I just received this absolutely delightful anonymous letter, addressed to everyone in the Bongo Racing Community. But honestly, it’s not just for us—it’s for anyone who’s ever run into online drama, misunderstandings, or those “did-they-just-say-that?!” moments. It’s a great read, full of wisdom and good vibes.
Huge thanks to the mysterious legend who sent it!
Dear Bongo Community,
While I am writing this anonymously to Robin I’m sure that by the end of this paragraph, many who know me will have already deduced who I am. Especially given the overly verbose and formal style, plus my tendency to include related threads in ever regressing parentheses (often coupled with a penchant for self deprecation (and the overuse of the word ‘verbose!’ (he exclaimed))).
And that’s the fundamental point that I want to explore: the use of language, the essential nature of communication as a palette of colour and emotion that paints the portraits of those we share this community with.
There’s a fascinating paradox at the heart of what we’re all involved in here at Bongo Racing, where we come together in a virtual place to engage in a simulated experience. But, the essential by-product of this experience is a community that is not simulated, that is not virtual; it is a community that can be ascribed all the essential aspects of the structure of community: comradeship, togetherness and an ontology of communication that stretches back hundreds of thousands of years.
It is as ‘real’ as the town plaza, the boutique, the arcade, the launderette and the backyards where we swap our essential stories and where we bond over pegging out the washing.
This storytelling, the colour palette it helps us create, the brushes it helps us to finesse, are the essential tools of understanding the world through the most meaningful measure of value: the relationships we paint with one another.
Dropping my harlequin flaneur act for a minute (lest I get even more caught up with Baudelaire type floweriness) let me apply these thoughts to the simulated, virtual backyard of Discord.
It strikes me that there are a few levels of context within any social media space and without fully appreciating these contexts along with a consideration of the essentials of communication I just described, we can end up perceiving ourselves as misunderstood, mis-represented, bullied, pushed out, picked on etc.
Each contextual level (from text, through voice and video) can be seen as representing an increasingly complex – and therefore a more ‘normalised’ or ‘IRL’ – set of communication cues, signals and prompts that can facilitate more effective understanding. However, I think it’s important to remember that this is not a ‘IRL’ context. Therefore reactions, interpretations and meaning can be warped as a result.
Presented with any of these contexts – but especially in relation to text, we look for the larger picture. We paint the parts we cannot see clearly in order to gain a better understanding of the context.
Sometimes behaviour or reactions are called out as ‘childish’, ‘entitled’, selfish or ‘immature’ and in terms of the platform itself I think this is true. That is to say it’s the ‘immaturity’ of the medium (Discord) that can be the instigator of these perceptions.
So Discord, because of its immaturity as a communication platform, is unable to account for the complexity of our unconscious need to ‘paint in’ any missing context, to ‘read between the lines’. This lack of complexity can lead to us to using broad strokes, using limited colour, and thus we end up daubing meaninglessly at the edges of a contextual canvas.
So what we end up with is a picture with so much assumed, imagined and exaggerated content that the picture is completely meaningless – it is immature because the medium itself has failed to provide us with the necessary complexity.
Here’s a more concrete example. If you and I were to meet in ‘real life’ (assuming you hadn’t called the police), we would tell our stories to one another, paint our pictures and create our impressions, all with the full context of the means of our communication. But of course this is not the empirical truth of the situation.
There would be aspects of my story that would be omitted. Your picture would be incomplete despite us both having exercised the essentials of storytelling where we listen and interpret, and ‘read between the lines’. Where we paint more than we speak.
In this community there are people of whom we possess only a partial portrait. Many people are here because of the support and friendship and care one can always find in a community where one is able to both speak and listen with depth and freedom.
This is not a simulation, this is the backyard, this is the laundrette.
So, why go through all this rigmarole and not just say ‘Don’t Be A Dick’? It’s the same thing right?
The reason is I just wanted to lay this out to try and show that reactions you may see, behaviour you may witness, things that may be said, are not always coming from the place you think they are: the architecture of the backyard has its role to play too. So just take a minute next time you’re about to say something in public.
You are complex and nuanced and familiar with your own way of painting context but with Discord, the reality you are about to exercise your complexity in is immature. It may be colouring your reaction.