It can be hard to find “your people” when you’re autistic. For us spectrum jockeys—avoidant, overwhelmed, and overstimulated as we are—community can be as slippery as the spectrum itself: something you surf along until you’ve slid straight through whatever you thought the end point was, before arriving back where you’ve always been, alone with your perpetually “other” self.
It’s no wonder, then, that the internet has always been a haven for autists. Here, in this vast interconnected constellation of freaks, geeks, obsessives, compulsives, and maladjusted eye-contact-dodging miscreants, is God’s perfect kingdom for undiagnosed and diagnosed autists alike—one wrought in their own image by them, for them.
Or so the old wives’ tales go, old wives usually being a Gen X former forum moderator in an ironic Wang Computers shirt. For as long as I’ve known the internet to be a place for diagnosable outsiders and oddballs, it has also been a place where they speak about how it is no longer a place for them.
I was 19 or so when I got onto Facebook and stumbled into the addictive world of social media, which at the time, functionally worked like an aggregator of all these wayward wackos. The early 2010s seemed like a heady evolution of the internet of my high school years: The savant sideshow acts of the forums and blogs were being given larger and larger platforms, fueling a healthy cottage industry of independent media and artists that was as exciting as it was eminently more explorable.
Technology Technology Latest News, Technology Technology Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Source: clevelanddotcom - 🏆 301. / 63 Read more »
Source: hackernoon - 🏆 532. / 51 Read more »
Source: ForbesTech - 🏆 318. / 59 Read more »