Tag Archives: online to real world

More Options, Narrow Focus

Something that I have been noticing lately are people announcing that they will be blocking others on Facebook for various reasons. Now I completely understand that there is no reason that we need to take time with people who drag us down, but online we have the ability to completely block even seeing that any of that stuff exists. This means that we can shape our life online to only include those people or things that reinforce our perspective of the world. Yet, what does this mean for how we deal with the wider variety that we might experience outside of these online circles? Continue reading


Not Everyone’s a Dick All the Time


-Douglas Adams, Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy

A couple weeks ago I read an article from The Mary Sue discussing the fact that cultures of harassment can be changed. The article was a quick reflection on a larger article from Wired magazine about Curbing Online Abuse, and discussing how some of the same ideas can apply to harassment at San Diego Comic Con. I have been wanting to write an article about the findings from the Wired article for a while, but just had not gotten around to it. With the occurrences of Saturday and the #yesallwomen movement, it seemed like a great time to discuss my reactions to this article and what it means for online harassment.

The study mentioned in the Wired article displayed some interesting statistics. Now they did not mention any specifics about the behavior that they considered negative, so it is not necessarily just abuse targeted at women. In some ways this makes sense because we should not just focus on ending abusive behavior towards women, but all abusive behavior. The most important take away is the fact that abusive behavior is not just isolated to a small number of players who are always abusive. The truth is that a large portion of abusive behavior is done by players who normally do not act that way, but something sets them off, which sets someone else off, and so on and so forth. This means it is not just about taking care of those people that are always abusive, but changing the culture of the community as a whole.  Continue reading