Blogification version 7.0

“Looking through life through the eyes of a tire hub…” – System of a Down

So, yeah, I’ve actually got a discussion prompt this time that relates to the initial image.  Online forum literacy!  If you don’t know how to use it, someone might actually post that image of Samuel L. Jackson in your thread… likely because your thread sucks (IE: you are illiterate in forum posting).

There are certain protocols to posting on online forums.  There’s a vast wealth of information to be had in these places, and generally very helpful people reside in them that tend to hang around there specifically because they want to help interested parties become more interested in whatever topic it is that floats their proverbial boat.  Some forums are generalists (Somethingawful.com, Reddit.com, voat.com) and tend to have a larger user base to draw information from, and others are specialists (www.tomshardware.com is one that I use devoted specifically to computer hardware enthusiasts).  All of them have one thing in common:  You won’t get anything out of asking questions there if you don’t follow proper forum etiquette, and the better you are at mastering that etiquette, generally the better quality of the answers to your questions you will have.

To a newbie approaching such information sources it can be a difficult task to try and find the right answers to a given question because of how you “come off” on a forum post.  Each of these forums has specific functions for searching out prior answers to questions, for example… and if your question isn’t actually unique in some way, chances are you will be repeatedly mocked, followed by having your post moderated into oblivion due to your question already being answered somewhere you didn’t think to look, with a net result of everyone having wasted some time.  Ask the question in a polite and researched way (one where you at least took the tertiary effort required to use the search button for prior answers), and the results will most likely be helpful and positive.

A lot of great minds congregate to these forums and they can be goldmines of information and content, so this is a skill worth having, and goes beyond simply looking up youtube how-to videos.  What if you have a physics question on heat dispersion techniques via different materials and casually asking google simply isn’t cutting it?  What if you could speak with a physics guru who’s been doing this shit for fun for 40 years and just so happens to take interest in your question?  From there, you can see the information exchange at work, and if done correctly, will result in a lot if disseminated information not just for the person asking the question, but for all watching such a conversation.  This is certainly a “new literacy” that has emerged within the last two decades that didn’t exist prior to the dawn of the information age, as the closest parallel would be something like a Senate committee deciding who gets to speak and when based on various rules of priority and seniority and so on… not really something most people would have partaken in.