Safe (Cyber)Space Exploration
“In the electric age, we wear all of mankind as our skin.”
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The Internet is getting safer, I swear.
Now that’s a wild-eyed thesis that probably raises some eyebrows because everyday feels like the exact opposite is coming true! I’ll admit that after a decade of being an Internet user, I find myself deeply pessimistic, preparing for harm on any given post. That cynicality isn’t empirically unjustified, either, according to harassment statistics for, say, Canadian journalists1, the U.S. population2, or just informal surveys of your friends.
But I argue that since its mass adoption, parts of the Internet have gotten safer, and I’ll show you evidence that the whole of the Web can follow that same path. The question I’ll try to answer is,
How can we feel safe on the Internet?
Yes but…
Off the bat, I cannot peddle a doe-eyed faith in the comity of contemporary online communities – there’s too much proof to the otherwise. But there’s still space for safety.
‘Reimagining the Internet’ is a podcast from the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure which interviews smart folks who are trying to understand what the Internet currently is and postulate on what it could be – God, I wanna be a guest.
They’ve got a fantastic catalogue of episodes that you should check out, but pull your focus to one for now: ‘It’s About Safety in Gaming with T.L. Taylor.’3
The episode features eminent game culture scholar T.L. Taylor in discussion with host Ethan Zuckerman on how to conceive of the online gaming community and keep members safe.
Toward the end, Taylor and Zuckerman reflect on how the gaming community and online spaces broadly have evolved since the early Internet of the ’90s. Zuckerman recounts a situation online wherein his son encountered racial abuse and anti-Semitism, but Zuckerman’s instinct was that such is the nature of the Internet, saying,
“I had to check my own reaction because my first reaction was, ‘It’s the Internet. Everyone’s awful. Everything is awful.’ … And then my second reaction was, ‘Actually, this is a very major part of how my son socializes’ and … hopefully this is the worst bullying he ends up experiencing, but you can’t minimize the impacts of all of this.”
Zuckerman’s initial reaction isn’t uncommon, reifying that the Internet is to be feared. It’s a warning about the online medium and not one to dismiss out hand. It can feel like the Internet’s set to entertain our worst impulses and can’t change that course.
That feeling’s just about dead wrong, though. To exemplify why, let’s discuss one recent, positive culture shift.
Softening the Internet
Content warning: This section briefly references sexual violence in the abstract, with no details. Skip to ‘Abyss, briefly’ if you’d like to avoid such matters.
That, above, is a content warning (CW), something so blatantly useful to media that it’s already an innate part of our lives – gaming’s ESRB, the MPA ratings, and libraries having delineated sections – but boy, did I chafe at it for a while.
Where I had once firmly stood was on the slippery slope, that once ‘proper’ content warnings for topics like sexual violence became popular, they’d be corrupted and we’d tumble into the ravine of overly niche, under-contextualized masses of pretext precluding anyone from reading the actual work.
Where I stand now is seeing that content warnings, filtering keywords, and all other self-selecting audience tools aren’t adversely affecting art or exacerbating ‘echo chambers,’ they’re just helping people.
So long as we recognize that a CW necessarily lacks context and remain alert such that CWs themselves don’t become an avenue for service-provider censorship, then more power to ’em and the users they benefit.
Content warnings evince that we can, in fact, make the Internet a more accommodating place.
Perhaps only some will use CWs, but if it becomes ingrained into the social fabric of a platform, the refusal or kayfabe ignorance of such a convention becomes an identifying tool as to who you are. Like pronouns in your bio or using a particular type of keysmash, your interaction with the platform informs others of what type of user you are, and whether you’re trustworthy to them.
You shouldn’t trust the whole of the Internet, but conventions are a fine way to help discern who’s worth their salt.
Abyss, briefly
Violence can invade nearly any space. As users in an adolescent cyberspace, witnessing megacorps and governments struggle to understand ‘online safety’ actually is4, we’re un/fortunately voyagers on the online frontier.
My answer to our headline question, then, is twofold.
The Internet continues to be an incredibly dynamic, fun place, and my money says it won’t stop being fascinating for a while yet. You should try to explore it to the extent you’re comfortable because I can near-guarantee that both you and the Web will be better off for it – so long as you keep within your limits.
Exploration means harm. Coming from the environment, sure, but that harm can also register within – Nietzsche’s warning about the abyss carries weight.
To balance that, find some comfy places, safe spaces where you can hang out with your shields down while still interacting with a dynamic environment. A casual gaming lobby, a great livestream, or even a bespoke Mastodon instance can be points of rest that still expose you, in moderated glimpses, to the depth of the Internet.
That depth is what we’re all after, just take care to not stare too long.
As someone who grew up in that early 2010s internet culture I definitely relate to that podcast dude. It's like I'll see the most awful, offensive, mean things on the internet and just kinda shrug and think "what do you expect". But then I catch myself and I think why? Why should I just accept the internet will always have this layer of awfulness where guard must be kept up at all times? Why can't the internet culture improve for future users? Some thought provoking things there
I also like the part about content warnings, I'd never really considered them in that light, interesting stuff!