How to Be Online and Also Be Happy by Issy Beech

Author:Issy Beech [Issy Beech]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hardie Grant Books
Published: 2021-10-29T00:00:00+00:00

Don’t let it break you (if you can help it)

Very much interwoven into the fabric of being online is having an opinion; feeling like you either need to add your thoughts and feelings to the discussion, or echo the thoughts and feelings of those you respect. The size and speed of posting and news online has meant that forming an opinion about something has become less about being thoughtful or educated, and more about being the most right, the most quickly. Having the Most Perfect Opinion. While forming an opinion about something usually requires having a grasp of the concept and a varied list of sources, online it generally only calls for an active account. We see something, we think, we post. Repeat. This phenomenon sucks, for lots of reasons. It’s too loud, too much, too obnoxious, too competitive. And it often means the opinions about a topic drown out the original topic, so that nothing really ever sinks in, or no conversation is ever led to its logical end. It also begins to feel like one of the principle exhilarations of the early internet – posting wildly because life was chaos – is a long-dead pipe dream. Being convinced we know everything (just because we’re online and we read stuff) doesn’t just make us insufferable and obnoxious. It also leads to us being constantly wrong, and feeling attacked when we’re corrected, or mocked for it.

If you’re hoping, expecting or planning to live a life on the internet where you’re constantly adored, get out now. Log off and become the North Pond Hermit because if you’re posting, you’re going to do things that people absolutely hate. Not because there’s anything necessarily wrong with you, but because it’s How It Is. When you’re sharing your point of view with the world, there’s always going to be somebody who wants to scream about it. If you’re unlucky enough, you may even find your point of view being shared and mocked with virality, jeered at by possibly tens of thousands (though we’re more likely to be one of the tens of thousands, aren’t we?). This is unavoidable because the internet has empowered us all to dust off a wooden box, stand on it and shout our silly little opinions at anyone who’ll listen. And sometimes, those opinions are insane. We’re all going to end up in conversations where we’re out of our depth, and asked questions we don’t know the answers to, and we’re going to answer them because we want to sound smart or like we care about stuff. And we’re all almost certainly going to say some things that are misinformed or insensitive or just plain foolish. Or, because it’s the internet, you might say something as regular as ‘Elmo seems nice’ and wake up one morning to find you’ve lit a fire of rage inside of strangers all over the world, inspiring Buzzfeed polls and podcast episodes and think pieces in The Guardian. However it happens, you will, at some time, go online and be told you’re ‘wrong’, ‘stupid’ and have ‘worms for brains’.

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