Day Thirteen: Benned

I spend quite a bit of time on Reddit. It's interesting to see what the internet is vomiting forth each day, perhaps help someone that needs it occasionally, Unfortunately it's also a place to be reminded about the depths to which humanity can sink.

Reddit, like any group of people online, is a microcosm of society, in this case largely western society. And by western society, I mean mainly American. 

I first started browsing the fledgling internet back in 1995, when I started university. By the end of the first semester I was training people in my department on it, not by dint of being a computer whiz, just by being more competent than the average arts student. Back then the conversational tool of choice was Usenet, which has all but disappeared from view in the intervening decade or so. I'm not even sure if there's a tool for accessing it on this computer. It fascinated me. I wooed my now ex with witty emails I never quite matched the promise of in the following years. Well, I remember them as witty anyway.

This is the thing, though, isn't it? What seems witty and brilliant when you're in your youth can be embarrassing and rude when you look back at it with the benefit of hindsight and experience. You have no way of knowing at the time how you are coming across, the mistakes you are making. The further back you go into your childhood the truer that is, until you get back into your early teens, where your arrogance and self confidence are supreme,. you are so sure of all your opinions, you will not brook any argument, but will argue with anything and anyone.

Teenagers pick up their parents and peers prejudices, and are often, if not usually, the least tolerant people of all. Oh, don't get me wrong, they will be tolerant of whatever their little in-group says they should be tolerant of, in a way that older bigots won't understand, but their opinions on race, gender, class, politics, culture.are hideously reactionary and pompously righteous. And lack of life experience stops them having any kind of rein on their cruelty, not having the empathy that comes with either first hand socialisation, or even second-hand through fiction (most teenagers don't have the patience to watch a movie that doesn't have things blowing up every two minutes to keep their attention, let alone read a novel).

When I first went on reddit I was appalled at the way that people spoke to each other on occasion. Then slowly I began to get it. The internet has a few older people like myself, a technological elite (and I mean that in the smallest self-flattering way, most people I know my age find even the simple idea of podcasts mind-bogglingly beyond them), maybe twenty percent of the middle aged. But it has maybe eighty percent of teenagers, who have grown up with the internet, cannot remember a time without it. People for whom the 90s is nostalgia.

That cuts out the very bottom twenty percent, but still leaves a good thirty to fifty percent of people that you would cross the road to get away from. I remember being a teenager, and the vast majority of them I never want to see again, for all they may have matured and mellowed. It shouldn't be surprising, therefore, that teenagers on the internet are foul. The difference is, perhaps, that adults get to see their foulness, caught there in words on the screen like flies in amber. 

In Reddit there is a little bit of the site that takes such dross and shows it, not for contemplation but for ridicule. I took it, as many others do, I'm sure as a way of making yourself feel better about the foulness, a reminder that other people were as repulsed as you, and that you are not alone in thinking that rudeness, cruelty and prejudice were things to be reviled. It indulged in it itself about what it found, but I accepted it there as ironic satire. That bit of the site is know n as ShitRedditSays, or SRS.

Recently there was a particularly acute example of the grossness of it all in the comments to a post to a section of the site specifically for teenagers. I wrote a short, pithy response, I thought:

"They're teenagers. You were expecting mature intellectual discourse?"

I was immediately set upon. Downvoted to hell, teenagers taking it as a personal affront, and banned from that section of the site. Why? Because I was displaying ageism, apparently. Yes, suggesting people might be too young, is ageism. Ageism, the only prejudice that time alone will cure, right? 

Well, no. Ageism is about writing off the old (what I encountered in comments, ironically). Youth is a position of privilege. But this appears to be the privilege too far, the one they can't see. And why? Well, of course because they are still subject to the whims of their parents, so they don't see it. Yes, they are that young.

So, I'm banned, but for a reason that makes me feel kind of icky I was there conversing with them in the first place. I now see why they indulge in such cruel judgement on their peers. It isn't satire, it isn't justice. It is because they are teenagers, and anyone that is not in their group is fair game. No empathy, no sympathy, no understanding, no limits.

No maturity.