Tag Archives: internet

My answers: My experiences with the Internet

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Posted by maxporter on November 19, 2010 – 12:02 AM
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Given that my readers are so thoughtful in commenting, I think it’s logical for me to participate in the conversation by answering the questions that I’ve asked my readers in the weekly Ask You Anything (AYA). Thus, I’m planning on doing an AYA at the start of each week, then answering the questions at the end of each week. That way, you guys get a longer period of time to comment before reading my own opinions on the topic.

In this week’s AYA, which can be found here, I asked:

  • When did you begin using the Internet?
  • What was it like back then?
  • What did you do on the Internet back then? What do you currently do on the Internet?
  • Do you feel that the Internet has changed dramatically since you were first online, or is it pretty much the same now as it was back then?
  • If you could change anything about the Internet, what would you change?

Here are my answers:

For as long as I can remember, my father has been a computer geek. Not in the sense that he gets a kick out of tinkering with breadboards, but he tends to be an early adopter of devices or ideas. For example, he was the first person in town to buy things online. Anyway, as a result of my father’s geekiness and the fact that the early nineties were a boom time for us, a computer has been in the household from my earliest memories. I learned how to read when I was five years old, so I began using the computer around that time: 1993.1 It’s sometimes difficult for me to distinguish my own personal growth from the growth of computers because I grew up around them, so please forgive me if I get some technical details wrong.

A mash-up of two different AOL login screens

In the early to mid 1990s, we had America Online and mainly used it to email others. One of the primary advantages of email was the fact that my sister and I could email our parents whenever they were out of town instead of having our babysitters relay phone calls. I don’t remember much about AOL in the early 1990s, except that the login process took a long time and that I really liked watching the key shoot a lightning bolt across the globe.

When I was nine years old, I began to explore AOL chat rooms and bulletin boards. At this point, after you logged into AOL, various icons would be displayed: your mailbox, bulletin boards, news, and so forth. There were themes for different age systems, so I’m guessing that there were some parental controls in place. I didn’t really understand the point of chat rooms or bulletin boards, though, because people would spam them by typing vertically and so forth.

Eventually, middle school came along. This was the late nineties through the early 2000s. I’ve already written an entire blog post, Growing Up on the Internet, about how I interacted with the Internet in middle school, which you can find here. Like I say in that post, I mostly hung out on Lord of the Rings forum boards and began to make online friends.

What I don’t mention in Growing Up on the Internet is that my real-life friends and I used AIM to communicate with each other, which was really convenient because I couldn’t use the telephone and I come from an area where the sprawling towns are really far apart from each other. I also switched my email address from AOL to Yahoo because Yahoo was tied to Geocities and I wanted to make a website. Over time, I found that I was attracted to the flexibility that web-based email offers: instead of being tied to one computer that has the application that you need, you can log in from anywhere. So I ditched AOL. Anyhow, when I had a Geocities site, I learned rudimentary HTML and I tried to learn CSS, but I never was really skilled. I tried to read tutorials but I always ended up being lost, and I thought that making tables was kind of dumb and ugly so I didn’t bother.

When making the transition from a small private school to a larger public high school, my entire social circle dissolved because my former friends either decided that they were too cool for me or went to magnet schools. So my online friendships intensified. I wound up meeting one of them – a girl my age – in real life at the premiere of the first or second (I forget) Harry Potter film. This was a pretty big shift because I’d been brought up with the mentality that only creeps want to meet in real life.2 In the process of making online friends, I installed various instant-messaging clients to communicate with them: MSN, Yahoo, etc. I knew of ICQ at this point, but I never liked it because the screennames were randomly assigned numbers and nobody I knew used ICQ.

A man in so-called nerdy clothes is carrying a huge pile of books that tower over him, and he worriedly looks behind him at a book that has fallen to the ground.

Halfway through high school, I had a lot of real-life friends. At the same time, I participated in a scholarly competition – it was along the lines of Quiz Bowl – and took six AP classes at once plus a few honors courses.3 So I decided that I didn’t have enough time to log onto the Internet. During my junior year of high school, I only used the Internet to email people and to IM my real-life friends. Not many of my real-life friends had AIM, though, so email was what I primarily used the Internet for.

When I was a senior, I got into the college of my choice and signed up for myspace so that I could contact with others who had gotten into the school. Then I began to experience intense senioritis, so I didn’t spend as much time on school, therefore opening up my free time. Then my social circle collapsed and I began to question my identity. As a result of all this, I again turned to the Internet to search for answers and made online friends in the process. At first, I wound up in a really terrible queer messageboard, but one of the regulars spotted me there and thought, “What the hell is he doing in here?” and introduced me to IRC. So, although I’ve been using the Internet since the early 1990s, I had never used IRC before 2006, which is really strange and anachronistic when you think about it.

I went to college and, distracted once more by schoolwork and a new network of friends, put aside IRC and online friends. I wrote in an online journal, but locked it so that only my real-life friends could read it. Facebook was still exclusive to colleges, and, although I didn’t see the point, I was talked into signing up for it. Shortly after that, the “stalkerbook” layout premiered. And, since I’d moved super-far away from my parents, I used email, videochat, and AIM to contact them. At some point, I signed up for a Youtube account because I wanted to rate a video, then didn’t upload anything until two years later. Halfway through college, I switched from yahoo to gmail. I also discovered torrents in college.

From then to the present date, my pattern of usage has remained pretty consistent. I discovered RSS feeds and signed up for Twitter in 2008, began this blog in 2009, then discovered tumblr this year, but those are about the biggest changes that have occurred since then. The thing that’s fluctuated the most since I left high school is the degree to which I use the Internet – sometimes I use it a lot more, sometimes I don’t use it as much. Also, it’s a lot easier for me to find things like collegehumor.com or cracked.com to waste my time on than it was in the past.

[Illustration comes from: This Is Why I'll Never Be an Adult by Allie Brosh, who blogs at Hyperbole and a Half.4 ]

Well, I think that that novel pretty much covers the first three questions. It covers a good portion of question four, too. I’ll wrap up the fourth question by saying that, from my perspective, one thing that has changed the most dramatically is societal attitudes towards the Internet: I think that people take it a more seriously now, and it’s become part of our daily lives in a way that wasn’t really true in the past. Cool kids still ridicule it to some degree because it is geeky, but not to as great of an extent. Another thing is that the Internet seems more intuitive to me, but I can’t tell for sure if that’s because I’m older or if usability actually improved.

As for what I would change about the Internet, the only changes that I can think of don’t directly concern the Internet – they concern human nature. Sometimes I get concerned when I hear about truly nasty trolling, or about people who con their audience into giving them money by faking illness and so forth, or about stalking. But, really, things like this have been happening for centuries. The only way to cut down on this type of behavior on the Internet would be to curtail our online freedoms, and that’s not a trade-off I’m willing to make. For me, the benefits of the Internet greatly outweigh the negative aspects.

-~-~-~
  1. I never interact with children, but I wonder if a kid still needs to know how to read in order to navigate the Internet because it’s less text-heavy today. [↩]
  2. Amusingly enough, the girl that I met had also been brought up with this mentality, so we were both a little nervous. It was kind of adorable. [↩]
  3. I actually read every single assigned page rather than skimming the work – I probably read more homework in high school than I have read in my entire college career. It was very interesting, I admit, but it ate up a lot of time. [↩]
  4. If you haven't read Hyperbole and a Half, GO READ IT now! [↩]
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Weekly AYA: Your Experiences With the Internet

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Posted by maxporter on November 15, 2010 – 12:01 AM
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Let’s try a different tack. Weekly Ask Me Anything posts are kind of pointless IMO. So, I’ll reverse the tables and ask you, my dear readers, questions.


Credit for this comic goes to xkcd.com.

Here are some questions to get you started off. Don’t regard these questions as hard-and-fast ones. They’re just starting points in a conversation. Feel free to be as long-winded or short-and-to-the-point as necessary.

  • When did you begin using the Internet?
  • What was it like back then?
  • What did you do on the Internet back then? What do you currently do on the Internet?
  • Do you feel that the Internet has changed dramatically since you were first online, or is it pretty much the same now as it was back then?
  • If you could change anything about the Internet, what would you change?

Thanks! If you enjoyed this, please consider boosting the signal so that we can see more people’s answers.

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Get Off My Lawn!

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Posted by maxporter on November 10, 2010 – 12:02 AM
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Today, if you open up a news story in mainstream media about a young person on the Internet, there is almost certainly going to be a story about cyberbullying. It’s interesting to read between the lines in these stories. ‘These kids,’ they declare, ‘are not mature enough to withstand flamestorms or to understand the potential consequences of posting online.’ It doesn’t matter how long the young person has actually been on the Internet – just the fact that they are not yet legal is grounds for concern.

I don’t agree with the viewpoint that young people should stay off the Internet. I think that young people belong on the Internet just as much as adults do. Do young people experience bullying online? Absolutely. But, in my opinion, adults should take responsibility for our actions towards youth rather than resenting them.

One point that I feel that most media outlets miss is the fact that, in many cases, cyberbullies are actually breaking basic netiquette rules. For example, videotaping your classmate having sex and then streaming it? That’s beyond trolling; that’s just tasteless and indecent and horrible by any standard, online standards included. Also, I’ve noticed that cyberbullying attacks usually come from people that the victim knows, but the media tries to twist the story into a narrative that is broadly anti-Internet.

In general, I feel like blaming the Internet for ruining the life of a kid is simply attacking a strawman. I feel that there is a double standard in how people treat online interactions compared to offline interactions. Many of the social ills that the Internet brings also exist in real life – corrupt salesmen, identity thieves, creeps, bullies, etc. So why do people blame the Internet for causing these things to happen?

Personally, I think that a large part of the problem is the fact that people are afraid of new mediums of communication. So it’s natural that the media will manipulate the audience to fear the Internet. Also, even though these are the same old stories repackaged in a fresh format, they look new enough to generate interest. It’s not – fear of the Internet has been around for a long time. When I was a kid, people were mainly afraid that predators would hunt for little kids online to kidnap. Yes, there are differences in how we interact with each other online in this Web 2.0 era than in earlier eras, but the differences are smaller than a casual observer may think.

For example, I think that part of the antagonism towards strangers who happen to be young is a continuation of a previous trend: for as long as the Internet has been around, old-timers have complained about noobs. However, as time goes on and the Internet becomes more integrated into our lives and our online identities become more closely attached to our actual identities, I think we’re starting to see a greater degree of social stratification based upon age1 rather than actual experience level with the Internet. In other words, instead of teasing the new kid on the forum for not reading the FAQs or not knowing the local slang, old-timers feel entitled to tease the new kid on tumblr simply because she is a twelve-year-old.

At this point, I can’t see a solution for barring kids from the Internet other than outright censorship. It is pretty ridiculous to expect that we can regulate the actions of every online citizen and still maintain ideals of freedom. To me, online freedom is an essential ingredient in offline freedom. So, whether you like it or not, I think that young people are here to stay. Besides, the Internet is a huge place – it is easy enough to set up a private chat room that is 25+ if that is what you really want to do.

-~-~-~
  1. And other factors, but I’m focusing on age in this post. [↩]
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DSDJ

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Posted by maxporter on November 6, 2010 – 12:04 AM
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This week, the second issue of DSDJ – Deaf Studies Digital Journal – was released. You can read it online here. It’s not entirely accessible, and the website is really clunky and difficult to navigate.

Nonetheless, I’m excited to see that DSDJ exists. Here is my take on the site, section-by-section:

  • Articles: there are some dense, scholarly lectures. For example, one lecture is named “Seeing Signs: Language Experience and Handshape Perception.” I’m really glad to see dense lectures because it shows that there are opportunities for smart Deaf people to make careers out of being smart – I’ve heard too many stories about Deaf children who don’t learn anything because everyone assumes that they have a mental retardation and therefore don’t bother teaching them anything.
  • Commentary: People comment on current issues within the Deaf community. Honestly, I think this is the weakest point of the site. In my opinion, places like Youtube or Deafvideo are much better platforms to do this kind of thing. The fact that you can instantly post ASL videos on those sites means that it’s easier to debate current issues in real time.
  • Literature: This one made me smile. Storytelling is a central feature of Deaf culture: telling a story in ASL is a very important skill. Also, there is poetry in this section and a really well-done ABC story.1 I love this section because it really shows that ASL is a versatile language that can be used to create art, not just to convey information.
  • Visual Arts: All of the art here is worth checking out, but I’m going to play favorites here. Nancy Rourke’s work was my favorite because I like her visual style and her message is totally rooted in Deaf experience. For example, in “Say The Word,” it’s difficult to understand why the background figures are signing “airplane,” “baseball,” and “hot dog” unless you already know that these words are part of a standard listening test.2 Anyway, I’m just glad to see that there’s a space for Deaf people to showcase their art.
  • History: Lectures about Deaf history. I am glad to see Deaf people talking about our own history instead of letting Hearing people write it.
  • Community: Pretty straightforward: announcements of upcoming events in the community.

One reason that DSDJ excites me is because Deaf people finally have the opportunity, thanks to the Internet, to communicate in ASL. Journals are an important part of academia, but when there’s no written language, it can be pretty difficult to disseminate your ideas. So, yeah, this is pretty awesome.

I just hope that DSDJ will fix their accessibility issues. Sometimes I feel like the Deaf community can be pretty ignorant of providing access to people who have other disabilities, and this is a good example of that. Still, I like having this resource.

-~-~-~
  1. ABC stories are also pretty central in Deaf culture – basically, you try to make a coherent story using the letters of the alphabets. It is something I personally find to be really challenging. [↩]
  2. This is because these words are spondees, so the stress in a word doesn’t interfere with the person’s ability to listen. Other words I remember: ice cream and cowboy. [↩]
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Living in the 21st Century

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Posted by maxporter on September 4, 2010 – 12:36 AM
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[Visual description: People sit in a cafe while using laptops.]

Computers have become part of mainstream culture. In the late 90s, people thought that the Internet was a fad, but very few people today still think that the Internet is a fad.

In 1994, spending time playing in MUDs, chatting on IRC, and even writing emails were all activities that a fairly small fringe of society participated in. Nowadays, it is the rare person who does not have a Facebook; not having an e-mail address is unthinkable.

However, some people that I’ve encountered are not happy with this state of affairs. They yearn for a time in which we didn’t have all of these Facespace or Myface websites but instead talked to each other in real life. They yearn for a time when we didn’t have our creativity stifled by staring at the screen for hours on end.

Okay, I agree that the Internet is not perfect. Not everyone has equal access to the Internet, and there are inequalities online. This is an issue that I care about. However, most of the critiques that I hear don’t engage these points; instead, they yearn for a “better” time that is long gone.

Honestly, one thing that I really don’t understand about these critiques? When Hearing people talk about being chained to the Internet and feeling like it’s a weak mirror of “actual” social life, it’s not an experience that I can relate to at all.

The thing is, not all of us have the same experience with the Internet. I have spoken before about growing up on the Internet, a space where I was able to understand others for the first time. Later on, when I was trying to figure out my own identity as a queer individual, the Internet was a great resource for meeting others.

In other words, the Internet connects some of us; it doesn’t isolate us.

Plus, these criticisms seem to be about ten years late to the party – people have been talking to each other on the Internet for a long time, and they’ve been using computers for even longer.

Getting back to what I said earlier about inequalities online? Yeah, I think that those are important to talk about. Personally, though, I think that the solution is more integration of the Internet into everybody’s life, not less. But I am open to being wrong on this point – let me know what you think.

-~-~-~

Update, added to this post on 9/26/10: s.e. smith has written a post named My Friends in the Internet. Once again, s.e. smith says something that I wanted to articulate so perfectly that I’m pointing at it and saying, “This. This is what I meant.” (This has happened to me a lot, actually.) smith’s central point in this post is that the hierarchization of the communication methods smacks of ableism – I am in total agreement.
I do want to qualify my previous post about the Internet by saying that I am not an introvert. I thought I was for years, but I’ll talk about that in another post. I am not happy just sitting all by myself, not talking with people. My favorite online activities involve talking with others.
I do prefer talking to people in real life, but I think that this is mostly due to the amount of effort that people give to the interaction – if I meet a friend over a cup of coffee, it’s harder for the friend to ignore me because we’ve both gone to the effort of meeting in real life to hang out. Online, I have some friends who take the communication so lightly that they don’t say “be right back” before leaving for 20 minutes. (If you’re a friend and wondering, “Does this apply to me?” – maybe, but no hard feelings towards you; I still love you.)
Anyway, I really like smith’s blog, This Ain’t Livin’, in general. To be honest, I don’t agree with some of the posts, but that’s the way it is with anybody in this world – I doubt that there are two people in this world who are 100% in agreement about every single issue. It’s a good blog; go check it out.

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Why I Don’t Have An Online Dating Profile Anymore

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Posted by maxporter on August 6, 2010 – 12:22 AM
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Once, I was really bored and new to town. So I created an account on a fairly popular dating website. (I’m embarrassed, but, hey, we’ve all done it once, right?) I figured that I could take all the fun quizzes to waste time and maybe meet interesting people nearby. When I was filling out my profile, I mentioned that I was deaf.

Boom, I soon got messages from creepsters. They said things like:

40/m/LivesAnHourAway
hey i saw on ur profile that ur deaf. i know asl, i took a class on it once. it is such a beautiful language. want to meet? my asl is rusty but i would love to practice more!

[Translation: "I took one semester of ASL 20 years ago, and the only word that I remember how to say is 'shit.' Also, because I know ASL, this is a really brilliant excuse to justify hitting on a guy half my age!"]

35/m/NextStateOver
Hello, my name is [full name] and I live in [very specific neighborhood]. [Blah, blah, blah... 500+ words about himself and how wonderful he is]. By the way, I looked at your profile and noticed that you are deaf. I am interested in meeting all sorts of different people. Do you want to come to my apartment sometime and talk about your experiences as a deaf person? I have never met a deaf person before, and it is so fascinating to me. I love the diversity of human experiences out there.

[Translation: "I clearly am a special and unique man who will render you mindless with pleasure, duh. By the way, do you want to come to my apartment so that I can add you to my harem (literally) of special and diverse partners so that I can brag about having screwed a deaf guy?"]

…etc.

Don’t get me wrong – I also got creepy non-deaf related messages. Regardless, I would say that 90% of the creepy messages that I got mentioned deafness. In many cases, there were multiple things that were offputting about these people, like the fact that many of them were messaging somebody 10+ years younger than them (ew), but their focus on deafness really stood out to me.

Here’s the problem with these people: They, in typical creepazoid fashion, were seeing me not as a whole and complete person, but as an object. I’m not an ASL textbook; if that’s what you really want, go to the damn library and check out one. Likewise, I’m not a “Deaf Culture 101″ book – I’m willing to share my experiences with others, but not if that’s the only basis of our friendship. Curiosity is natural, but it is not okay to dehumanize somebody by making assumptions about them and demanding that they educate you every hour of every day.

This is a pretty universal complaint about creeps, though: they objectify. So here are some things that bother me about creeps who specifically target deaf people.

It is not possible to learn ASL overnight from one semester of lessons – in fact, I find it borderline insulting that people seem to think that ASL is so simple. We do not just “mime” our words or anything like that; we communicate in a syntactically complex language.
On one hand, this tendency to claim fluency in another language is not uncommon – I have seen people say “I know Spanish!” when they only took three semesters of it in high school and can’t say anything more complicated than “My name is ___” and “How are you?” True fluency comes from being able to read books and hold nuanced conversations, not from being able to pass a standardized vocabulary test. So, to some degree, the “I know ASL!” phenomenon is also seen in other languages.
On the other hand, ASL has had a difficult history: it was not even considered a language for a very long time. (It still is not, in some circles.) Early oralists said that using ASL slowed the student’s acquisition of English – according to their logic, this was undesirable because English is a true language whereas ASL is nothing more than filler. Hence, deaf people were not allowed to communicate in ASL for a very long time and were actually, in some cases, punished when they tried to do so.

So that is why, when somebody claims to know ASL despite the fact that he or she has taken only a few classes in it, I can’t help but wonder if they truly consider ASL a language or if they only see it as a silly amusement. Sadly, a lot of hearing people tend to see it as a novelty, not a language.

Sure, it’s really sweet when somebody meets me, then tries to learn some signs so that we can communicate more fluently. I appreciate this in friends and romantic partners alike. The key difference, though, is that they have first met me and decided that they like me as a whole person. Creeps, on the other hand, obsessively focus on one aspect of me – my deafness.

Another assumption that these creepsters made was that, because I am deaf, I therefore know ASL. Because, you know all deaf people are born knowing ASL.
Okay, first of all, I have met plenty of people who are deaf or hard-of-hearing and don’t know ASL. Just because somebody can’t hear doesn’t automatically mean that they consider themselves a member of the Deaf community or that they can sign.
In my case, it is true that I know some ASL – but the key word here is “some.” I know enough ASL to get by, but I’m not fluent anymore. I grew up signing, but I haven’t interacted with other Deaf people in such a long time that I have become super rusty. In fact, other Deaf people tend to ask me, “Are you hearing?” upon seeing my accent. I’m pretty sure that, if I lived among Deaf people again, I would regain fluency, but I’m just not at that point right now.
That’s another blog post for another day, though. The point here is that I did not come out of my mother’s womb signing ASL fluently. I worked to learn the ASL that I do know, and I am not 100% fluent. Even if I were fluent, though, the obsessive focus on deafness and ASL is creepy.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a problem that’s restricted to online dating websites. I’ve encountered it in real life too, albeit not as frequently. Online, the solution is easy: delete the person’s message. In real life, though, it’s not that easy. Thankfully, there’s enough awesome people in my life to outweigh the yucky creeps of the world.

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Growing Up On the Internet

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Posted by maxporter on July 31, 2010 – 12:56 AM
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When I explain the role that the Internet played in my life, I usually say, “The first online community that I ever joined was a Lord of the Rings messageboard, even though I’ve never liked Tolkien in my life.” Contradictory, right? Well, let me explain.

In middle school, everybody I knew suddenly became absolutely obsessed with the first Lord of the Rings movie. For months on end, it was the only topic of conversation, and I do mean the only topic. As annoying as this would have been under normal circumstances, it was worse for me because I couldn’t participate in any of the discussions: the movie wasn’t subtitled, so I couldn’t go watch it. I’ve described in a previous entry how miserable I was throughout this whole affair.

Since I couldn’t watch the movie, I tried another angle: reading the series. I figured, “I love to read. All my friends are talking about the movie based upon this series. I’ll read it so that I can at least know who all these elves or dwarves or whatever are.” Well, as it turned out, those books were just too damn boring! Obviously, the only logical conclusion was that the movie must have been a million times more exciting than the books.

Thanks to this failed effort, I continued to feel like an outsider. But one day, everything changed when one of my best friends joined a Lord of the Rings messageboard and invited everybody else to do so as well.

Screenshot of Lord of the Rings forum from WayBack Machine
[Visual description: A messageboard with a blue background. Categories: General, The Books, The Movies. Red folders are depicted next to the subcategories.]

It was a tiny messageboard with approximately 75 registered users total. The whole atmosphere was super laid back – people liked Lord of the Rings, but they weren’t rabid fans by any means. Most people were there to chill and hang out. We talked about random things, like how cool the marquee HTML tag was or how hot Orlando Bloom was as Legolas. In short, it was the perfect place for a kid who wanted some way, no matter how superficial, to take part in this topic of discussion that had dominated every aspect of his friends’ lives for the past few months. But, as it turned out, it was more than that.

I continued to frequent this messageboard and other Tolkien-centric messageboards even after my friends finally tired of Lord of the Rings and moved onto other things. Why? One very simple reason: At long last, I had finally found a place where communication wasn’t a total chore!

Here’s the thing about a lot of Hearing people, especially when you’re going to a middle school full of them. They have a tendency to congregate in large groups where it becomes difficult to lipread anybody – worse, they won’t repeat anything because “it’s not important.”

On the Internet, that never was the case: someone typed something and I instantly understood what they said. Conversely, people didn’t have to ask me to repeat myself a million times because it didn’t matter how well I spoke: I typed something, they understood it.

And that is that the story of how I ended up making my first online friends on a Lord of the Rings messageboard even though I’ve never liked Lord of the Rings.

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