Re: Distancing myself from the blind community
Some thoughts from someone who is quite old compared to most of you, (I'm in my mid forties.)
First of all, people are people, and whether it's here, Google Plus, Facebook, LiveJournal, or a good double dozen other fora I've participated in, there are people who either don't know how to conduct civil conversations when things get hot, or who don't give a tinker's damn. Believe me, this is not unique to the blind community. We do have our particular cultural anomalies, but they are small compared to the common issues that plague on-line discussions everywhere. I refer you to the phenomenon known as gamergate that dominated the tech news for about three months earlier this year that resulted in some truly dreadful and misogynistic behavior on the part of so-called grownups, and the kerfuffle over the Hugo awards. Google these if you aren't familiar, gamergate or "sad puppies".
Next obvious statement, ther
e is a reason why people in most countries have to be of a certain age before being given responsibilities over lethal accident vectors, such as cars, aircraft and the voting booth. The on line world is a space that allows for much more freedom of younger people than most other spaces. This is probably a net bonus, since old farts like me need to be shaken out of our complacency. But there is a cost in inexperience, in incivility, in the fact that teen agers are simply aliens, most of whom don't know how to feed themselves well, do laundry properly or take any account of money, let alone deal with the responsibilities of running a complex on-line game that requires good security, the ability to consider consequences and so forth. I know from experience, I was one, and I've raised two, with two more in the pipeline, God help me.
A lot of the drama referred to here seems to me simply the radioactivity of children, and is not necessarily worth wri
ting off a community. Those of us who are older and have more life experience need to be in the position of mentors and guides, and perhaps not judge too harshly. Those of you who are the aforementioned aliens, (sorry, but truth is truth, and if you survive it you will get better) please cut the rest of us some slack too.
We all come from such diverse backgrounds, that blindness is, surprisingly to some of you, one of the least important things we have to share with one another. That said, it is important to remember that my experience of blindness, being in the first cohort of blind children who were put in public schools (or government-run schools for you britts) is very different from that of someone growing up today in a country with few resources to work with. I was damned lucky; being born even a couple years sooner would have condemned me to having no choice about how I was educated. Blindness is not the central fact of my existence, that wo
uld be the lovely woman who foolishly consented to marry me ten years ago, and the avatars of chaos that claim to be her children. Others of you have come to different terms with your blindness and who am I to judge, given the differences in our history.
People have been complaining about Freedom Scientific since it was Henter-Joyce. There are a lot of reasons why they developed the way they did, and there are a lot of modern-day market forces that are stressing their business model to the breaking point. JFW is still a nice piece of kit that I no longer use, but if it works for you, God bless, kiss kiss and let's go on.
So, if you have a beef with internet forum chatting, that I get, but I think you're misattributing some of the problems you see to this and other such like being a blind-specific affinity group. For every drama queen I've run across here, I've found a ton of people who are respectful, helpful and love sharing the
ir enthusiasm for our hobby of audio games. I've had lovely discussions with people, even when we are vehemently disagreeing on another topic about such things as religion, or something equally important, the future of Swamp. I'm not here every day, and I hardly read every topic, so I often miss the worst of the drama, because it takes place on discussion threads I don't normally follow, so I hear about it as an indirect reference somewhere else.
So I'd urge you not to give up on us just yet. We've survived the hacking Swamp year, debates over same sex marriage, and we'll survive the poor security practices of people who either don't know any better or choose to be slipshod. It's ok, that will sort itself out over time. Hot button topics will come and go, tempers will fray under disagreement, but on the whole, we do pretty well.
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