you know what annoys me a whole lot about tumblr
is that it glorifies and promotes the idea of the antisocial cynical young teenager who refuses to relate or communicate with people as if it’s a POSITIVE thing
that staying at home on the internet constantly, isolating yourself completely from others and refusing to talk to people because they ‘dont understand you’ or that they’re not in your fandom, because you’re a special snowflake tumblr user who knows big words like ‘gender binary.’
newsflash: NO that isn’t healthy, NO that isn’t normal, and NO that is definitely not an attitude you should allow to continue. You are setting yourself up for a huge disappointments when you get to the real world. You NEED to communicate well with people to get through university and jobs and a career and you need to be able to sympathize with people and relate to them, not bitch about how your class mates don’t understand your slash couple or your fashion sense or your taste in music or humor or whatever.
Here comes something that I wanted to write for months; more in response to comments of people in my RL, but now it’s been triggered by the above post.
I have been a typical geeky introvert kid. When I was a teenager, there was no internet yet and we had no TV, so the conflicts with my parents were more about “Stop drawing and go outside.” “Stop reading and talk to aunt Barbara.” “Stop soldering stuff that will never work and go make friends.”
As I have also been a very malleable and weak-minded child, I simply obeyed. I have learned to make brilliant smalltalk, I have learned to look people in the eye, smiling and giving them a deep sense of understanding; I have learned to put myself with a witty comment into the center of attention and entertain a room full of people. And I’ve successfully fooled everybody and been successful for 15 years this way; my parents get regular compliments for the result of their education, and I got a lot of brilliant boyfriends.
Then I had the incredible luck to encounter one who wasn’t easily fooled, who wasn’t impressed by my social skills and who kept and kept asking me “Yes, lovely, but what do YOU want? What do you FEEL?”, and I (slowly) realized that what I feel is still the same: the wish to be alone for long periods, the wish to obsess about things, be it art or a TV show or science, and a deep and qualified hate for smalltalk. I was not even daring to listen to my interests because they would perhaps make me seem antisocial.
I am incredibly grateful to my boyfriend, and to my therapist, and, sorry, also to tumblr, to make me understand that my desires are legitimate and valid and that I have a right to try to make my life fit them.
My environment is mostly worried about me, because I don’t go out as much as before and I don’t smile at everybody, and I’m not as much “fun” as I was -while I enjoy myself so much more. And when I don’t feel like talking to someone, I won’t, and when I’m uncomfortable looking into your eyes, I won’t. Both as politely and as gentle as I can, because I don’t want to hurt feelings; I know how easily they get hurt.
But what is this fucking NORMAL and HEALTHY and ALLOWED(?!) thing that tells me how to live my life? By being in my corner, whom do I harm? Who has the right to expect me to entertain them? I am not born to be a provider of smiles and pleasantness. And why is it better if I smile and talk with a middle-aged woman at a local café about the fucking weather than if I send a response and a kitten gif to a tumblr user who has written a brilliant political analysis? I really don’t get it.
An introvert will just sit in their room, do as they please and thus make you feel terribly uncomfortable by … by what? By not dancing a weird funny dance with you? While I get ACTIVELY bothered all the time by oh so lovely social extroverts who not only enter my personal space and chatter a lot of superficial stuff into my ears, but who also think I should be grateful because they are being kind and I was being “lonely”.
I think parents do a good job teaching their children/teenagers a minimum of social skills to interact with other people in RL, because, well, life is much easier if you can do this. But telling someone that being an introvert is invalid/inferior/sick is just bullshit.
SLOW MOTHERFUCKING HEARTFELT HAND-STINGING CLAP. This is the BEST response I’ve read to an attitude that is everywhere, that is a stupid cliché, and that only serves to reassure those who don’t understand or respect the pleasures we take in fandom. And let’s be clear about what fandom is: essentially, we’re an online community of people with not only shared interests but shared pleasures and shared meanings. (No, not always shared beliefs—look at the way we argue over what things mean!) But the fact of the matter is that things are meaningful to us, and that we bond, we make powerful bonds, over those things and what they mean and why we love them. Our relationships are not based on power, not on money or prestige or social image: they’re based on meaning, on pleasure, and on love.
I’m only going to focus on one part of the stupid here: that online community makes us anti-social. Oh for fuck’s sake. It’s online COMMUNITY, and its value as social community has been recognized since Howard Rheingold published Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier in 1993. We’ve been having this argument for twenty fucking years, people, and it’s time to recognize that we’ve won. You want a good contemporary argument for it? Try Stephen Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You, or Cathy Davidson’s Now You See It: the Science of Attention, or any fucking thing Henry Jenkins ever wrote. There are any number of new studies of electronic community and social skills: avail yourself.
In the end, the only argument you need is the one that zwischendenstuehlen has given. Her example proves all of this true: she and I both came into the fandom at about the same time, and I’ve watched her go from someone who was uncertain and tentative about the happiness she found online, and about what that said about her, to someone who can write this gorgeous manifesto. She shows me that being unashamed about my involvement in online community means being unashamed of myself, and for that I can only thank her. Well done, you.
Oh, hey, to which I’d like to add: all that stuff about how you need to ‘network’ and ‘work your connections’ and crap to get ahead in life? (Which also implies that you need ‘serious’ friends to get ahead in life, not the frivolous ones who share your hobbies with you.)
On a quick tally, just off the top of my head, through fandom I know at least: two college professors, two PHD students, at least four librarians(!), two web designers/developers, two network administrators, two professional fiction authors, two professional editors, a professional translator, a lawyer, two technical writers, a risk management analyst, and a marketing director. We like to talk fanfic. But these people also review each other’s job applications, keep an eye out for good job openings for those who’re on the hunt, provide fantastic career advice, share professional contacts, and leverage one another’s knowledge for the benefit of their work.
Oh, and the whole special-snowflake ‘non-gender-binary’ thing—turns out that the increased understanding and awareness I’ve picked up from Tumblr is a big hit with real life people! Yeah, it appears that trans* people, and people with physical handicaps, and people with Asperger’s or ADD or depression or OCD or cope with, I dunno, racial or sexual or religious or weight discrimination also exist offline! You may meet them there, and have to talk to them face to face some day. You might even find yourself working with them. If you think that politically correct BS about ‘just ignore it and treat them like everybody else’ is enough to get you by, you’re going to be tragically disappointed. A person’s culture, life experiences and challenges color their needs and the perspectives they can bring to the table, and as it happens, Tumblr and other online venues are FANTASTIC places to sit down, shut up, and listen to learn what you need to know in order to appreciate and address them respectfully, and—oh, it’s a long shot, but maybe even enrich your own work and life by incorporating what they can teach you.
Just some things to think about before you vilify online interaction.