The Origins of a internet tough guy.

We like to find faults. As a human being our pursuit of perfection resulted us to look of others imperfections, by thus we tend to catch attention to situations where negatives outweighs our emotions towards positive ones. A common example would be is reviews; if some said that “Bakemonogatari is the best dammed thing that ever appeared on torrentzzz.” we tend to shrug away and move on. But if someone said “Bakkemonogatari is a over hyped underbudget  shaft piece of crap.” you would care more on reading that than the former.

Now. In the situation such as my previous article. I have mentioned the faults of the ZOH, and their unaccepted fact, that they can’t seem to handle have taken quite a emotional gulag of sorts.

As you can see the great folks at ZOH, has decided to be gloom and doom to ban their critics for pointing out their mistakes.

Now. I will trace out the origins of why some people can’t seem to accept criticism, and shun their detractors. This article, published on cracked.com. tells us why people of the 21th century are miserable compared to people of the old.

We have less and less encounters with annoying people. Anime communities sprung because there isn’t any outlet from the sharp eye of the masses. The west  have soldered our minds that Anime are for kids, and people watching 2D are immature jerks (well some). Forums are a great way to share the common likeness of a certain hobby, from computers to anime we post our way with satisfaction. But the process of selection has change our mindset that we can sort who we want to talk with and who we interact with, but clearly this is not that case in real life. We encounter random strangers. We get annoyed at some, but we don’t have the means to just ban them from existence. We have professors whom we hate the most; you hate him, you despise him, you want him dead but in the end of the day, you will thank him for being a jerk, because it made more tolerable towards society. Thats what make us humans. Forums is a great alternative to the stressed and miserable life we have, but having to rely for comfort is by no means a death sentence to your character.

We wuss out situations, we can’t interact instantaneously. One thing that is evident is turn based conversations. Sure we have IM’s but it generally turn base, it just refreshes more often. The deal with turn based is we can plan ahead of time, like in chess. We have time to formulate situations that will prevent the result into something awry or spell death to a situation. In terms of forums and microsites such as plurk, we can filter what we say, we construct our feeling to what we want them to appear, and thus produce a convincingly honest post. Real life isn’t turn based. we can plan a head, but do you think the moment you wake up. you log on and have all the information you need in the internet that will make you plan your day? We aren’t clairvoyant.  life can go shitty from the first blink of the eye, or the last blink. Now, If a stranger talks to you unexpectedly what is the most thing internet people would do? most of them will ignore it (or run away), because they can’t think of a reaction because they are used to have a large time to think about it. Certainly ignoring and shunning is quite a common reaction for internet people.

When someone points your mistake? do you: Run away and prentend it never happend, or Think about it and accept it positively.

We can’t accept criticisms because we don’t get criticized enough. Unless your a pampered kid. The internet pampered our lowly achievements or our wrongful ideas, but why? It’s because they all think alike. Like in the first one, internet has given us god like powers to select what we want to hear, what we like to hear. Forums are the culprit for this. why would you go to a Yaoi community if you like Hentai? why would you be in a religious forum if you are an atheist? see, we have the God powers. Criticisms comes from people who think differently, people who has seen you as a person not as a friend. Understanding clouds judgement. Acceptance takes effort and pain. People often mistaken insults and criticism. being a negative by default, we often see them as one, when a person says your grammar sucks, you would most likely think that this person hates you. The fact of him saying that is that he notice your mistakes, and he  told you. Real friends are the people who tells you point blank that your a jerk and an a-hole, friends who keeps his opinions to himself are not your friends. So, do you think you can improve yourself alone?

As the picture suggest. if i never put a picture expressing sarcasm, do you think writing "oh really" really mean sarcasm?

Text is a hollow representation of ones view. Internet and SMS is a text oriented medium. One is because it’s easy to produce, and two its easy to digest. If you are working in a company, you would agree that email is the heart and blood for corporate people to communicate to their employees, and from employee to employee. Philippines is still living in a blogging bubble, compared to Americans doing micro-blogging and video and audio podcasting. In a recent study, it seems there is a higher percentage that email are being misinterpreted by your readers. Why? its because we view them as us. Mood determines the message of the text, if you are mad a text saying “I can’t come” will mean that that person hates you, he doesn’t have the time for you, But in reality he can’t come because he is in a middle of a deadline or his wife is in labor. There are many ways we can interpret text. No wonder we have a lot of Christian Groups in the country. See, pairing this to Criticism clearly paint a picture on why people can’t take the heat. We misinterpreted the message, thus we take it as an insult. I happened to talk to this guy in IM, asking for advise to remove a virus in his computer, i jokingly said that my advise comes with a price, he doesn’t seem to get it and he made a bad comment about me. As much as possible, if you want to convey a message, either do a video cast or do a podcast (or simply invite him over). The gesture and the tone are give aways to bring the persons character, body language are hard to hide, and certainly tones are much better than emo icons.

Next one i will discuss how to escape from mistakes? how does a intelligent person get away from failures?.