the leaving work tab-dump and the professional twitter

The professional Twitter @mrsjeremyday might be getting more use than the personal one nowadays. Partly that's the intensification of the middle aged public sector career. You're always either in frantic catch-up or being flung around by outsourcings and restructures, or both, and there is less left over for personal life, even the tiny, interstitial bits of it. Partly it's that, like everyone else, I'm more of a visual communicator nowadays in my personal life, and as a super early-adopter (I started using it back when it was a text-message service) I never got the habit of putting pictures in my tweets.

That's OK for the professional twitter, though, because she has two pretty solid jobs to do. Number one will be familiar to most: the dreaded conference twitter-huddle, the scramble for #hashtags, the quick run-through the half-dozen other profiles tweeting, the little boom as your professional circle expands, and you get another dozen news-threads bringing you the good - or at any rate, novel - stuff. So yes, I'm one of those who suddenly messing up your trending list with an inexplicable acronym periodically.

The other job is maybe a bit more personal. Most working days include a bit of click-around, a bit of research, a bit of checking, reading, discovering. That stuff gets dissolved into the work I'm doing of course, but I also usually don't want to just close all these useful things when the light drops out of the sky and the cleaners turn up with their increasingly futuristic hoovers. Spread the joy. And so the ritual is born of the end of day tab-dump, excerpted fragments and useful diagrams dropped into my twitter stream in a tea-time splurge as I'm trying to leave the office.

Sometimes, the tab-dump allows me to pick up a fresh news perspective on something that has relevance to my work head, but another tto my home head, as I'm sliding between the two. Consider this tweet, for example:

This interesting study finds an association between problem gambling and high spend on loot boxes in self-reported behaviour of adults recruited via Mechanical Turk https://t.co/a1sz6avFLG and also opens me up to the genre of loot box opening videos (a quick dip suffices)

— Jeremy Day (@mrsjeremyday) September 23, 2019

I'd been checking out loot box information to improve our gaming and regulation advice for parents and carers, and had managed to hack through to some actual research. Almost the sweetest meat in this paper was in their limitations section, where they reflected that recruiting survey respondents via Mechanical Turk may have queered their sample. As an online piece-worker myself (I Yougov, which is lower risk and reward than Mechanical Turk, but comes with its own problems - generally a stab of guilt when I discover it commissioned to produce yet another dead cat or dog whistle for a problematic think tank) I keep an eye on the innovations in the area, and I agree with the authors of the paper. They recruited exclusively from optimistic, gambling-prone, system-gamers, and this probably did change their results, although the actual findings from this generator of headlines and policy change were modest, and in essence came down to this; a small number of adolescents are vulnerable to becoming problem gamblers, in line with adults.

a blur of infotainment

I'm playing Candy Crush Saga. With the serious, slightly pained focus that is only available when you are almost incapacitated by procrastination. To be fair, this is only happening when my mind begins to blur out of academic focus and start to flicker off into exciting vistas of other topics of interest, when the mind is dulling against the taptaptap of another chapter.

I'm not just playing Candycrush either, whoever only does that? Right now I'm also watching television (Dinosaur documentary), skimming through fashion shows on vogue.com, fitfully conversing on Facebook and also, naturally, playing three other games (Words with Friends, Disco Zoo and Kleptocats) because that's the way to play if you don't pay. There's some stuff I'm looking up in a tab or two. A book, a magazine, today's paper.

I am thoroughly immersed in the blur of infotainment. And I'm not coming up again until I'm fit to study once more. 

on the refolding of identity

Scandal this week as huge online multi-player game World of Warcraft decided to introduce their forums to real name culture. The predictable outcry masked a broader anxiety about the brave new world of total connection. Now that the entire world is online, will it have to become less free? Or, put more simply; are most people really idiots?

World of Warcraft backed down, of course; several days of female roleplayers gently sharing with the site organisers their extensive personal experiences of being stalked, threatened and harassed did the trick nicely. But Facebook, the native home of the real name culture, is alive and well and winning the internet.

The internet started out as a pseudonymous culture. Faced with character name limits, people created aliases. Realising they were different people with different groups, they made multiples. Feeling the need to escape in an overpoweringly male-dominated world, women went male, or gender neutral. People put on imaginary bodies and made strange worlds. They met strangers and found out new ideas, explored new territories of identity and expression. They were able to switch and change to meet new challenges and rest from exhausting interactions. It was thrilling, empowering, exciting.

Compared to that, the real name culture of Facebook feels like being a pop-up gopher in the hammer game -- the same friends, the same connections, the same short list of faces/friends/family, chattering back endlessly. It's quite nice, but also quite boring. You respond to someone, you see more of them. You ignore someone, they go away. It simulates the experiences of popular kids everywhere, which is fine, I guess; but if you only stay in your own pretty playpen you're kind of missing the point of going online.

For anyone who read about online freedoms and felt a sinking sense of horror, you're absolutely right. While you can engage with this freeedom creatively, make interesting content, have fun, make new friends and generally have a brilliant time, of course many people take the other route. They grief, flame, stalk, harrass, break and vandalise things. They do appalling things almost unconsciously, without a second thought; and their excuses are very simple and very clear. It is easy to do, anyone could do it, lots of people want to, and nobody's stopping me.

Are they right, though? Are they really now the dominant online group? Or, to put it another way, are most people really idiots?

If what's predominantly happening is that most people are routinely thoughtlessly acting out without worrying about consequences because there are unlikely to be any bad consequences and it's just so easy, yes, some form of unique registration might have an effect. However, if what we're seeing is an aggressive minority indulging in deviant behaviour because that's what they want to do, then it seems likely that people will get round the checks and blocks and continue with what they're doing because that is what they do when they're online.

World of Warcraft's forums, for the moment, are continuing to allow their users fictional creations their voices. But if the moronic and monotonous sock-puppet slaggers outnumber the real and honorable interactions, what conclusions should we draw?