birdsite link, Kids These Days, internet privacy, over-sharing, harassment
On that note, perhaps I'll share a stream-of-thought from yesterday...
This post on Twitter has been getting around in various ways, and I extremely vibe with some of the concerns expressed. Here's the original Tumblr post too, for it in text form.
I've said repeatedly how off it's felt to me since mid-2010s people put everything out in the open and it's like... that's private information. You don't need to tell everyone your specific sexual interests/etc unless you intend to cyber. Though being that said, my asexuality could also just have me personally responding to it all "but why, what's the big deal" and being put off by the cultural obsession with categorising yourself sexually.
But later points are valid too: harassers and bullies are not going to be put off by "x don't interact". It's often simply virtue signalling to allies, it's not going to discourage shitty people. Especially when "x" things are just the latest buzzword by fancops that is extreme enough to catch peoples' reactionary tendencies. Just rally cries for friends and allies.
It's kind of ironic in the end. Back in the day when I was at high-school, the internet safety stuff seemed reliant on any harassment coming from a local person. Both in terms of what level of danger a kid could be in, and what parents and teachers are capable of doing about that sort of thing. Internet safety felt like it woefully underestimated the internet is global.
But even if I didn't think the saftey stuff was very good, I still didn't overshare various deep and personal(ly identifying) information online. Largely because that information wasn't even important for my friends. I have a self online I've created, and that's the thing that's important.
I don't really care about The Teens because of the playground bullying that is the modern internet, but I do care about this cultural shift that's making things more volatile online.
We really need more 18+ websites. Not for adult content, but to give the kids and teens other places that are safer to make mistakes, and then the adults can have places away from the prying eyes of kids that have nothing better to do than to police the behaviours of adults with more worldly experience than them.
re: birdsite link, Kids These Days, harassment, religious abuse
Hilariously, after I post that, I see another post about the subject of internet harassment and the Kids These Days, empowered by the over-sharing culture prying into every little detail of everyone's lives and interests.
Twitter link, unfortunately the raw text source appears to have been deleted.
I wasn't raised in a religious house, but I did go to a religious high-school. Not for any personal belief reason, but because it was small and my parents felt it would be safe for me, because of my physical disabilities. Versus say, going to a school with tens of thousands of students and getting trampled in the hallways.
But at that school, there was certainly those odd moments by the faculty that were all about moral purity and villifying the supposed evils of the world into anthropomorphic threats. My classical history teacher once said that "[your dean] uses god and satan as shorthand to represent what she sees as good and evil".
And perhaps, that's what the religiously fervours gay kids are like. They've created bogeymen of The Problematics, and they're not one of The Problematics, therefore they have to be one of the good ones.
The biggest parallel for me is the idea that all sins are equal, & since thoughts can be sins (e.g. lust, envy), indulging in bad thoughts is just as bad as doing bad things. And suddenly shipping a 17-yo with an 18-yo and being a literal child molester are basically the same.
