Inclusiveness

I've been having assorted thoughts about "inclusiveness" and communication with regards to my content and behavior.  I haven't been sure how to really write about it all, so let's just start with this:

Every time that you use an inside reference, post a meme, make an in-joke, or even use slang or non-standard vernacular, you are creating a dividing line between people who are "in on it" and people who aren't.  That's not to say that this is an inherently bad thing, because it really isn't.  The reason why fan communities can oftentimes be so wonderful is because of a shared history and understanding that can, in turn, lead to a real sense of belonging.  On the opposite end of the spectrum, you can see this manifest in toxic behaviors such as gatekeeping, attention-seeking, and a culture of..."oppressive bandwagoning" for lack of a better term.

So my point is not that drawing this line is a good thing or a bad thing, but that it's important that we consciously recognize the lines we are drawing when we speak and write -- and when others speak and write.  And to go a step further, and question why we draw these lines.

When we choose to say "it me" instead of "I really relate to this", is it because we feel like the sentiment of the phrase just somehow "feels right" in describing how we feel?  Or is it because we saw someone else use the phrase online and also want to "get in" on the joke?  When we chat with our co-workers and make sarcastic remarks about how such-and-such department is so terrible and incompetent, are we trying to make humor at someone else's expense?  How would that experience feel if you had a close friend working in said department?  Would others feel pressured to express the same opinion as you even if they did not feel the same way?

In some (many?....most) of my workplace jobs I end up becoming the defacto "engineer that the non-engineers talk to" and I don't think it was just because of my charming good looks [tosses hair].  This past year, in particular, it became obvious that some of these people were coming to me specifically because they would privately message me instead of, say, posting to a message channel meant for engineers to field questions.  While there are certainly multiple factors at play here, I'd hazard that one of them is the simple fact that in these situations I try not to make assumptions about other people's technical knowledge when communicating with them (...though apparently the same is not true when I'm writing blog posts about obscure games [laughs]).  This means checking in before you start a spiel about how "Ah, yeah, the Geo-IP DB lookup is giving 532 because X-Forwarded-For isn't coming through".

That is not to toot my own horn and say that I am consistently good at this sort of thing, because the truth is that in many other facets of my life, I'm not (or at least, have not been).  I'm not always the most approachable person and I have been prone to making offhanded remarks that are exclusionary in nature.  I wouldn't really be having to think about these sorts of things as hard if it wasn't a problem.  But for whatever reason, this is something that I feel like I am slowly starting to become more cognizant of.

Something else that I have been seeing in myself is the tendency to add more qualifiers to my statements.  That previous sentence started as "this is something that I'm starting to become more cognizant of", for example.  This is something that I think has come with the experience of realizing that I'm simply not always right, even when it comes to making statements about myself.  And even if I am right, perhaps I don't always have to act like I am.  I think I've seen enough examples of people who do and don't do this, to know which way feels better.  But that, perhaps, is a topic for a different post.