Intertribes
Original composition date lost
|
etc
no date
2024 +
2025
entries
home
The italicised portions are commentary found in another person's journal, and what's not italicised were my comments to it. (2025 06 10: This being many years past the time of composition, I have no recollection of whose journal it was.)
But we get along. Because we have to. It's the real world. We find ways to be polite to one another despite the disagreements [...]
The Internet, or Intarweb, or whatever the hell the kids call it these days, may be a font of many things, but what it is not, is a font of teaching people how to actually deal with each other. It is entirely dehumanising in several key areas, like personal interaction, respecting someone else's space, acknowledging that on the other side of the screen sits a human being who feels just as you do. The average length of a friendship was, jokingly many years ago, two weeks. I don't think it lasts even that long these days.
It's easy to dismiss, ignore, and abuse someone you never have to look at; easy to push aside the reality that they house a beating heart and a brain.
I keep looking for substance, for real amusement and challenge, and 90% of the time, if I'm lucky enough to find it, it's been turned into a game, a gadget, a widget, a blog tool for the masses who most of the time seem completely incapable of any real depth, or propagandised out of it, and can only share themselves via lists, quizzes, and the likes list. Everything's been trivialised - I blame much of this on the rampant, fungal growth of so-called "reality TV". (That's a rantitribe for another day).
[...] microtribes. Those little pockets of particularly like-minded folks [...] We seek them out because [...]
We all belong to multiple microtribes though, and each of them, if they validate, validate sometimes very disparate things about each of us - sometimes things that are conflicting with validations from other groups. I don't think there's anything wrong with finding such microtribes; we all need to belong somewhere, to find solace, safety, comfort, etc. But you are right. Hiding is wrong. Deliberately hiding is even worse. I don't think it's such a deliberate act most of the time; sometimes it happens simply because we don't have the time we need to devote to our personal lives, so we settle in places that feel comfortable, because they are the least likely to hurt us in our topsy-turvy existences.
Maybe that, the fact that we have so little time, is the problem. And that I blame on the fact that we've been hauled through a society that, in large part a good bit of the time, has taught us to live to work, instead of working to live. We are wageslaves, and I mean that both in the sense of financials, and in the sense of being forced to feel a loyalty to The Company that should only exist with family, friends, compatriots, and causes.