The internet is a pretty
incredible resource.
Chances are that you, reading this post right now, are hundreds, even thousands of miles away from where I sit typing it. Right now, I could open up Skype and be capable of talking to someone on the opposite side of the world to me in real time. Or else I could open up Netflix and stream movies at a rate that would have been considered nigh-impossible a decade ago.
For every silver-lining,
however, there's always the cloud.
Because whilst the internet
is pretty incredible, it's also full of assholes.
Write a post about movies,
and some guy will emerge to tell you that your opinions suck. Write a
post about video games, and another guy will pop out of nowhere to
tell you that you're terrible at what you do and you should stop.
Write a post about religion from an atheistic standpoint, and you'll
find several people jumping out the woodwork to tell you that you're
going to hell. Write a post about religion from a theistic
standpoint, and I'd wager you'll have plenty of folks telling you
that you're an ignorant, Bible-thumping fucktard. Talk about how you
think homoeopathy has no evidence for it and you'll get labelled a
shill for Big Pharma. Point out the faults in a particular conspiracy
theory and someone will be there to declare you a narrow-minded fool
who can't see the bigger picture.
In short, if you talk about
things on the internet it's basically an inevitability that at some
point you will have people stop by just to try and fuck with you.
Don't get me wrong, writing
a blog can be a very rewarding experience. I've been writing Damned
Already for over a year now, and it's been an awesome way to help me
figure out how I think about issues and has put me in touch with some
very cool internet folks, too. But you've got to be prepared for the
less enjoyable parts of putting your thoughts and ideas out into the
ether that is the world wide web.
The ability to look past
things and weather abuse, otherwise known as having a thick skin, is
pretty vital at times when you're writing a blog. The ability to not
be put off by some guy appearing just to tell you how much he thinks
you suck can help you not to lose your enjoyment of this whole
'typing out your thoughts and ideas and then sticking then on the
internet' thing. At the same time, though, it's important to be able
to separate assholery from those dispensing useful, if blunt,
constructive criticism. You might not like what they have to say, or
the way they say it, but sometimes there's a few gems of useful
feedback in amongst the sea of shit being spewed at you.
Posting anything on the
internet can suck at times. That doesn't change the fact that it can
be an extremely rewarding experience too.
