whatever other targets to which we align ourselves.  Maybe the only rule we really need is, “don’t be an asshole”; and I’d like to think that we can all get there without all that much trouble.  In the meantime, I feel I’m looking at a lot of blank or freshly-read, short pages, wondering where the next steps are going to take us.  We need to keep moving forward, and that won’t happen until we act like people, not assholes.