I discovered a French hikikomori forum.
I'm not sure whether the board is French-Canadian or French from France; if it's French-Canadian, I may sign up since the majority of people from Canada who speak French can also speak (at least some) English. People from France tend to be far less fluent in English than French-Canadians, so there'd be far too large of a communication barrier if I were to sign up -- I wouldn't want to have to rely on Google Translate.I've created an anonymous discussion board on the HikiCulture forums. By anonymous, I mean that non-registered members are able to post to the board. At this point in time, I consider the board to be "experimental" since it's not certain whether I'll keep the board up for very long or not; we'll just have to see how things go.
I will probably only view the board once or twice a week or so to clear spam out (if there's any). If there's too much spam, I'll simply delete the board since I don't want to create too much trouble for myself and staff; it would not be worth it to put so much effort in maintaining a spam board.Perhaps if we start getting some anonymous people posting on HikiCulture, they'll eventually decide to sign up to the site.For the record, I personally despise anonymous boards (as is shown in this blog-post) and avoid them like the plague, but some people seem to like them. Here's the link to the Anonymous Board on the HikiCulture forums; feel free to post.After constantly having students signing up to the HikiCulture forums out of complete self-interest asking the members of my forum if they could answer questions for them about the hikikomori phenomenon, I felt that it was due time to revise the HikiCulture rules.
First of all, it poses a great danger to the members of my community when these people sign up to my community asking the members to get in touch with them by email, standard mail and the telephone. Some people have even asked if they could videotape the members of my forum. Even if these people who are signing up to ask questions don't have anything bad in mind, I still don't like it because these people are signing up to the HikiCulture forums out of complete self-interest -- they ask their questions, then bugger off. I initially posted a list of rules in the early days of HikiCulture, but lots of the them were quite silly, so I figured it would be best to delete the old list of rules and create new revised ones (most of the rules are similar to rules from the original list I had.) Anyway, here's the list:
As the year is drawing to an end, thoughts are now drifting to the New Year and what it will bring. I'm very much of the opinion that life is what you make of it, knowing what you want is the trick. Ugh! I'm in danger of blogging about my life here, please don't turn away dear reader, I'm about to rein in the vague, dry wit, rant about how crap life is and get on with talking about my photography!
Elizabeth Kolbert has a piece in this week’s New Yorker reviewing Cass Sunstein’s new book, “On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done." In the review she lays out the concept of "group polarization"
More access to information doesn’t bring people together, often it isolates us.People’s tendency to become more extreme after speaking with like-minded others has become known as “group polarization,” and it has been documented in dozens of other experiments. In one, feminists who spoke with other feminists became more adamant in their feminism. In a second, opponents of same-sex marriage became even more opposed to the idea, while proponents shifted further in favor. In a third, doves who were grouped with other doves became more dovish still.The Internet is becoming a vast petri dish for the group polarization phenomena. As Sunstein puts it “The most striking power provided by emerging technologies,” is the “growing power of consumers to ‘filter’ what they see.” (Thanks to Jim Stogdill for surfacing this link via email)
It's often remarked that customisable start-pages, self-selected RSS feed readers and social network dynamics tend to result in:
(a) a lack of conflict. People take their cues from the best-established commentators and simply chime in to agree. The number of 'me-too' posts that appear supporting whatever the top ten blogs say is indicative of this.
(b) delusional hysteria. The recent Twitter campaigns against Jan Moir, Nick Griffen, Retweet changes, etc. seem to suggest that many people believe that a trending hashtag can change the world. It can not.
Ironically, it sometimes seems as though nowhere is there less acceptance of differing points of view than among the social media / social networks crowd, where 'discussions' are largely limited to describing just how much of an idiot a particular opponent is.
I believe that the Internet can make us better people and that it can help us make a better world. But this probably isn't the way forward.
So how can we embrace and foster pluralism, diversity, real democracy in networked society?
Maybe I need more unpleasant people around me.
I'm tempted to argue for some return to anonymous debate, a la Usenet and IRC twenty years ago. They could be ridiculous and frustrating in equal measure, but at least your views got challenged and you were (vigorously) exposed to people who think very differently from yourself.
I think we need to think about ways to divide people's work and their online activity in some way. Often, when I read blogs and tweets, I know that the person writing is doing so because it in some way amplifies or enhances their professional career. A lot of people I connect with are consultants of some description in their jobs. Their job is to be wise and right. That makes them lovely people, by and large, but there are arguably downsides. It can very often have the side-effect of meaning that they are never going to go out on a limb or wish to seem controversial. It's also a job where you need people to want to work with you, so you won't go around telling potential clients or collaborators that they're wrong.
I don't use the forum WrongPlanet anymore, but find it to be one of the best Asperger's forums out there at the present. It's not on par with a couple other Asperger's-related boards that I frequent, but the people there are a lot more caring and supportive than they are on some other boards I've been on.
I decided to type this blog-entry up after pondering all of the present Asperger's forums I know of and realizing that WrongPlanet, even though it has its flaws, is still a somewhat decent Asperger's forum to use. One thing I recommend is that you stay clear of the Adult Autism Issues & Random Discussion parts of the board since they are loaded with extremely trivial threads (I created some myself back when I used to frequent the site - pretty much everyone there does.)I want to let you people know of a great board that is somewhat similar to HikiCulture; the board is called A Lonely Life. I don't think that the people at ALonelyLife are quite as reclusive as the people on HikiCulture, but it's still a pretty similar board.
I updated the HikiCulture banner. In addition to updating the HikiCulture banner, I updated the banners for my Posterous, Tumblr and Blogger blogs.
The typeface used was Myriad Pro; bold was the weight I used for HikiCulture, and bold condensed was the weight used for A Forum For Reclusive People (and Hikikomori) part of the banner.
To all HC users:
I 'cleaned up' the boards by removing old threads that were no longer relevant, threads that I felt didn't belong on the forums (some of them were mine), merged threads into more relevant topics, removed slight grammatical errors, and deleted unnecessary HikiCulture-related links at the bottom of the main page. The only HikiCulture-related links I kept are the following: HikiCulture Blog (Posterous)
