Fighting Fit?

I've just watched a clip a friend posted on their Facebook feed from a page called The Fight Archive.

Make no mistake folks, I love a good fight. As a matter of fact, watching a good scrap or a sparring bout, or being in the ring myself has to be up there as one of favourite things to do.
The intensity, the passion, the power, technique and skill, speed - there's a real kind of purity that comes from combat; a true test of one's dedication and discipline. It's exhilarating.

But something about this particular clip really put me off. It was titled "Bully versus Nerd - Nerd lands fifty seven punches!!" As a martial artist, if I hear that someone landed fifty seven punches, I'm definitely intrigued. I'd expect to see an Ip-Man style kung-fu beat down on someone who picked on the wrong guy. That wasn't what I got. At all.

See, the fact that this particular clip was filmed in the first place made me initially think it was probably staged, but there was something about the raw emotion in the video that hit far too close to home.

I mentioned in my previous blog that I was never one of the popular kids in school. It would be fair to say I was very, very close to the bottom of the school social ladder, by virtue of my intense geekiness. A skinny ginger kid who was properly crap at sports was never going to do well for themselves in a high - school situation. That's all very much squared away now, thanks.

I'm bringing up my own experiences here because the kid in this video was looked to have been tormented on a regular basis. Now, I don't know why the bully thought it would be fun to have his buddy film their latest antagonising efforts, but you can only push someone so far before they snap (trust me on this one). That was exactly what happened here, after pushing this kid around incessantly and calling him a few names they end up in a scuffle.

The victim manages to somehow get the upper hand on the bully (who's fat as fuck, it's worth pointing out. Stones and glass houses come to mind.) and then he just unleashes. I'm guessing years of pent up fury and frustration went into the onslaught that followed. He's on top of the other kid, and he's throwing right after left directly at his opponent's head. 

He then screams: "Do you want to leave me alone now?! Are you gonna leave me alone?!"

By this point, the bully is just desperately trying to guard his head. He's not doing a very good job. The video ends abruptly after our 'Nerd' shouts: "Have you learnt your lesson?".

My question is this: what are we supposed to take from this as an audience? It wasn't an enjoyable fight to watch in the slightest. Is the idea here for me to champion our nerdy hero who just annihilated the guy that was picking on him? Because he didn't look relieved in the slightest. Something about the way he says: "Are you gonna leave me alone?!" tells me that he crossed a line he never hoped to. There wasn't any technique or skill in his attack (and be under no illusions here; it was very much an attack), it was just raw emotion sending a message in the most dramatic and violent manner possible.

I'm not vouching for the bully here, by any means -  my point is that the [former] bullied guy ended up decimating this other kid, but it was in no way a decisive victory for victims of bullying the world over. I saw a young guy snap under the straw that broke his back, and in his voice I heard something that told me he'd crossed a line I don't think he'd ever wanted to cross.

Yes, I'm a fighter. Contrary to what many people may take that to mean, I absolutely do NOT enjoy hurting other people, nor do I enjoy seeing others get hurt. Standing up to bullies is sometimes necessary and sometimes even good. But that isn't always the case. The MO of a bully is provocation, desperately trying anything and everything to get some kind of reaction from their victims. To word it another way; a bully is someone who is trying to get you to compromise your own self.

That's what I saw in this video: a kid who compromised what he believed about the world. 'Live and let live,' 'Do unto others as you would have done upon yourself,' 'Don't hurt anyone.' Pick your cliché. The guy being picked on was upset because it had come down to him beating the ever-loving shit out of his bully; and he regretted every single punch. 

Maybe I'm reading too much into this. We all know that bullying is not funny. It's the last resort of people who lack the proper ability to express themselves as a cooperative, productive human being. Don't get me wrong; there's always that grim satisfaction when some asshole gets their just desserts, but this video borders on gratuitous. How am I supposed to react to that?

I suppose my intention here is nothing more than awareness, with a request that readers question their reactions to this particular clip. Regardless of its validity, is 'Nerd landing 57 hits on Bully' something to be celebrated as an act of bravery? Because that's not what I saw. Or is this simply a shock-tactics video, hoping to catch a few bloggers hook, line and sinker?

Welcome to the Internet

So I decided to start a blog after a throw-away bit of encouragement I received at work. Seemed like a pretty natural thing to do really; I have opinions about things and I have access to the internet, so why not exploit both and share with the world what's on my mind? twitter doesn't offer enough words for me to get properly talky about things and Facebook is fine for the odd status and a brief review of the latest buzz, but there's just not the space to, well, ramble on a bit. Hence blogging.

The first thing I wanted to write about was the internet itself. I'm old enough to remember a time before the whole world was online, yet young enough for it to have come along at such a pivotal time in my life. We got online in 1997 - I was 12, taking those first steps into the horribly awkward and formative years of adolescence. 

I'm an unabashed geek, and at the time in school, that meant not being one of the cool kids. I'm talking old-school geek here, reading sci-fi and fantasy from a young age, enjoying things like Star Trek and Star Wars on levels that most others don't, being an obsessive gamer and all the rest. That meant being an outsider and having only a very small, tightly knit friend group who could understand why it's fun to argue about whether or not a Star Destroyer could take the Enterprise. (In case you're wondering, the Empire wins hands down, Every. Single. Time.)

So all of a sudden, we get online. Actually it wasn't so sudden. Back then getting online took forever! You were treated to the glorious beep-beep-hisss-clicking noise of your dial-up modem connecting to the world wide web. ISPs charged by the minute and your connection was likely to have been so slow that loading up even the most basic html could take a matter of minutes to display. In other words, we had to wait our damn turn to internet! We treated it like a precious resource, not the all consuming, nigh-on ubiquitous presence it now has in our lives.

What did that mean to me then? Freedom. Liberation. Online you were (and are still in most cases) completely anonymous and free to access the content you wanted, when you wanted it. You could be anyone - I seem to recall that I used being online as a kind of amplifier for my young personality. I don't think I fully understood the risks of being so digitally naked back then, but I was smart enough to at least be fairly responsible with where I went and what I said (I think!). The news was awash with the dangers lurking in chat rooms, and parents everywhere were being scare-mongered into shying their kids away from the inherent dangers of this new online craze. For my part, my parents trusted me better, though my incessant typing definitely drove them to breaking point. It was new and I was young, so naturally I wanted all of the internet my mind and body could handle. 

The most accurate analogue for how the internet felt to me then is something like a fusion between The Matrix (a huge system, where you could ignore the rules and do almost anything with the right knowledge) and the OASIS from Ernest Cline's Ready Player One - if you haven't read this book yet, I strongly urge you to do so! It fast became my favourite novel of all time, and is probably deserving of a blog entry all to itself. The web is essentially a place where you can indulge every whim, every passion. Like Final Fantasy? Check out any one of almost a BILLION pages (837,000,000 according to Google) that mention it. Music fan? I've got 6.83 billion pages at my fingertips, brought to me in 0.24 seconds. Something as vague as "videos" brings back 13.65 billion results in less time than it took for me to type the first letter. 

Or how about specifics? Fancy learning how to hack? "Hacking websites for beginners" returns  1,070,000 results. The internet is a bastion of opportunity and completely embodies the old adage that knowledge is power. 

My browsing today is a perfect example of just how freeing - or even empowering - the internet can be as a medium. I've indulged every interest on a whim, spanned multiple mediums, been entertained and intrigued, I've laughed and even cried online today. Here I am blogging about how cool it is to share my thoughts on a blog. Meta. 
And it's not even quarter to two. The web is still very much an amplifier of my personality, only nowadays it feels a little more direct. To snap back to the Matrix again, when I want some information I get it, just like Neo downloading kung fu into his brain. 

(As a side-note, my personal thoughts as to how the internet will evolve is that we'll likely see something like the Net from Ghost in The Shell or the OASIS. I feel as though it will become even more relevant to us than the real world. That makes me a little sad, but I think that ultimately, online the possibilities are almost endless.) 

I often like to challenge myself by thinking about what I think the greatest achievement in human history may be. The obvious contenders like the discovery of fire, agriculture, the invention of the wheel or the computer are very valid, but until recently I've always firmly supported the Moon Landing as humankind's greatest moment. We evolve in and live in one very specific environment, break the bonds of one to only go into the most challenging domain of all (space) then we have the gall to land on another world with less technology than the average digital watch. Are you fucking kidding me?! 

Truly, we are capable of amazing things. 

I mention this is because I've recently been entertaining the idea that the internet itself is our greatest moment. It's something that has infiltrated every aspect of our lives and become fundamental. The digital realm now has very real consequences both on and offline. But it brings us education; it brings us family - a global network of friends without borders or such petty restrictions as 'time zones.' We have all the information everyone *anywhere* has ever wanted known uploaded and digitized into immortality. Riots in the Middle-East? Oh hai camera phone, let's upload this footage to CNN or Al-Jazeera and show the people what's really going on as it's actually happening. Had a pretty good meal out? Instagram's sole purpose is to show other people how nice your food is! 

If we have access to the internet, every single person starts on the same platform regardless of wealth, race, gender or nationality. We can access whatever information we want at any time and do with it what we will. That level of freedom and power has never been available to the masses and represents a paradigm-shift in how we conduct our society now and going forward. This is both wonderful and truly terrifying. But for me at least, it is above all exciting.