dArama, Oppions and Thinking for yourself

“The thing I’ve learned over the years is that for anyone to have an opinion on the internet these days is the ability to type and not even type well at that.” - Anonymous

With so much dArama going on around the site lately  it’s easy to get swept up into one side or another without really thinking about it. Admit it, it’s easier to just side with the first opinion you see or not side at all then to do some work to look into a topic. This is a little piece to help you learn how to think for yourself for a bit.

First off, as the quote above mentions anyone with basic typing skills (not even basic thinking skills in most cases for the very negative opinions) can post something on the internet for good or bad.  The thing you as a reader need to think about is “is this information credible and am I only getting one extremely biased side to the story?” Because if you base something on one overly biased non-credible decision then you’re just being gullible and a bit lazy.

All stories have two sides. For example let’s say girl one and girl two are siblings and they’re playing in the living room. Girl one shoves girl two and girl two falls into a lamp and breaks it. In the story girl one is going to say her sister tripped while they were rough housing and it had nothing to do with her. Girl two is going to cry and say the other sister pushed her and it was the other sister’s fault.

Adults aren’t much better than little kids not wanting to take blame or admit they’re wrong sadly. Both girls have a side, one is lying and one is probably not going to be believed except by people that may know her to be more truthful etc.

Here are some signs of the side that’s usually not telling the truth on a two sided matter:

1. The post journal that evoke strong emotionalism towards themselves making them look like a hapless victim, trying to stir your sympathy and get your attention.

2. They swear a ton more than they have to and go on and on and on about how wronged they are.

3. They seem smug, happy and pretend to be so dramatically sad when people support them and trash the other person.

4. They do immature stuff like hack accounts, ask people to attack for them, comment spam etc.

5. They hide all personal info and refuse to show credibility to their words and constantly hide comments, hide whether or not they have any real knowledge in the area, refuse to listen to reason, keep repeating the same attack even when proof is shown and refuse to listen to facts.

6. They’ll go on and on and on and on about how much of a victim they are. “Oh these people are just so mean! They stole my ideas and now they’re calling me the art thief even though their art work was up 3 weeks before mine but hey, my work was original first *dramatic sigh*”

7. They have no care for facts, proof or anything other than just being annoying and trolling so don’t bother arguing with them, it won’t help.

These are just some signs to look out for in a two sided fight and set of opinions.  In general unless the other person being attacked or wronged is very insecure or just as immature they’ll usually behave a bit better and just seem angry/upset and not provoke emotionalism.

(Quick side note, emotionalism is when they show sick/hurt/dying animals in commercials to get your support for a foundation. The provoke the ‘awww those poor things…’ feelings in you hoping you act on feeling before you realize “hey… these people stand for things I don’t and don’t use their money correctly…”  People can do this in journals to with the way they talk and the way they portray themselves.)

Moving on to the last bit. If you ever run across a bit of dArama read both sides and figure out for yourself which side is right. Don’t let strong emotionalism win you out into being naive and not thinking for yourself. You have a brain, you have processing skills, you have the gift of thinking and internet so use it wisely and actually use it instead of letting those gifts go to waste by believing whatever you see first.

Hope this helps someone when seeing a problem around dA and when making choices on whether or not to support someone or to get involved in a matter etc.