internet | Jessica Grixti Stanley

Are You Distracted?

Posted on August 31, 2021 by Jessica Grixti Stanley

*Can you believe the pictures that exist on Pixabay? I promise I’m not distracting you…or maybe I am?*

Everything is trying to take away our precious time.

The internet and social media. Family and friends. Dishes. Lunch. Bills. That delicious tub of boysenberry ice cream in the freezer. The book that just arrived in your mailbox. The books in your bookshelf, calling your name, begging Read me! Read me! in an insolently nasal accent. Work. Zoom sessions. Grocery shopping. Perusing the latest news that You Season 3 will be out in October and predicting what will happen on Twitter and Reddit and random messageboards and to the neighbourhood bin chicken. When our time is all we’ve got, what happens when we’ve got none left to spare?

Back in May, I blogged about our deteriorating ability to focus in the current attention economy. The attention economy being “the business model of keeping our eyes glued to the specific apps and sites maintained by those with vested interests who do not care about our health and wellbeing” is one of the many things in life distracting us from using our time the way we want to, in our best interests.

You Won’t Read This Blog Post

Posted on June 30, 2017 by Jessica Grixti Stanley

According to studies, around 60-80% of you never read past the headline. That’s right, this one included. Congrats if you read past the aptly titled You Won’t Read This Blog Post, ’cause you’re in the minority! You’re only slightly more common than the guesstimated 0.01% of people who read the iTunes terms and conditions, those poor, poor souls. I mean, I read the entire Copyright Act of 1968 once for a university assignment, and I don’t even do that.

So, um…hello, I guess? Wow, I actually only had enough content to fill out that one paragraph. Hey, well since you’re still reading this well into paragraph two, I guess you’re here for the long run. Sigh. I guess I’ll start with the article that I first thought of when looking into the topic of, well, Reading Past the Headline and Read[ing] This Blog Post. It was April Fools’ Day, and I was one of those fools that spent the day mindlessly scrolling down the mine of endless time-wasting, Facebook. That day in 2014, I switched between Facebook and Twitter and back to Facebook. Then a wild article caught my attention. These were the wild days in which I didn’t have AdBlocker and F.B Purity, so I immediately reacted—probably with rage or annoyance or something–when I saw this headline:

Why Doesn’t America Read Anymore?

With imagined fury running through my veins, I read through the comments, as they, 100% of the time (unless comments are disabled) are a source of lolcowery, entertainment and humour. This one was predictable, with the obligatory slew of comments about millennials destroying society by partying with smashed avocado instead of buying houses; As a non-American, I knew ‘Muricans were always stupid; those “LOL Debbie this is so true” with attached Minions image; and more. The truth: I didn’t even click on the link until I read a comment that gave it all away. And I’m not the only one. You do it too.

The Honest Truth About Male Allies, The U.S Presidential Election and Social Justice: An Opinion Piece

Posted on November 29, 2016 by Jessica Grixti Stanley

NOTE: This is an opinion piece.

On November 9 2016, Donald Trump won the United States General Election. I’m not usually that big of a political junkie. I live on the other side of the world to the explosion of emotions that was going on in the U.S. My first introduction to politics was a controversial Australian comedy that’s since been watered down to appease to the public—The Chaser’s War on Everything. I was in mid-high school, and it was the first political show palatable to my young, impressionable mind. Combined with the Kevin Rudd, PM segment on Rove Live, I was finally interested in something that previously bored the socks off me. Now, back to the U.S Election. Just two weeks ago, on the ominously dated 9/11/16 (in Australian formatting), Republican Donald Trump, in a massive surprise to the world, the polls and the media, beat out his Democrat rival Hillary Clinton. Trump was the frightening evil underdog, who prior to the election, I only remembered him from The Apprentice and its subsequent board game. Hillary was going to be the first woman President; she was going to change everything. Then came Wikileaks, and the onslaught of right-wing media trying to balance out the crazy extremeness of the left-wing media. Now, I’m not right-wing by any stretch of the imagination—the political compass put me at libertarian/center left—but the over-the-top “Hillary Good–Trump Hitler” narrative of the media left me wondering where the unbiased media of yesterday was. But, there you have it, Trump beat out the odds, and come next year Orange is the New Black (or so the memes say).

However, that’s not what I’m here to blog about. Of course, you can’t talk about politics without mentioning that slowly burgeoning section of the Democrats/left-wing: social justice. Now, back in the good old days (i.e. twentieth century), social justice was described as:

justice in terms of the distribution of wealth, opportunities, and privileges within a society

While we’re on the topic of definitions, I might as well get another one out the way, and that’s feminism. Over the last thirty years or so, around the time of third-wave feminism, the feminist and social justice movements have morphed together. Here’s the original definition for feminism:

the advocacy of women’s rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes.

4 (Or More) Reasons Why You Should Be Blogging Right Now

Posted on June 30, 2016 by Jessica Grixti Stanley

It’s not really blogging. Just a Word document with the words “blogging”.

There. Now that you’ve read the utterly clickbaity headline, it’s time for the blog post!

When I first started this blog, way back in the golden olden days of 2012, I had big wide-eyed dreams for what I would do now I was a blogger. A Blogger was a mystical, ethereal internet person; someone who wrote catchy online versions of personal diaries, albeit better edited and with a little less of the constant Does he/she like me? and the boring analysis of how much you hated P.E/Gym. I can’t really talk about that from experience: I was one of the diarists who started off January 1 expecting to become the next Adrian Mole—at least until I discovered no-one should aspire to be Adrian “Lo, The Flat Hills of my Homeland” Mole. By June or July, about the time where we’re at now, I’d be making up diary entries days afterward, trying to guess if I read K-Zone or played Sims 2 on PS2 all day. It didn’t really matter. I wasn’t meant to be a diarist.

But, back to that magical word: blogging. I first started on Webs and then moved over to WordPress due to its overall simplicity. I sat around for a while and thought of what to write before deciding on the topic of the day: Political Correctness Gone Mad. It wasn’t about writing—it was after that I turned to the generic writer blog posts about writer’s block, inspiration and the like. It was nice to write about stuff on the internet, even if people didn’t really read it. I didn’t expect lots of views; after all, the internet superhighway is full of so many people trying to get their words out, trying to tell us the same thing, and I expected moderate success. But I kept doing it because I enjoyed it. When writer’s block (funnily enough) set in, I was still able to open up my WordPress reader and belt out a post for you guys to peruse, like and enjoy. Four years later, and I’ve stuck to my New Year’s Resolution for 2014 and still write a blog post a month.

The Non-Issues of the Modern Gaming Internet

Posted on February 27, 2016 by Jessica Grixti Stanley

Gamergate is one of the most ineffective movements of the twenty-first century—and not just those for it, but particularly those against it. For a movement that started from a simple bad breakup, who’d have thought it would turn into a debate about censorship of the internet?

It shouldn’t be a shock to anyone who knows the patterns of the internet, however. Ever since it became widely used in the 1990s, there have always been a select group of people using their influence to try and control the internet. With the most widely known examples being Government initiatives such as SOPA, it really shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, but current attempts at invading our privacy have become more and more intrusive. The common saying, “If you haven’t got anything to hide, it shouldn’t be a problem” is useless now in the modern era of the internet, because despite how moderate your opinion is, someone will always find you offensive. And that’s where censorship of the internet becomes dangerous.

In August 2014, after finding out his girlfriend was cheating on him with five guys, Eron Gjoni wrote an essay detailing the behavior of Zoe Quinn and what led to their breakup. Of course, things that we write in the heat of the moment will always come back to bite us, and this essay Gjoni wrote about his ex-girlfriend is now considered on the same level as revenge porn. Despite all this, a few men and MRA’s from that bastion of internet loners Reddit and 4chan, latched onto Gjoni’s website and used it to send Quinn some harassing messages as well as “proof” all women were evil. However, Quinn wasn’t innocent as most claim, and used this to cement her recently released game Depression Quest, paving her way to fame on the backs of a few internet harassers, and claiming all women in tech were bullied and abused out of the industry. A few other people—namely Anita Sarkeesian and Jonathan McIntosh; Brianna Wu; Arthur Chu; Sarah Nyberg; Katherine Cross; Jessica Valenti; Tauriq Moosa—all latched onto the Quinn/Gjoni breakup saga, christened it “Gamergate”, and an internet movement was formed.