Kal Cobalt

As I formulated the launch of my blog, a funny thing happened — something that helped me understand what’s kept me from blogging before, reminded me of the importance of honesty, and strengthened my resolve to offer myself up to the wolves of cyberspace. Keith Olbermann, Twitter, and your host the “unamerican ignoramus,” all under the cut.

Around the time that I began considering blogging in earnest, Keith Olbermann, the at-times-controversial then-host of MSNBC’s Countdown, retweeted something I tweeted at him about free speech. While I had always assumed that was possible — he’s known for retweeting liberally — I really hadn’t thought out what might happen if I were retweeted by The Big O.

Predictably, I was immediately deluged by retweet and favoriting notifications. Unpredictably (to me, anyway), I then received a constant ongoing wave of replies — most of which were negative. Few approached it like a debate; most just offered up variations of “you’re wrong.” I was even called an “unamerican ignoramus.” At the same time, a smaller but still vocal contingent thanked me, praised me, or otherwise offered positive feedback.

I found myself quickly falling into the trap of placing more weight on the negative replies, especially the angry ones and the single tweet that called me names. I started second-guessing what I had tweeted in the first place. Never mind that I had really thought about it before I sent it on to Mr. Olbermann, knowing he might pick it up. Never mind that I wasn’t second-guessing myself based on any facts anyone had offered. Never mind that favoriting and retweeting were most likely positive and far outnumbered the cranky responses. It was intensely uncomfortable to be disagreed with so vigorously and often angrily, and that obliterated rational thought at first.

I immediately decided not to reply to anything. While a few tweets did offer reasonable dialogue that would have been rewarding, I felt far too overwhelmed by the response and didn’t trust myself not to reply to the asshats once I got started. So I just sat there and watched the replies roll in.

Within just a few minutes, I understood how otherwise-reasonable celebrities trolled on Twitter could lash out. I was already struggling with how to even use Twitter while under such a deluge. I can’t imagine what it would be like to suffer such an unpredictable reply feed constantly. No wonder celebrity discourse often dies out swiftly there.

Since I’m not a celebrity, though, the twitstorm was over in less than an hour. Occasional comments trickled in for another day or so, and…that was it. Nothing horrible happened. I didn’t pick up trolls eager to prod me with sharp sticks daily for weeks or months or years (don’t think this doesn’t happen — some trolls are awfully long-lived beasties, and like STDs, you don’t have to be famous to pick one up). More than the lesson of “be careful who you tweet at, lest they boost you to a level of notoriety you’re unprepared for,” this was the lesson for me: People yelled at me on the internet, attacked me, called me names, and then a new day started and nobody, including me, cared.

You’ve probably figured out by now that I’m shouldering some pretty heavy baggage into cyberspace. While I like my discussion and debate the way I like my sex — vigorous and free of constraint* — there’s still a part of me that withers and wants to die when confronted with non-fact-based, character-questioning arguments. Before K.O. unintentionally K.O.’d my Twitter notifications, I’d been thinking about how I could balance blogging with keeping myself perfectly free of conflict. But I knew it was the keeping myself perfectly free of conflict — innocuous tweets, bland webpages — that would keep you utterly uninterested in anything I had to say. Sanitizing my content constituted lying to you. That, I could not uphold.

I am not an uncontroversial person. I am a fairly radical free-speech advocate, particularly in art; I don’t believe that it should be forced to scrub itself of intentional or inferred sexism, racism, immorality, et cetera. I’m omnisexual, pangendered, and polyamorous (definitions on request, or check out an upcoming blog post about all of that). I’m into every letter of BDSM and I am, in many ways, old-school Leather. I’m a spiritual atheist with a healthy respect for all faiths. Socialism doesn’t look like the end of the world to me. I don’t like olives in my martinis and I sometimes like Coldplay.

There. Now you know! Fire away!

Being unexpectedly deluged with angry tweets was not pleasant, and I doubt my heartrate would stay at fireplace-and-a-good-book levels if it happened again, but what this one little experience with retweeting taught me is that vicious disagreement is not as bad as it once was for me. I grew up, metaphorically, in LiveJournal forums; I lost many personal friends by taking stands on issues they not only disagreed with but ridiculed. It’s the way of fandom sometimes. And for me, at that point stuck in a small town and aware that, truly, my online social network was all I had, the bitter endings of those relationships cut very deeply indeed.

But that’s not me anymore. Somehow, I’ve become known in my household as “not conflict-averse,” which confused me at first until I remembered that “conflict” doesn’t always mean “arguments where your stomach hurts” — at least, not to me. Not anymore. Sometimes conflict is downright fun. More often, conflict is absolutely necessary.

I have things to tell you. I want to hear what you have to tell me. Those two things are vastly more important than the slings and arrows of my past. Therefore: Welcome to my blog. Please have a look around and comment on whatever you like, however you like. I’m excited to see what we make of each other.

*That’s not to say free of restraint, necessarily — but that’s another post.