Star Wars Episode 8

[plastroncafe]

Originally Posted by dl316bh

I mainly balk at the idea it's at all recent. It's not. It's gone on since the internet started up and you had the first bulletin boards. When you have direct contact with more people with opposing opinions, some are going to butt heads and some will just be dicks. Like in real life. I've been on or lurked on a lot of forums like this, back when forums were still popular, and you'd get legendary flame wars. The only thing that's changed is venue, where nerd wars are on social media now.

If you want to argue that's bad, well, sure, I won't disagree that it sucks stuff can boil down to that, but that either requires policing - and hell, even moderators on forums couldn't keep a complete handle on it in the big forum days - or the internet going away, and it's a little late to put that genie back in the bottle.

Exactly.
But there's another thing to consider: The mainstreaming of fandom and all things geek.

The toxicity we're seeing now was always there, it's just it usually had a much smaller venue. And those venues were considered safe spaces so long as you agreed with the dominant paradigm. For the longest time it was gold-star gatekeeping geeks who got to control what that paradigm was.
And now they don't.
And they are not happy about that.

You can see it in the video game world.
For years video game fandom wanted to be taken seriously, and wanted their medium of choice to be viewed as art.
And now it is...and there's a very vocal portion of that fandom who really does not like all the side effects of that legitimacy.

Things like deconstructive media criticism.

At the end of the day the stories we make, and how we make them, say something about us as creators and our culture as a whole. We affect the media as much as it effects us.

To be blunt, geeks are sore winners.
We're not shoved into lockers anymore, but instead of being better people...we're just go around shoving other people into lockers because we can. And we think that they deserve it, because people did it to us first.