Shades of Terminally Online

There was Drama recently in one of my online spaces. Someday, I’m getting a sign for my room, technically the Media Magpies headquarters, that says “No Unnecessary Drama in [blank] Days” where the counter is stuck at zero, but this wasn’t Magpies drama. In this other space, someone was going on about the importance of telling people that this guy was wrong. Which, you know, the guy is wrong, and often, and about a lot of things. However, my pushback was to say that he isn’t terribly influential in the wider world because hardly anyone I know outside that group has even heard of him.

I started to say that this was because we at Magpies are not terminally online, but as any of my fellow writers can tell you, this is not just wrong but laughably wrong. We are insanely terminally online. All of us. We are more plugged into The Discourse than anyone else I know—provided the Discourse you’re talking about is pop culture-related. Since the person under discussion was, in fact, not a pop culture figure, I had to get into vague description before the Magpies writers I told about it knew who I was talking about. Some of them didn’t even know then. But when I told a story in the other group about Free Guy, some of the people there didn’t remember that movie.

One of the dreams of the World Wide Web was a universal community, where everyone was connected and could share the same things. And in the early days, that was kind of true. However, even then, the splinters were clear. And that only makes sense. People have different interests. How specific those interests are depends on how granular you want to look, but it is true that, while there is overlap between Terminally Online Science People and Terminally Online Pop Culture People (hi, it’s me), it’s also true that they are different spaces for a reason. What kind of weirdo goes from watching The Substance to watching a livestream about Young Earth Creationism in the same day?

Well, again, it’s me. Because there is a lot of overlap. And I’ve had interesting talks about science with Magpies people and interesting talks about pop culture with people in the various science-based communities I’ve been in over the years. I know for a fact there are Magpies people with interests beyond pop culture in fields that don’t interest me. And honestly one of my science groups is watching Star Trek: Enterprise after streams these days and I’ll join them when they move on to the Original Series. Because again, it can get awfully granular.

As it happens, the guy who caused that Drama spiraled way out of control, mostly starting that specific day. And we’d already discovered he needed to touch grass about Wikipedia. But you know, it’s entirely possible to be just barely not terminally online, to at least be aware of the existence of grass. For all I know, there’s someone in one of my online circles who is also terminally online about grass. People are, after all, allowed to have hobbies.