My first foray into Youtube was a bit of a shock. Prior to RIU and Youtube my Net experience was limited to a forum that, in retrospect, didn't prepare me for this brave new world.
My first experiences online were back in the Compuserve days so most of the people I interacted with we're fairly early adopters. They were a fairly tech savvy group. Stayed offline regarding social interaction until about two years ago when I stuck my toe into FB. This was right about the time that
everybody started to use it. So there were a whole lot of people that I had not seen in years who were looking to reconnect. We were adding each other as friends, going to informal reunions, that sort of thing.
But after a while, you start to realize why you lost touch with these people in the first place.
So from time to time I would log on FB and read my "feed". For the most part, it was banal but there was just so much hat I found openly offensive. One guy in particular (a-hole beat me in an election by a tiny number of votes (thankfully, it turned out)), became by bête noir. Fascist, homophobic, tea-bagging, racist prick, he was. He would post about 30 times a day, each one more offensive than the ones before. For the most part, he was just parroting to teabag line - but even the parts that were super rapey.
And here's what pissed me off, of the thirty or so of us that were all 'friended in' from those days, nobody was shooting this bastard down. So I started to. Using logic at first, but there's only so much logic you can apply to certain things. For example, when the teabaggers start leaking non-existent 'quotes' overheard by anonymous sources, you're pretty much left without an arguement of "that which is freely asserted is freely denied" (the RIU version is 'pictures or it never happened').
Oh what a flame war it was. All through the election it continued. My wife urged me to just de-friend the bastard but I don't play that way. Eventually, I forced him to do it. After I did, I realized that he was the only reason I even checked my damn feed. After that I was left with things that did not interest me one bit. Jill and her husband went to the club. Monica and Jim are at a restaurant.
The fault was really my own. I never should have friended half these people. Should have left it with just family and friends (though some family members were leaving Posts like "Obama is a lousy nigger" on election night).
Not responding directly to your question here, but the web showed me how much I have changed relative to those I knew years go. I think a lot of it had to do with my subsequent education, both in and out of school.
And am I a different person online? No, I'm one of those people incapable of being anybody other than me. I am irrepressible and without that type of guile.
Now days I rely on my wife to keep me aware of the doings of our actual friends. I don't log on anymore.
But I dig you guys.
it's an awful balance.
