I understand the idea of shielding people from content that would be upsetting, but my own experience is, that I feel a little anxious as soon as I read Trigger Warning […].
How is your experience with it? Are you happy with it, or do you thing there are better ways to address dark topics?
I appreciate them. You are what you eat. That goes for what you put in your eyes and ears as much as your mouth
Depends. I’m fine with most stuff, but I certainly want warnings if a video is titled “revolving door fail” but the content warning is “NSFL” (dude got his fingers caught and visibly cut off)
Not having a NSFL tag would be a major disservice to the viewer.
I certainly want to know if a thing contains gore or viscera before seeing it so I can not see it. And as such can understand how other warnings would be helpful, too.
I feel content. Warnings are beneficial.
i appreciate the heads up
I grew up in the 90’s. The wild West of the Internet. I’ve accidentally seen things so beyond fucked up. I had a friend back then that I’ve lost contact with and she used to email me fucked up images that just opening the email, there it was. But she’d also send high quality jokes or nudes of herself so it was kinda all or nothing. I think at that time my email was @rammstein.com lol. But were talking fatal crash pictures, one was a woman fucking a cactus, stuff seared into my memory that I wish I could get rid of. So yeah, if you think trigger warnings are excessive, you are probably too young to have experienced the 90’s and early 00’s. Even going to picture sites like imgur today, back then nothing was categorized so you’d get everything. Nsfw sites back then included EVERYTHING nsfw, from people smoking pot to stills of decapitations.
The traumatizing shit I saw on the Internet in those days, I’d compare to my experience in Iraq. That’s not to say that visual imagery is as bad as IRL, with the sights, sounds… And smells, but when you’re not expecting that sort of thing, it can be a big deal. Honestly those things probably jaded me to a point where I could more adequately handle war, but in ANY other scenario I’d say those days of no rules Internet were very harmful to a lot of people.
This is a very valuable take and much needed perspective here. I appreciate you sharing it!
Also can’t help but lol at your experience with the wild girl who definitely used Skinner Box conditioning to make sure you always opened her emails! 😂
I miss a lot of the spirit of the hijinks and lulz internet, but I definitely don’t miss all the disgusting shock content that came with deeper web exploration. I visited the famous /b/ exactly once and decided my soul didn’t need that shit.
There’s a lot of gore stuff that I think was photoshopped, but also damn someone spent time making that?! I didn’t care to analyze it, I just wished there was such a thing as brain bleach.
There was also sites that would punish hotlinking by replacing images with the infamous “goatse” (no.), which was really great when trying to send my girlfriend a funny picture I found and she got to it too late. LOL that was fun to explain why she was seeing what she was seeing.
People warned me of misnamed videos on Kazaa and stuff turning out to be abuse material or execution footage but thankfully I mostly avoided that.
I remember clicking a phony download link and getting eyeball-blasted with CSAM ads seared into my brain once. (Actually I think I sent the link to the FBI on this one.)
Yeah, I miss the expressive freedom of “at your own risk” Internet, simply because you weren’t as much constantly being tailed by marketing bots and algorithms, but I don’t miss the mental trauma that came with clicking the wrong link.
You’re right though, in a weird way a bit of prior desensitizing can almost help us keep it together if we find ourselves in a really, really bad place. But I wish for a world where nobody has to do that…
This is all also why, even though I find the Dark Web super intriguing…I don’t need that shit. Lol
Yeah I’ve occasionally been tempted to check out the dark web for things like drugs from stuff like silk road, like mushrooms and DMT type stuff, nothing crazy. But thats opening a door to a world much more dangerous than mushrooms and shit. And I know myself, I’m naturally curious, and I know for certain I’d find things I’d wish I hadn’t. Beyond that, I’m not computer savvy enough to to get there without being looked into by the gov more than I’d like, or obliterating my computer, or losing bank accounts or something. It’s just a door I’ll keep closed.
Yeah she was… An interesting character.
eh, shit i’ve read and seen on a screen, while it may have bothered me at the time, isn’t actual trauma, which does not fucking ask permission.
And yeah, there’s media that triggers that-but it’s media. I close it. I leave. I can. it’s not actually happening to me, right now.
I think it’s a decent notion, to annotate. It’s for sure people trying to be good for one another, and that’s laudable.
But. As I said, the worst of the world does not ask permission, and I think enforcement of content tags or what have you would likely lead directly to even more oppression and censorship in the storm of that which we are currently in.
I will say ao3’s pretty on point about it, from what i’ve seen-it’s voluntary, and it’s actually voluntary. How you keep that across the ages is anyone’s guess
I like it as it helps with keeping the vibe right. It would detract from certain specific cases that rely on the element of surprise to give you the full effect. If there was a list of trigger warnings for doki doki literature club, for example, it wouldn’t hit you right
I dont have any super PTSD/trauma/psychological scar triggers or anything though so my opinion doesnt hold much weight here, I’m not who they’re for.
All content is upsetting to someone.
Many commenters would self-censor, at best, toward a “common man” kind of shock tolerance. This doesn’t help those people who need trigger warnings for way more.
I can’t see how to resolve that vast gulf.
I think it’s content dependent. I lean towards not having them, but I can think of a couple episodes of the magicians where I would have appreciated the warning instead of the after the fact help line screen. It’s also true that adding a warning lessens the impact of the scene being warned about which I think is also counterproductive.
I think we need more granular ratings than we currently have. Kickass and I Spit on Your Grave having the same R rating is essentially meaningless.
I think of them like food content warnings for non-lethal allergies, like lactose intolerance. It’s a kindness to have a warning that helps people avoid shitting their pants. However, we all need to recognize that it is just that, a kindness. There is an inherent risk when someone says ‘hey, taste this.’ If you have a high sensitivity, you have a responsibility for self-care through self-denial. If you were uncertain if a food contained something to which you had an extreme sensitivity, you’d say ‘no, thank you.’ Same holds true for the whole world of media. You can hope for kindness, and put in the effort give it to others where you will, but don’t trust that it will always be given to you because it is an extra effort.
Had a friend with an extreme peanut allergy, and she couldn’t even enter places that MIGHT have them. Chinese restaurants, steakhouses (back then every steakhouse had buckets of em and people would discard shells on the floor) baseball games, it’s not always about going so far as eating it, sometimes just having the particles in the air is enough. Imagine it like scrolling reddit back in the day for memes and coming across r/spacedicks.
I absolutely appreciate them. They give me the chance to decide for myself whether to engage with a topic, depending on where I’m at. Suicide is often hard for me to deal with, due to my own family circumstances, so sometimes I want to get in and help people who are struggling, but other times, I just need to avoid the discussion for my own wellbeing. Content warnings give me the opportunity to make that choice
Yes, they are. For a literature class, I taught a very short story, which is expertly written, about an infant who is scalded. It’s a fantastic piece, but something I’d totally expect some people to opt out of given the content.
I think I remember that from my creative writing class! Wasn’t it by O’Connor or someone?
David Foster Wallace, “Incarnations of Burned Children”
Ah right, Wallace. Seemed like everything he did was a cry for help
What’s the story?
David Foster Wallace’s “Incarnations of Burned Children.”
not to be confused with David Wallace, CEO of Dunder Mifflin and founder of Suck it
hell of a read, thanks
Depends on the magnitude of what is being warned of.
“Warning, graphic gore”? Absolutely appreciated. “Contains scenes of actual combat, those with PTSD may wish to leave the room”? Yeah totally reasonable. “This book contains vivid descriptions of sexual abuse”? I can see why people would be squicked out by that.
But then we get into the absurd side of it. A film about the Holocaust, needing to warn its viewers that some contents may be distressing? Wow. You don’t say. A memoir about a tragic death, needing to put a warning that… someone dies? “This politics discussion may discuss slavery, racism, and oppression”? Oh no, we have to think about upsetting things that happened!
And before someone suggests those are unrealistic hyperbole, those are all things I’ve seen. I don’t feel those are helpful.
They are harmless, so don’t see why not. I rather them to censorship. I remember mainstream media was heavily editing/censoring the footage of the killing of Charlie Kirk, and even posting the “far away” shot onto the same platforms that had close up, raw, uncensored footage. I heard it debated by them if a content warning and uncensored footage would be more beneficial.
I think the high quality footage itself of it actually made people more sympathetic/outraged about it, just seeing a man die that way
This is the correct take.
Content warnings on everything seems silly until you think about what the alternative is. It’s much better to have largely uncensored media that people can engage with intellectually, making their own decisions if they want to experience it or not.
The alternative is visible in the advertiser-friendly hellscape that mainstream social media has become, where people can’t even say words like “kill” or “drug” without being buried by the algorithm.
For a healthy society to exist, people need to be able to interact with sensitive topics and challenging ideas.
Imagine if the the news was able to show the actual true suffering in Gaza. I remember seeing Ukranian media publish uncensored images of mangled corpses and fragments of people’s skull still with a scalp and hair among rubble from Russia’s invasion. I think with the interactive nature of the internet, offering a content warning, then a censored version, then an uncensored version is the way to go. I imagined an interface possibly which starts with a content warning and then a “censored” toggle visibly turned on by default, but can be toggled off.
