Friends, this has been on my mind for a few days & I've been trying to formulate a way to say it.

This, as with all things I say, is built from my experience & is my own thoughts on the subject. Please be kind; we're all tense right now.

Let's talk about context & educating.

You all are wonderful, bright, inquisitive people. This is actually a fact. Right now, you have a wealth of experiences & knowledge that make you experts in various fields. It's important to remember that for yourself, but also to remember that for others you interact with daily.

Now more than ever, when we are so separated & our only social interaction is through devices which limit the depth & subtly of our communication, it's so easy to just think of the other person online as less than a person.

This all is vital in understanding context & educating.

What do I mean by that?

Well as beautiful, bright individuals with little else to do online, many of you who are very progressive, there's a tendency to lean into our education & experience & knowledge. It's not only a rock, it's a way to connect to others & feel helpful.

Only.

While education's great & all & I know people have the best of intentions, there have been a few instances where folks have forgotten the context of where they're posting.

They have, in a digital way, failed to read the room.

And this inevitably results in 1 thing: frustration.

Let me provide the example that got me thinking about this:

I RTed a post about one of the webcomic issues last week. I won't detail the specific one, but I'll just say that it was comparing how libertarians react to comics with young girls in them to other more benign comics.

And one of my mutuals - again I won't say who because I don't have any beef with them truly - responded with a detailed reply about class consciousness.

What they failed to take into account was that this really wasn't about that. This post was about how chodey libertarians are.

I responded "not really the time or place for this."

To which my mutual replied "there's always a time & place to discuss this."

And like.

Kind of.

But maybe the best time to stand up & start seriously discussing class consciousness isn't in the middle of a comedy routine?

Because that is the real life equivalent of what had occurred. OP told a joke about one thing, and my mutual gave a serious response about... not really the thing being talked about.

This is what I'm mean when I say context in educating others.

Because there IS a time & place.

With how online everyone is right now, we need to remember that even our best intentions with educating can often be unwarranted.

If we treated the topics of threads more as physical spaces & less as open season public forums, I think it'd go a long way to solving this issue.

I'm all for class consciousness. But there's ways to bring it up without shouting in a comedy club, so to speak.

Quote tweeting is perhaps the most effective means of doing that. Screenshots too. Hell even subtweets actually have their use, this thread is technically a subtweet.

And I have learned this lesson by being the one to do it. By making that mistake time & time again for many years. I was absolutely the person who would come into your mentions & make it about something you really hadn't intended the conversation to be.

I lost friends that way.

And not only did I lose friends, nobody really listened to the point I was trying to make either.

It was just me, being Very Educationally Authoritative in places that really didn't need that. I didn't read the room. I didn't care.

Because people needed to know The Truth of It.

It is something I still work on to this day because... yeah. I miss some of those friends. And I could've avoided those fallouts. And maybe, if I'd gone about it better, some of them would've listened, & actually have engaged with what I was saying.

But they're gone & I learned.

We are all so passionate, each of us. We want each other to be the best. But sometimes, man sometimes we just need space to be.

Space to grow, or rant, or cry. Space to be happy. One small thing to bring us joy.

And as well-intentioned the educating is, we gotta read the room.

So I would urge all of you to remember Craig Ferguson's 3 Rules. Before you post something, before you hit send, really ask yourself:

Does this need to be said?

Does this need to be said by me?

Does this need to be said by me, now?

We're all on edge. Let's try & do better.

And to the mutual I talked about in this:

You're good people. I hope you understand this didn't come from a place of ill intent if you read this, just as I know your reply wasn't mean.

But I did see people respond to you & there's a reason I didn't beyond that. Hope you're ok.