Friday, 8th June, 2007

September 2.0

secondlife flickr frustration n00bs rant

I quite like it, when all the online things that I'm interested collide together.

All across the spaces I inhabit, I'm really starting to see the erosion of initial intentions and idiosyncracies, towards a beige vanilla blandness of 'meh'. The early maverick tendancies of those spaces are giving way to the clean-up 'safety' of floods of incoming, blinkered ideologies.

I dunno — maybe I'm being elitist and talking out of my arse here, but there does seem to be an overall wave of Not Quite Getting It™ going on in various places.

Flickr's a great example of this. I love Flickr. Every day I see amazing things, beautiful images, stunning photographs, snippets of lives, curiosities and pixels beyond what my imagination could ever conceive. I talk to people I've never met, flatter — and get flattered by — people I respect and admire. I make connections with photographers and artists that I'd never normally get the chance to, and I reconnect with people from the past who've stumbled across me, or who I've stumbled across and sat back in my chair with a gasp and a "Ooooh! It's them!"

But my browsing delights are increasingly becoming filled with superfluous crud. Not photographic crud — hell, I'm as guilty of that as anyone else — but engagement crud.

Part of the key thing, for me, about Web 2.0 sites, is their ease of use. A couple of trips through the FAQ and some tutorials, and you're flinging photos in all sorts of places. That big button that says "Send to group" — guess what that does, for a start.

Yet almost every day (she said, exaggerating somewhat) I see "How do I post a photo to this group?" discussions popping up in every group I belong to.

But I digress

My point, I suppose, is that time and time again, I see evidence of people who don't get it immediately — but instead of lurking and trying to work things out, try and reshape it into something they're more familiar with. The Brave New Promises™ of these new spaces get reverted, perverted, back to the monoslabic hulks of yesteryear.

I think I can sum up my frustrations in many fewer words: "Some people think that Flickr is a Tranny site".

When I first started posting photos there, I was amazed by how cool everyone was in that community. I didn't feel like I had to hide myself behind some cloak of anonymity. I could — quite brazenly — be "Siobhan", and be taken seriously about what it was I was trying to do.

I mean, it wasn't my initial intention to post girl pics there even. I just loved it for the ease of it all, and for the fact that I could say "Hi, I'm Siobhan Curran, I'm a transvestite who makes nice pictures" without feeling like I was going to get laughed at.

Two years later though, walls have gone up. Privacy steps in. The previous joy and pride of being open, honest, progressive and integrative has given way to a depressive state of furtiveness, fear and closedness. Instead of embracing new values and opportunities, it feels sometimes like we've reverted to form — lowering the bar in terms of quality and of expectations, all in the name of inclusiveness and 'safety'.

...

Ah. 'Safety'.

I was flicking through one of my seldom-read mailing lists this morning, and — as if by magic — found something to get annoyed by. It is, I feel, bad form to quote something from a list out of context in another space, so I'll paraphrase, adding my own take on the intention behind it (which might, of course, be completely inaccurate)

"blah blah blah ... there are fantasists out there who are men pretending to be women ... blah blah blah"

Those aren't remotely the exact words — but that's how it came across.

It occurred to me — especially in light of all the recent controversy in Second Life — that there's a pattern of development in certain things. The imaginative progresses of the original mavericks and weirdos who invariably end up being the innovators of a space, come crashing down when the lumbering masses get involved. Progressive notions of sociability are brushed aside by an unwilling-to-engage hoarde of people who want things to be 'familiar'.

The New World is sucked back into The Old. Second Life becomes First Life In Which I Can Fly. Flickr becomes Roses. Canal Street becomes straight.

...

Ack, maybe that's an exaggeration. It just narks me sometimes that things that I'm enthusiatic about, things that I invest a lot of time and effort — with results that I'm chuffed with — are dragged back to a dull level by the people who would most benefit from engaging with things in a new way, whether that's a bunch of trannies who want to stay behind closed doors deludely patting each other on the back and telling anti-men jokes, or a group of luddites who want to be able to 'be themselves' in a virtual space, and have their real names emblazoned on their chests.

And all this talk of "safety" is a misnomer — the spaces that we try and create have safety as their backbone, the safety to be whoever you really are without old-guard predjudice (and side-swipes at transvestites).

Becuase I think that's what people mean, when they talk about "safety" for a "majority" — they're talking about the safety to carry their old predjudices along with them, rather than embracing the glorious possibilities of engaging with a group of diverse, open, wonderful, weird people who can open up their minds a little.

She said, wandering completely off the point.

As usual.

Yes, I guess that's what I meant. Although I do feel I should somehow emphasise that I don't think it's a case of 'Jennies-come-lately' or anything. I'm not saying that it's only the initial crowd who are the amazing ones — that would be very wrong (and I'd be excluding myself if I was saying that).

I'm just saying it's the ones with the predjudices — more specifically, the ones who insist on keeping their predjudices, desperately avoiding 'change' — that have a tendancy to fuck up what was once a beautiful thing.