What Accessible Communication is Not

If you speak ironically, and then refuse to clarify whether a statement is sarcastic or genuine, your communication is not accessible.

If you are unwilling to explain a concept when someone takes longer to understand it than you might, your communication is not accessible.

If you are asked to slow down, to repeat yourself, to define a term that is not understood, or to stop joking and speak seriously, and you meet this request with contempt, your communication is not accessible.

If you deliberately mislead anyone for the purpose of amusing yourself or others with their gullability, your communication is not accessible (and you are also an asshole).


I'm tired of people who fill every conversation with impassible cognitive barriers.

I'm tired of having to use all of my brainpower just to figure out whether I am being manipulated or told the truth.

I'm tired of the idea that believing another person is a character flaw, an invitation to victimize, a sign of an embarrassingly unsubtle mind.

I'm tired of the assumption that because we're all at college, we can all speak on this distorted and sophisticated plane of half-truths and true lies, and surely we will all understand each other because anyone too dumb to navigate this level of language would never have got here in the first place.

Anthropology

(You can click this to make it bigger if you like)

[Image description: a drawn comic in which I stand facing a lanky college guy. The guy is holding a cigarette and wearing a T-shirt which reads "I am totally not a hipster". I am holding a microphone, and a speech bubble indicates that I am saying to him, "May I have a moment of your time to ask you about irony?"]


This is a comic that I did about the challenges of interacting with people at college. Many college students, especially (but not exclusively) people who might be identified as hipsters, are really into irony. They are so ironic that they can even manage to be sincere in an ironic way. I'm not quite sure how that works.

Like a lot of people on the autism spectrum, I can have problems telling when other people are being ironic. I'm pretty good with plain old sarcasm (when someone says one thing but mean the opposite), but I can't get the hang of the meta-irony that hipsters use. Sometimes I have to ask people "What did you mean by that?" or "If you were going to express the same sentiments, but use words that were true, what would you say?"

This creates all kinds of awkward situations because people really aren't used to being asked these kinds of questions. One classmate began laughing, rolling her eyes, and exchanging looks with her friends when I asked her to clarify an ironic comment. And often, when I ask people what they mean by something they have said, they tell me that they don't know. This leaves me wondering: Do people really not know what they mean by what they say?

Do I fail to understand hipsters because they don't understand themselves?

Will other people ever make sense to me?