The
internet is a strange new world full of bustle and noise. Friends are easily
lost amongst the constant bombardment of like-baiting and deceptive exaggeration.
We’re the country bumpkins who stumbled onto the streets of a crowded city, ignorant
of the many pitfalls, the mercurial meme-fashions and the truncated, awkward etiquette
of this environment.
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| www.aveleyman.com Like Dennis Cooper |
Jabberwocky. NSFW, at all. Via YouTube
31:00 to
33:40 is what it's like social networking for the first time.
The trick
to navigating the internet is the same as on any street in the world – be sceptical,
don’t broadcast your vulnerabilities, remember who your friends are.
In the noisy online world it’s
easy to forget your friends, to think we’ve already replied to an email or comment, or to put a
low priority on getting round to it. The fallout is one of the recurring problems
with social networking: groups disband because no one replied to a post that
everyone read; friendships are tested because people feel like they’ve been ignored;
a flippant comment or a hasty response can define us to a huge number of people
and make friends doubt us. If we acted in person like many of even the most
internet-savvy of us do online we’d often be accused of rudeness and arrogance. Even
emoticons can’t convey the nuances of human interactions.
It’s a complex new world and
we have to navigate it at the same time as the old world, a place many of us still
struggle with. Little red flags tell us how many comments are waiting for us to
read; little red flags tell us people want to be our friend; little red flags
tell us we have emails waiting to be read, and the emails are often Nigerian
businessmen needing our help, lonely robots in our area looking for a good
time, special offers, sales, deals of the month, notification of statements ready
for reading, reminders and newsletters, and endless streams of spam spam spam
spam spammity spam.
BBC/Monty Python, via YouTube
Where it all began
It’s easy to lose track of
what’s important. The right choice is usually not the easy one. The two
things of most value on the internet are truth and friendship. The two most
common things on the internet are fabrications and acquaintances.*
The digital age needs better
etiquette, but don’t expect everyone to take it up. Being polite has never been
common in any society. It sounds snobbish to modern ears, but ‘common’ was once
the antonym of all things refined or well-mannered. Acting, as they used to
say, like a lady or gentleman has always been the exception rather than the
rule, but mostly due to reasons of culture, class, money, education and geography. I see
little excuse for it now. Manners and politeness are accessible to all, they're what we expect from
others. Only the most self-obsessed and self-entitled assume the rule doesn’t
apply to them. How we behave around others, especially the least
powerful in the room, defines us. How we treat our friends shapes the world we live in. Acquaintances exist in a bottomless shifting reservoir of mass populations, but friendships require maintenance or they cease to be.
*And cats, obviously.
