Society Made Me Do It
We have heard the claim that “society made me do it” for a long time. I have heard many people brush off this statement as if it was a lazy excuse for people who do not want to take responsibility for their actions. For a few, this may certainly be the case. However, we should not just brush off the claim and we should really start looking at context.
I know, we Americans are terrible at context. We like our precise dicotomies of “us” and “them”, “black” or “white”, 0 and 1. Life isn’t this way and I know that people have trouble with that.
Life is not simple. Anyone who thinks so is so very privileged that they’re sickening. As a visually impaired individual from the disreputable parts of California, my life is not simple, has never been simple and who would really want their lives to be simple anyway?
I am a firm believer in the idea that challenge us helps us grow and having things too easy, too predictable is bad for our mental and physical health.
Yesterday I decided to really expose something about myself that I haven’t shared with many. I’m sharing it now because I feel that it is important to talk about our systemic problems in our society and also to show how we deal with them. It took me so long to talk about this so directly because, well, for most of my life, most people did not understand, they could not relate. Now, however, society has changed, more people use the technologies that I have used for over half my life. As an example, in 1995 I experienced my first video teleconference. Zoom did not even exist then. The Internet was just barely trickling into the public consciousness. Work from home? You could technically say I’ve been doing that since 1990. I still feel like I came late to the party too since we had been building the Internet for over 20 years before I ever touched it.
I’m not writing about the Internet, though, not directly. I’m not writing about the on-screen magnification I use in the vast majority of my computer work and play, even though Apple’s MacOS has had that built in since sometime around 1984. (I used my first Apple Mac in 1987.) Linux built in a working magnifier before that and Microsoft Windows had it woking in less then a decade after Apple. Apple’s version always worked better then all of them until only a few years ago. Now, no matter what operating system I use, I can have on-screen magnification. (We have had versions of the talking computer since about the 1980s but talking interfaces are slow and cumbersome but if you have no vision they are much better than not having a computer at all.)
Although the Internet has changed all our lives in profound ways, and on-screen magnification has allowed me to much more easily do what I want and need to do, where I am going in my wordy and tangential way, is to virtual worlds, sometimes called “online worlds” or “virtual environments” and many other more derogatory names. I will include online games in this group as well because many people also use these games as social spaces and vicariously live in these worlds as well.
A brief history of the Internet should include a section on how people developed the connection technology from a file sharing utility into a method for connecting to colleagues and (later) friends in real time. File sharing, as far as I know, was first and then email followed shortly after because afterall an email is simply a collection of files that moves from one computer, though a server and gets delivered to your computer which is why we use the postal paradigm.
Soon after email came person-to-person real time text chatting. We take it for granted that we can pick up our phones, waggle our thumbs a few times and in no time at all dump our obnoxious boyfriend or even order pizza. At the dawn of the Internet, people still had to use hardwired (landline) telephones to do either of those things. (When was pizza delivery invented anyway?)
If you have ever tried to have more than one text conversation at once then you should understand that group chat quickly followed. These worked very much like three-way calling and conference, even Zoom, calls work now. They happened at certain times when all the participants where at their computer terminals. That was not good for everyone. If the host left, the whole thing would often collapse and then participants would have to set the whole thing up with a new host connecting everyone. So, then we developed the “chat” server. Internet Relay Chat (IRC) being the most widely none of the chat server flavors of it’s time. This is where “chat room” comes from. The server ran on its own computer, the physical server hardware, and people connected to that and could connect to any room they need and “talk”, type at, anyone else in the room in near-real time. (Depending on how busy they are or how much coffee they have drank that day.) Does this sound familiar? Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Hangouts (is that dead now?) are three examples of modern versions of the same idea, except now we can throw pictures, videos and graphical emoji at each other as well. (Yeah, smilies are bad enough but emoji really don’t do it for me.)
Of course, you get people talking and soon enough, they want to play games to pass the time, because honestly when your job is to fix things when they go wrong, what else do you do when there is nothing to fix?) So, the online, or virtual, world was born.
These text-only worlds actually started a little bit earlier with the telephone-modem connected, pre-Internet, Bulletin Board System but the idea really expanded on the internet when people were not paying telephone charges. These worlds varied from freeform chat worlds that were not much more than stories you could virtually walk through by typing directions like, “walk north” to full-on real time text Mech battles where if you typed too slow your virtual robot blew up and all your buddies laughed at you as they danced on your virtual corpse.
Of course, computer games and virtual worlds swiftly progressed from text, to text graphics to adding pictures, sounds and we have now the amazing real-time 3D rendered worlds that are sometimes amazingly beautiful.
I learned about the BBS, mentioned earlier, in 1988 and first used the Internet directly in 1990 when I started studying computer science at my first university.
This is where I finally get back to my thread of “society made me do it.” You were likely thinking that I had forgotten all about it! Hahaha, fooled you. I just felt that this little history lesson was needed to build up a shared understanding, or context.
As a visually impaired person, I have never been able to coneect to people very well. I was not socialized the same as most of my peers, I rarely shared the same interests as my peers and I am terrible at reading social, often visual, cues so people find me harder to deal with. Therefore, I have always had few friends and the friends I did find were often very similar to me.
So, while many of my peers were off doing whatever young people do while not sitting in class, often getting drunk, high or pregnant (or trying to get someone else one or more of those three things), I was exploring the pre-web Internet. I first discovered IRC, and that was neat but could get boring when there was no one I wanted to talk to around. Believe it or not, world-spanning chat rooms can get just as quiet as a subway tunnel during a power outage. So, I had to find somethng else to occupy my fingers (because reading is not always enough to occupy the brain.)
Within the first two years of me joining the still relatively unknown Internet, I was making my way onto, into, virtual worlds. They were all text, as I mentioned before. Within a few years, I was not only playing in them, but I was helping to create them as a writer and a “programmer”. (In quotation marks because in computer parlance it was technically scripting because the code I wrote would not run outside of the environment in which I wrote it.)
Internet technology, computers and computer software applications rapidly change through the decade of the 1990s. I became more or less active in the world outside, and more or less addicted to the virtual spaces I participated in. At one point I had to admit that I was so addicted to these online games that I nearly failed at university, in a figurative and a literal sense. My being put on academic probation twice was not due to my Internet game addiction, it was due to my utter disinterest in several university courses and also being quite terrible at fallowing certain university instructors who really did not know how to teach a visually impaired person algebra. (I will also admit that I never liked the subject either, even if I have on occasion use what I did manage to learn.) I did manage to pull myself out of those ruts and graduated. I learned better how to balance the real and virtual worlds and even learned how to use them to my own personal advantage.
Here is a minor tangent about entertainment. Certain people have made the claim that some entertainments exist to passify and distract the masses. I say, plausible, but not every entertainment and not every member of the masses are pacified. Especially now where some forms of entertainment have so distorted reality to some people that it makes the old supermarket tabloids look prophetic.
We monkey human animals are creatures of stories. We tell stories to educate, to warn, to pass on information, to entertain and sometimes to protect ourselves. Making up stories and passing them on to others is part of who we are. I did not really understand that for so long and that is why I was an entertainment hater. I was! I hated spectator sports, I hated television programs that weren’t news or educational, I even hated concerts. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t hate performers, they were just doing a job. I did hate professional athletes though because some of these people made insane amounts of money just for doing something they, may have at one time, enjoyed and seemed far easier than going to a university and getting one or more degrees. (Yeah, I know, I will get yelled at by some people for that but you know opinions, everyone has one. That doesn’t mean that all opinions are equally valid.)
While I worked in the entertainment industry for the short time I did, three years, my opinion began to change. I began to understand that many of the people who work in entertainment do it because they like entertaining and some of them are even good at it. In addition I began to understand that we need to step away from ourselves once in a while, responsibly of course. Stepping back can help us deal with our other issues better by giving our brains and our emotions time to recover, to consider, while we’re doing something else distracting our conscious minds with a little play. Yes, I said play. Adults should remember that it is okay to play. That was something else I learned then.
Since there are a lot of real world things I can not do, virtual worlds have been a bit part of my life because in them I can do some of those things that I could not, or likely would not have the opportunity, to do in the real world. Like drive, you may ask. Oh, sure, I’ve driven in the virtual, it’s even fun. Of course I often crash on accident…and sometimes on purpose. No, though, I have driven in real life too, several times. Sure, I am not terribly good at it but it has been an interesting challenge from time to time. Fly? Oh, sure, flying gives you an interesting perspective but that’s why we have tall buildings, helicopters and drones. Oh, oh, how about captain a stealth submarine deep in the ocean during the Cold War? Yeah, no one sane would have let me do such a thing, but I was able to do it virtually.
Anyway, I’ll stop beating on that nail.
Even as the technology has changed to make more immersive online environments, outside in the real world things have not gotten much better for the disabled and other marginalized groups. As our society drives us further apart, people are driven deeper into virtual spaces where they can ind safety and support for their own beliefs. These virtual spaces can be helpful, like support groups, or harmful, like driving fascist hate groups into games like Roblox where they can indoctrinate new, and often younger, members because the smokescreen of a game.
Certain people target online resources and claim that changing them will change our society. It will not. We need to change how we act in the real world and that will change how we act in the virtual.
Of course, myself and many other people within virtual worlds are fighting to improve the online experience from the inside. On Second Life (a virtual world I joined in 2005) there are many groups which work inside virtual worlds and outside in the real world to make life more equitable, and sensible, and even in online simulations (like Elite Dangerous, a space simulation) and other online games, similar groups can be found.
In the real world my voice has been ignored or attacked because of my disability, I have not been given the same chances as others because of my disability, I have not been hired to some jobs because of my disability, so I went someplace where my voice mattered more because my disability mattered less, the virtual world. Virtual worlds have taught me a lot about many real world people and issues. Now, I am beginning to bring what I have learned back out into the real world.
Some people think that life is a game that you can somehow win. I’m here to tell you that you will not win at life. No one does.
If you think that you’re a “boss” just remember that in every game the boss dies. No matter who you think you are, no matter how powerful you think you are, someone has your cheat code and they are waiting to use it.
Society made me feel insignificant powerless and useless but it has also taught me how to stand up for what I believe in, to fight for what I believe in, to play it clean and by the book, or down in the gutter dirty. I will do whatever it takes to come out on top because that’s what society wants me to do, too.
Your deal, before you hit send on your next rage and hate filled rant, ask yourself what kind of society do you want to live in? Do you want to live in a world where no one is safe or do you want to live in a world in a world were we can accomplish even greater things. If you think that you would prevail in a chaotic world-wide winner-takes all fight like in the video games? Think again. You will be the first to go because it will be everyone else against you.
Good luck.
Society shapes us and in turn we shape society.
I know, this was pretty rambling, right? Okay, let me lay it down this way. People like to separate things to keep them simple. Problem is that nothing is truly separate. Virtual worlds are reflections of the real world. People build virtual worlds for many reasons but they still bring a lot of themselves and their societies with them into these worlds. Then, as people get into these places, they can form a reinforcing loop, just like can happen with other forms of addiction and cults.
Hey, wait, what? Wasn’t I supposed to be in favor of virtual worlds?
I am, they are great forms of entertainment and can be very helpful for marginalized people, including people with disabilities. Just like the conspiracy theory factories spawned the the supermaket tabloid crowd though, anything can get out of hand.
Think about it, if you can quote entire dialogs from television shows like Star Trek or The Simpsons, or you can read batting statistics for a player who died back in 1941 from memory, you are no better than a kid who spends 6 hours a day scrolling on TikTok.
Okay, okay, fine. I will wrap this up. Just remember that how you treat people, even on the Internet, has real world consequences. If I had been given a more equitable chance in life, I could have been a more outwardly productive citizen, I could have paid more taxes, I could have helped more people with their real world problems. Since that has not turned out for me, I have gone into the virtual world where I have admittedly wasted a lot of time, I have also helped a few people and have made my own space, had some positive influence and have even at times made some money. It is not the life I expected or wanted but I am greatful for the positives that I have gained through virtual worlds.
There are amazing things to see and do in the real world, amazing things to experience in books, movies and even more amazing things that we can build, if we give ourselves the chance.
Let us remember how to build a stronger, more resilent and understanding world, virtual or otherwise. If we do not, game over, zero lives remaining and the arcade will not be opening in the morning.