This week we experienced the passing of a former student from our campus. It is the one event that I hoped to never encounter as a student executive. The logistics of how to deal with the death of a student are complicated, and they become more difficult when the person who is gone is someone that you considered a friend.

When the news hit me, it was several days after learning that a colleague’s son had passed away. I didn’t know of the relationship at the time and when I realized through a post on Facebook, that I knew him, I was left staring at my laptop unable to process the connection. A few days earlier we had discussed in class the difference between being notified of a death via cell phone and landline. I had been notified, by chance, via text on a screen and a video from the dance class that I took with this person.

The ways in which we grieve have been shifted by online interactions. Prior to online community the grieving process was carried out either as a group, or as a single person. The option now exists to grieve in private, while experiencing community in an online platform. Memorial pages are created, where friends and family can post thoughts and prayers, or share stories about the individual. When a famous person passes away, Twitter will light up with hashtags and condolences. But how much does the internet actually contribute to the grieving process and is it hurting or helping those who remain?

I ask this as I create an event on Facebook, notifying the students of a campus memorial. In some ways it feels fake and cold. My filters are turned to maximum as I struggle to create sentences that correctly identify not only the time and place, but the place that the individual still holds although he is no longer here. How do I make this not about me, or the student association, or the venue in which the memorial will take place. How do I tell people about it without resorting to marketing tactics that are designed to bring in large groups? How do I maintain the humanity in an online space?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/17/death-social-media-grief-facebook-twitter-text

Like the writer of the above article, I think that we are still trying to figure out how to grieve online. Stratification of communications may have increased the intricacy of the social web, but it does not discount the fact that we still need a place to grieve, or as Inside Out puts it, we still need to be blue. How we blue will be an ever changing process, shifted by cultural expectation and norms, but the need to blue will remain.

It is 8:01PM

I was going to blog this week. I had every intention of falling down a rabbit hole and coming out the other side with some long, academic, incredibly fascination explanation for why we post negative things about ourselves online. I even have a painful episode of What About No? that was going to be edited and posted by exactly 8PM tonight. It is now 7:50 PM and I have nothing.

I spend a ridiculous amount of time within the 17” screen of my laptop. Between school, work and my extremely not exciting Instagram account (you can follow me at buffyontheverge…just sayin’), I estimate that I spend 8-10 hours a day online or staring blankly at word files that will one day become actual research papers.

So with just 6 minutes left on the clock to post this blog entry, I’ll explain why I have nothing.

I was playing UNO with my 7 year old.

She has been begging me to play all week and I keep putting her off because I am in the middle of fixing up a house, planning a move, midterms, and everything that the day to day life of a mom/student/employee can throw at a person. So I made a decision. I have no links, no videos, and have not edited for wordiness.

#sorrynotsorry

A couple weeks ago I was reading You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier. Lanier asserts that before a person endeavors to interact with the online community and other netizens, they need to not only know who they are, but need to know how to retain their own weirdness so that they can avoid creating an online persona that simply fits within the templates that already exist online. Retaining our weirdness is not only what sets us apart from others, but it is also what drives the online sphere forward in an organic way that defies the rules set in place by software.

So how do we encourage children who are, thanks to interactive games such as Minecraft and Roblox, becoming a stronger online presence? How do we encourage them to retain their weirdness and avoid the templates that have been preconstructed? My son has spent hours studying the onscreen habits of the gamers that he idolizes. When he talks about gaming, he mimics their speech habits and gestures. I asked him recently to tell me who he was and his immediate response was “I’m a gamer!” After explaining the difference between the thing that you do and who are at your core, as a human being, he didn’t have much response. I did however give “empathetic” as an example of a descriptor and he laughed out loud, “That is NOT me!” I have to agree. He is not much for empathy. I consider it progress that he recognizes this fact about himself, without anyone having to point it out.

I grew up in the 90’s, wandering all over the city with my friends sans cell phones. We didn’t use Google to do our homework and we still had to call our friends on the land line if we wanted to meet up. If you were really lucky, your parents had two phone lines so that when you used the internet your Mom didn’t freak out when the dial up screeched in her ear while trying to call your Grandma. For me, the 90’s were a time of great music, increased freedom and puberty. It was also the decade where online interaction became a real thing. I frequented chat rooms, learned how to delete my history and flirted with guys in glamourous far off places like Finland and Singapore. I didn’t really know who I was, but there was also a certain thrill that came from either creating an online persona that I could try on just for a while. I also appreciated the times when I could vomit my reality into words and send them off into space. Sometimes I got an empathetic response, sometimes not. Everything was pixelated, bright and slightly off. Bugs were normal and we brushed them off. I like how Jon Westenberg describes the internet of the 90’s in his short essay The Internet Is Allowed To Be Weird. Why I Love Tumblr:

"Things were definitely wilder and weirder. The internet that I first fell in love with was a weird place. It was full of animations and glitches and bad design and it felt a little like the inside of the Grateful Dead's brains." 

I don’t feel that same uniqueness anymore. Yes, I now have access to thousands of apps, free software and YouTube tutorials. But I miss the weird. I miss being able to BE weird on the internet. Now I have to run my words through a dozen filters based on who may or may not see what I am posting. My online identity is watered down and basic. By the time I run through my filters, be it familial, political or employment related, my online persona has become fluff. If I were color, it would be ecru. It is so bland, that even beige is too out there of a color. I have lost my weirdness. I mourn my weirdness. The only weirdness I have retained is my talent for incredibly awkward summary paragraphs. I suck at those.

As What About No? progresses, I am struggling to balance this for my children. Modeling a behaviour is the best way to pass on a behaviour, but I have caught myself many times turning down an idea based on how it runs through my filters.

Do I want my kids to know that the filters exist? Yes. They are not all bad filters. Filters are necessary. However, they should not filter to the point that they no longer recognize themselves online. I would rather they be the creators of templates.