that excuse for communication called speech

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zalia:

Whenever I hear about another documentary or article bitching about how social media is destroying lives, and are we all just obsessive narcissists who want to be liked, and people online aren’t *real* friends, I want to make my own documentary.

It would be full of people talking about the first time they found other people like them, people they could really talk to and who understood. There would be so many clips of online friends meeting each other in person for the firsttime at airports and conventions, with all of the tears and laughter, and immediately hugging and talking like they’ve never been apart.

Online friendship is not screaming into the void waiting for someone to ‘like’ your post. It’s staying up until 3am talking over a messenger about books and movies, and music, or comforting your friend because they’re sad, and knowing they’d do the same for you. It’s group hugs at the train station when you finally get to meet in person and feeling like you’ve been doing this forever. It’s making art for someone because you want them to smile, even f they’ll never see it.

Online friendship is friendship, not some inferior form of it. And I am so sick of people who don’t get it being snide and trying to analyse it. 

Tags:

#I love you all #there have been times when I kept hanging out offline with people I could barely stand #because they were my Token Meatspace Friends and I was using them as a shield against claims that I didn’t have any ~real~ friends #not fun #(plus you know autism) #(I *can* talk in voice but that doesn’t mean I *like* doing it) #that excuse for communication called speech

brin-bellway asked: Re: “this [Hannibal post] needs a cw but I’m not sure what”, I suspect the Hannibal tag acts as a pretty good content warning in itself. Tumblrites pretty well know what to expect with Hannibal, and have had quite a while to blacklist accordingly.

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sinesalvatorem:

Is this true, Tumblrites?

…damn, I forgot to throw in some wiggle room about “generally” and “most” and “in my experience” and all that.

*watches as this inevitably finds the one fragment of Tumblr that doesn’t have a sufficiently clear idea of what to expect with Hannibal*

(Wiggle room/acknowledgement-that-other-people-are-not-like-me-and-may-have-different-experiences is the first thing to go when I’m having even the slightest bit of trouble with language. Usually I can manage it in writing, but in speech I frequently neglect it and it makes me look like I have less theory of mind than I do. I’ve lost count of how many times Mom has admonished me to bear in mind that not everyone is like me, usually during occasions when I had thought of that but the thought got lost on the way to my mouth.)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #that excuse for communication called speech

Quote ~ ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

People who oppose the use of screens aren’t trying to silence disabled people. The problem is that they aren’t thinking about us at all. When confronted with what smartphones can do for disabled people, anti-screen folks will claim that they are not talking about us. The thing is, when they look at a café and see people using their phones, there is no way to distinguish between the people who use phones as disability aids and people who just happen to find speaking through social media a perfectly adequate or even preferable mode of communication. A false hierarchy is formed, and of course, the ways some disabled people speak is at the bottom of it.

By idealizing inflexible, narrow definitions of communication, we are dehumanizing the people who don’t make eye contact, the people who don’t speak. Social media just gives us more socially acceptable and normalized options for communication. A world where people are “glued to their screens” is a world where I and others can more easily exist, succeed and be happy. Stop telling strangers you pass on the street to “look up.”

Screen Backlash is a Disability Issue
(via digoldenepave)

It also is so hugely helpful for those of us who are too ill to go out and have an active public social life. 

(via hermionxjean)

Tags:

#(oh right I never actually reblogged this) #(fixing that now) #yes this #that excuse for communication called speech

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

lesbiandana:

hello! I don’t know if anyone has already made a post about this before, but I just stumbled upon this app made specifically for when you’ve gone into a nonverbal anxiety attack!!!

it was made by Jeroen De Busser who is an autistic computer science student.

the app is really easy to use! all you do is open it and hand your phone to someone you need to communicate with during an attack but physically cannot, and it shows this cool little alert for the person to read, and then it takes them to an easy to use chat (that looks a lot like texting! except both of you are communicating using the same device). 

the alert message is completely customizable and you can have it say whatever you need! 

the app is called Emergency Chat and it’s available in the Apple Store and google play store. 

I highly recommend it to anyone who might need it :)

Tags:

#interesting idea #I’m generally not too fond of the implication that in-person textual communication should be reserved for emergencies #I’d like some normalisation #but I’m probably just projecting that in this case #that excuse for communication called speech

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doctopus:

what if you spoke in your icon’s voice for an entire week

Tags:

#well being mute for a week could get annoying #but on the bright side I would have a iron-clad excuse for wanting to talk to meatspace people through text #(this is assuming I *know* it’s temporary) #(and that I know it’s not a symptom of some larger more terrible thing) #(otherwise it gets a lot scarier) #icon #that excuse for communication called speech

Image ~ ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

straightwhiteboyproblems:

 

scientiststhesis:

Ignoring the actual content…

I love the fact that I could read all of this.

 

geeksaurusrex:

This is my average reading pace for most things. Of course, it’s easier when you use an app that does flash-training like this. 

 

comparativelysuperlative:

If people want to get the Spritzlet app and tell me how long it takes to read the same text with and without it, I’ll be able to figure out how well it usually works and whether the few people I have data on so far are wacky outliers.

I can almost keep up with the text stream here, but not quite.

I really don’t get the appeal of Spritz. One of the primary advantages of text is that it will sit there and wait for you until you decide to move on, and you can easily skip back and read over the previous paragraph again if you didn’t quite understand it or you want to savour a good turn of phrase. This streaming method has all the hyper-linear bullshit of audio, only even more overly fast. Why not just listen to a sped-up podcast? Unless the intended audience is deaf people who want the sped-up-podcast experience, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Tags:

#Spritz #(the following category tags were added retroactively:) #reply via reblog #that excuse for communication called speech

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

stephenhawqueen:

“kids arent being social now a days because of those brain washing phones” what the fuck do you think we’re doing with the phones. do you think we just stare at the number pad. do you think twitter is just a one way text from a robot bird.

*nod* I had a meatspace party yesterday. (To celebrate my new Canadian citizenship! \o/) I spent about the final hour of the four mostly with a pillow over my head, in a vain attempt to muffle all the light and sound to a decent intensity. I longed for Internet interaction, where it’s mostly quiet, things happen at an actually reasonable pace*, and it’s much more socially acceptable to ignore (or sometimes even call out as rude) “what are you going to do when you grow up” questions. (Those are basically just a veiled insult of the young adult in question’s ability to get their act together, by holding them to the unreasonably high standard of “knowing what they want to do with their life”. But that’s another story.)

All those get-off-my-lawn types talk about how pretty soon we’ll communicate entirely through text and won’t have face-to-face conversations at all. I’d say I can hardly wait for that day to come, but I think we all know it won’t. Unfortunately.

*Nobody would have let me spend half an hour composing this in meatspace. Maybe two minutes. And then they talk just as fast as they make you talk, and expect you to somehow keep up.

Tags:

#that excuse for communication called speech #remind me to try to talk her out of it next time Mom wants to host another party #in what seems like a rather backwards rule of social interaction you only get to kick people out of spaces that *aren’t* yours #if you’re elsewhere you can end the party #(or escape it) #(which is close enough) #by saying you’d best be off and going home #but if you’re *already* home you’re at the guests’ mercy #and they are not nearly as merciful as they ought to be

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donkos:

reading a foreign language: yeah
writing in a foreign language: ok
listening to a foreign language: wait
speaking in a foreign language: fuck

Tags:

#honestly I kind of feel this way about English #to a somewhat lesser extent #that excuse for communication called speech #was already a tag

There definitely IS the idea that socialization in speech is better then in writing

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eateroftrees:

Which is ironic because prescriptivist ideologies generally act like writing is a more PURE form of communication.  But for some reason spend all your time on the internet socializing that way and people will ask you “But don’t you get lonely?” and I’m all “I’m talking to people constantly geeze!”

This.

Sometimes I want a text-to-speech thingy for when I do have to talk. Unfortunately, the stigma would be bad enough if I was completely incapable of speaking. That I merely prefer typing* would probably make it worse.

(Also I’d need a portable gadget that could do text-to-speech. A lot of smartphones and tablets and such can do it, but I don’t have any of those.)

*I can speak using vocal cords and such. More or less. Most of the time the stuff that comes out even carries the same basic gist as what I intended to say.

Tags:

#that excuse for communication called speech   #eateroftrees

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fyeahmultiplemanta:

[Image is Multiple Manta against a blue and teal pinwheel background.  Top text says, “[Say “We” instead of “I”]”  Bottom text says, “[Oops.]”]

I do this sometimes because I fail at the spoken word. Nobody ever seems to find it odd, probably because they’ve all noticed my word-wrangling issues by now.

If anyone ever does ask, I can tell them about the word-wrangling or that having imaginary friends gave me the habit of referring to myself in the plural. The best excuses are the true ones (if they won’t cause freakouts, of course; false will do in a pinch). (To this day I have inner dialogues rather than inner monologues.)