Now, most of us, those of us who are Netters and Webbies, we easily recognize the bumbling RL based blogger. You know the type, they just stumbled on over to the grid *WAAAAAY* back in liak two thousand and FIVE! Actively surfing such pedestrian level sites like eBay, Amazon and other highly marketed beacons of direct RL attraction. Such superficial forms though are rarely very informative and give RLs a false sense of reality on the grid. Effectively, they don't teach these children of the Internet what the Internet is all about, how it differs from real life, what they can really expect, or how to deal with things on the net level.
Because of that fact, if and when such RLs encounter some aspect of the *REAL* Internet, they are very often quite poorly prepared to handle it, very often making bad decisions that only worsen whatever situation they've put themselves in.
Now, "blogging" is not a new concept, and it has actually existed since long before that particular term was ever coined. Problem is, in the early days of the Internet RLs were effectively and RIGHTLY banned from blogging in that having your own blog required technical expertise, the kind that RLs just don't have (even the ones who ~think~ they have it). But we are now living in Web 3.0, the "cookie cutter" Internet age, where any idiot with a mouse can create a website or a blog with little to no sense at all as to what it is they're even doing or where they're even at.
This has led to a great exodus of sorts, a mass immigration of idiots, much like the original AOL invasion of Usenet, circa 1996 and the "eternal September" that followed. The people who run these cookie cutter outfits are often RLs themselves, who simply outsource much of their operation to those who know what they're doing who build them the cookie cutter constructs they need to pawn off to the muddled masses.
At this point any idiot with a keyboard can have a blog, say whatever they want, and of course, look liak a fuckin retard. Case in point, let's take Tim O'Reilly, founder of "O'Reilly Media" (he certainly is high on himself, innt he?). Now Tim is a "blogger" and spends much of his time stumbling around the top crust of the grid and fumbling out verbal inanity at every opportunity. Now our story with Tim really begins with another blogger, whom you might recognize. One Kathy Sierra, who basically embodies every last thing that's wrong with RLs on the Internet and why they shouldn't be here.
Kathy, liak most RL bloggers, has no sense between the real world and the Internet. To Kathy, the Internet *IS* real life and she treats everything she see's online as if it were actually real and believable. This of course makes her a bright, shining target for every last troll on the grid, looking to upset some little RL fruitloop for the entertainment value of watching them spaz out over words on a fuckin screen. And hoo boy, did lil Kathy just run with it. Most likely suffering from a "victim complex", Kathy did just about every last thing she could to try and victimize herself and ran around collecting pity points at every opportunity. The height of which culminated in "death threats" that ~scared~ poor lil Kathy *SO* badly that she was crying her eyes out and just couldn't even come out of her house.
As a result she just about took her lil blogger ball and went home foreverz! ...fortunately for us she finally did and the wicked witch of whining is ding dong net.dead. Of course she couldn't "leave" without putting up a whole "woe is me, teh bad guyz wun!" post. Obviously because, as has been noted, she has a victim complex, she *LIKES* being "attacked" she *LIKES* raping sympathy and pity points off other idiots online. Whoring herself out as a delicate little flower, all stepped on and trampled by dat mean 'ol Interwebz. The level of slurpage she got off of her "leaving" was nothing short of epic...on a massively sad fuckin level. The poor lil snowflake just couldn't handle all the "abuse" anymore.
*snicker*
Yeah, right. Just to make a point of reference, since I first started posting online...I've probably received around...mmm...20 to 30 THOUSAND death threats in varying forms and circumstances. And that's been since nineteen fuckin ninety four! o_O I mean, it's been a gawd damn decade and a half of death threats against me and, well, gee, I haven't had anyone attempt to make good on any of them! At all! In *ANY* form! And unlike lil Kathy there are people who *REALLY* have good reason to want to try and kill me, especially those I performed unethical sociological and psychological experiments on.
But it never happens...and it never will. And you know why too...if you're a Netter or a Webbie, if you're someone who actually *UNDERSTANDS* the Internet and the underlying sociological structures. On the one hand you have trolls of course, looking to pray on those foolish enough to treat the Internet as if it were real life, trying to get a rise out of them, trying to get them to have a meltdown and make outlandishly kooky counter threats or to watch them have a total mental breakdown as they attempt to put themselves up on the virtual cross. Sorry kiddies, but the cross is for Christ...not you, you're no victim, not in this world anyway.
On the flip side of course you also have other RLs, who are actually genuinely ~serious~ about their threats...well, not so much in that they would ever try and carry them out, just to the point of trying to "scare" a person so they can "get back" at them. Such individuals really aren't much of a step up above the dribbling little wannabe victims and they are, effectively, enablers for the very behavior that fuels their hate of the person in the first place. A vicious cycle as it were, a ping pong game of social retardation. What fuels those types of "death threats" is of course the largely text-only environment of the Internet, which gives most people a sense of detachment and feelings of safety and anonymity, believing they can say whatever they want without any possible repercussions or backlash. Put any of those people in a similar real life situation and I guarantee they'll mostly all keep their fuckin idiot mouths shut altogether and won't say a thing.
The last point to keep in mind is that there are quite a number of children online, whose neglectful parents use the Internet as their babysitter. Such children can and will say almost anything, often without any clue at all as to what it is they're even suggesting, often without any comprehension at all of things like consequences and repercussions. To them, the Internet represents a portal into a world where they can say anything, do anything, pretend to be anything, and nothing matters at all on any level, and they of course are *ALWAYS* in the right (even when they're in the wrong, which is 99.9% of the time). Places liak 4chan and other "mainstream" volatile web communities are often the source of the largest tweenage and teenage infestations on the grid.
And if you think a death threat on the fucking Internet from a semi-illiterate 9 year old who lives half a world away is something you really ought to concern yourself with...yeah, you really are a fuckin idiot.
So anyway, back to our story, lil Kathy got a couple of these "death threats" and went BAAAWWWling about it *ALL* over the fuckin place, to the point that she even managed to get the attention of Tim O'Reilly, a "celebrity blogger" of sorts, who posted this fuckin trash:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6502643.stmIn it, O'Reilly gets his lil virtual training panties all up into a snit and quotes off this lil gem:
"The fact that there's all these really messed-up people on the internet is not a statement about the internet. It is a statement about those people and what they do and we need to basically say that you guys are doing something unacceptable and not generalise it into a comment about this is what's happening to the blogosphere."Wow...just...WOW! Okay, first of all, do note the fact that lil O'Reilly can't even figure out that the word Internet is CAPITALIZED, a sure sign of n00b level stupidity. I've always said, if you don't know how to spell the word Internet, you ought not to go running around trying to pass off opinions about it. Because it *REALLY* just makes you look liak a fuckin ass. And that's probably the best way of defining O'Reilly on the Internet...a gawd damn ass hat, and not much moar.
O'Reilly believes that we Netters and Webbies are "messed up", because we don't try and recreate the real world online, rather we use the online world as it was meant to be used...as a free and open medium of communication...*ALL* communication, of any sort, without any opposing rules, laws, regulations, or "codes of conduct" as O'Reily wishes there was. Such forms are nothing more than Internet impotency in most cases and there are no shortage of people around to help educate you proper in how this world *REALLY* works.
People like O'Reilly are basically an affront to everything that the Internet stands for and he completely misses the whole fuckin point as to *WHY* little miss attention whore Kathy was even "targeted" in the first place. You can't take anything online seriously, you have to take *EVERYTHING* with a grain of salt, because on the Internet you have no real way of knowing FOR CERTAIN whether something is real or not real. Anything in the online world can be fabricated or manipulated...a fact that is sorely missed by our justice systems, who rarely understand the nature of the Internet.
Those who can't get that concept through their head present themselves as entertainment packages, targets to be shot up with words carefully crafted to try and get them to spaz out and have a little mental meltdown over nothing moar than words on a screen. It's a sport, really, amongst trolls, or Internet performance artists as we like to call ourselves. But moar than that it's also a teaching tool, designed to force people to comprehend that they can't take things online seriously, or, if they do, they're going to wind up with their lil mind all ripped apart. Or in the cases of online attention whores liak lil Kathy, they actually *FEED* off of it, or rather they feed off the emotional sympathy and pity that they manage to molest out of others around them as a result of it.
Ultimately the goal of an Internet performance artist is to back someone into a corner and force them to lash out in every way that they can to "fight off" their attacker, once they've exhausted every means they can think of to "get back" at the person whose bested them, that's when they're effectively forced to comprehend that, simply put...you have no real power over anyone online...at all. And ultimately, the only one who can *REALLY* make you angry or upset online...is you. At most, all anyone online can do is to provide you with opportunities and excuses to play out whatever little emotional games that *YOU* want to try and play, as you so desperately try and define the Internet as you do the real world. Such attempts are absolute comedy gold to those of us who actually understand the Internet, those of us who have evolved socially to a level where *NOTHING* online bothers us...at all. At the very most all it is, is simply...words on a screen. Nothing moar than that. You must *CHOOSE* to make it moar than that and it is *ALWAYS* on you.
