Friday, March 30, 2007

What the Net seems to need....

...is a place for an emotional baggage check so they can leave all the excess issues at the door before they enter.

Some of the lessons I've learned from being online in the last 15 years is that no matter where you go, be it Forums, Virtual Reality or Art communities is that people always bring their problems with them whenever they interact with others.

Even if they have nothing to do with the topic of the place they're in they can't help but be filtered through their own perspective. As they say "No one is a villian in their own eyes"
That applies to another cliche also "Opinions are like assholes, everyone has one" So when you put them together most people have reasons and rationalizations for what they do but they rarely have respect for what other people do or give them the same tolerance they give themselves.

In some places they can start out with people cooperative and supporting each other for a while, but as the community grows it seems to lose that cohesion until it reach a point where it's only old grudges and bickering going on in it. Some places that happens faster like on YouTube and now Acceptable TV has gotten it.

It was a great experiment to see if an audience could do a better job of picking programs than TV producers. So far it's been a lot worse than even American Idol has been doing by voting for the worst. Maybe it just shows that the public isn't ready to handle unfiltered democracy since it depends on an informed populace.

I've been trying to get the members on Acceptable TV more informed by spreading the message in the tutorials on the site for example I posted this comment on this video with what I thought was a simple suggestion "It would help a lot if you took Jack Black's advice on what makes an Acceptable video" and including a link to the tutorial videos since it missed a lot of the guideline that were those tutorials.

But it wasn't recieved that way since bnproductions responded with "It would help if you hung yourself you pompus ass gamer bitch, your video's suck more ass than you do dick." I guess I was expecting too much from people since that's exactly the way one of the examples in the tutorials reacted to criticism.



and instead of watching that example and learning from it, they ignored it and reacted the same way as in the video "I'm going to my room and I'm going to write in my blog about how much Acceptable TV sucks!"

"After they were rejected Dan and Justin played video games for the next 3 years. Then Justin killed himself. Dan wrote a screenplay about it. Oliver Stone optioned the rights to it but never made it. Dan killed himself. James Cameron made a movie about their suicides that made 7 billion dollars in the 1st weekend. Then an asteroid hit the Earth and killed the entire population. Everyone got together in heaven and agreed that they had taken each other and themselves too seriously."

Although that's one way of taking care of the problem that emotional baggage makes, it's not all that productive. I'd still rather take karismo's advice after all Why Hate? Just Create?



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If you have this amazing opportunity to interact with people and get your stuff widely distruted on TV why would you waste in in petty bickering and cruelty? I made a video to try and express some of the points about emotional baggage that I put on YouTube.




I remember when the "La Bamba" album came out only being able to listen to Tommy Chong, now with this awesome tech we have to be able to virtually share a joint with him is so totally amazing, you would think being able to interact with people in this way, more people would want to show how creative and cooperative they can be and not waste it all on alll the competitive crap.

I'm sure when Jack Black was turned down for the pilot of Heat Vision and Jack, that he took it badly at first.




But he did bounce back to give a lot better performance in King Kong so he must've dropped the emotional baggage over it to move on with his career. The trouble is that there are a lot of different points of view that people have that make communication difficult since most people are looking at it from different perspectives. Ken Wilber goes into a lot of this in his this video.



And what he's saying applies to this kind of thing a lot since if you look at it from the exterior or the interior, you're not going to react the same way to what the other person is trying to tell you. I guess it depends on if you react defensively to criticism or seek approval from the group.

Maybe it'll settle out as the site goes on since it's only the second episode, but I have my doubts. I'm not sure if this is helping since WorstShowsHere is inflaming some of the people to hold onto their defenses with his emotional baggage, but he's also pointing out some of the problems.

Thing is that it's only half of it, since it does no good to tell people that their video sucks without also telling them where they can get help in fixing it. Pointing out the problem is no help witout offering a solution so he should be telling them where in the tutorial videos they can look to fix what was wrong.

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