> 5. Skateboarders, one of the most anti-social hobbies
I hear you - skateboarders skating on the street can be a nuisance sometimes, and yes they make a racket - but that's precisely why skate parks are such a great addition to a community.
That said, calling skateboarding an anti-social hobby is a bit misleading; on the contrary it's a highly social hobby, and in many ways can be socially uplifting.
In the part of town where I grew up, skateboarding gave my friends and I something enjoyable to do, that kept us fit - and crucially - kept us away from other more destructive past-times typically associated with rebellious teenagers (drinking, drugs etc.).
I don't mean to pick a fight here. Just felt it was necessary to better represent skateboarding culture (as a past skateboarder, who owes some of his success to the benefits that hobby provided at a very critical time in my life).
Chiming in to totally agree. At the start of the year I had no local friends and was just starting to meet people. I matched with someone online who was part of a local queer skater group, and we met and got along. Then suddenly I had a huge group of people where there’s always someone skating Saturday and Sunday every weekend. This made it super easy for me to drop in to a social group any time I wanted, and for months that’s where I was every weekend. The queer skater group is one contingent of a larger group of skaters, so in all there’s usually a good 30 people hanging out and skating together every weekend. It’s a huge new social group for me and they throw events with donations from local skate shops, they do board swaps and clothing swaps, have Instagram groups and photographers. I laughed when I read “anti-social”. The skateboarding group I connected with is the biggest social group I have!
Skateboarding is antisocial because skateboarders are inflicting a noisy hobby on the neighbors. It has nothing to do with whether the skateboarder will make friends or not.
Usually the neighbors inflicted things like park closures, "no loitering" near commercial parking lots, and vetoing neighborhood skate parks on the skaters, all of which would be further from resident bedrooms, and much safer for pedestrians, skaters and sleepers.
Instead folks seem to hope that by demonizing and inconveniencing a relatively harmless teenage activity that simply requires a bit of outdoor space as "antisocial", skateboarding will just...go away?
I'd argue that usually the neighbors are people entirely removed from the skate boarding debate one way or the other. They just don't want excessive noise pollution outside their apartment (be it from skateboarders, mopeds, neighbors with bass-heavy stereos, etc.)
I think (and this is just my intuition over the years) in the UK 'anti social' is used very broadly to mean 'detracting from the public interest', where here in America I've most often heard it to mean someone who shuns the company of others.
I mean the group I go to meets at a disused commuter overflow parking lot under a noisy raised train station so they’re quieter than their surroundings and not really bothering anyone. Still it’s wild to call a group anti social when they are in fact a very social gathering.
We have skate parks, but skateboarders would come and do tricks on our hill while filming themselves, plus there were a few people who used them for commuting at the dead of night.
Cities can be surprisingly silent at the dead of night, someone riding along on a skateboard makes a huge amount of noise and as they're going slowly, for quite a long time.
That book is printed on trees, or the device is powered. Those inflict externalities on others (trees for paper, components for the device, power inputs). Thus it affects others and the wider environment.
What's actually the antisocial behavior here is unsustainably harvesting trees, or polluting power generation. Not the act of reading itself, which has no adverse impact on other members of society.
There definitely is a difference between behavior that has a direct adverse impact on society, and pedantic attempts at portraying non-disruptive behavior as antisocial. A skateboard rolling down the street at night and waking people up is causing direct adverse impact, someone reading in their home does not.
Pushing the blame for externalities onto some nebulous other is antisocial though. It's a way of absolving yourself and others of the responsibility of agency and creating change. Limiting the definition to actions which directly "disrupt" others is simply a way for the privileged to export their antisocial behavior to ethically unburdened faceless corporations.
Is it practical to stop reading because a tree gets cut or your ereader needs charging? Probably not, but that's why change doesn't happen until it's forced by the circumstances.
Most paper is recycled (over 2/3rd). So no, it's not antisocial.
Regardless, it's still a false equivalency to try and equate directly antisocial behavior like making loud noises that disrupt people's healthy sleep and the sustainability of producing paper, some of which is used for printing novels that people read in their homes.
I live on a street in NYC where the sound of a skateboard is nothing compared to sirens (cops will punch them to run the red at the corner but sometimes it’s ambulances or fire trucks) and the ridiculous mufflers mentioned in the article. I can’t even imagine being bothered by the sound of a skateboard.
Without wishing to get into the argument about skaters- antisocial has a secondary meaning which is not the opposite of 'social'. An antisocial behaviour in this sense is one that offends against the rest of society, even if it is conducted by a social group rather than a solitary individual.
The primary definition in the Oxford English dictionary is "opposed to sociality, averse to society or companionship." It cites a usage dating to 1797. The secondary definition given, which you claim is the only correct one, similarly cites a usage dating to 1802. If the usage you complained about was ever a mistake, 200 years of usage means it is no longer.
Language is a moving target, and like it or not, the term 'antisocial' has developed a decided bias in terms of its meaning, which carries legal and medical weight.
You don't want to go describing other people as antisocial when asocial is what you mean, this thread illustrates that.
I joke with friends about this in fact, if someone says "ah I'm probably not going I've been feeling kind of antisocial" I'll ask them if they're planning to [redacted comment on America's violent culture in poor taste].
This is magnified by British use of antisocial, see ASBO, it's not worth trying to hold the line for two meanings when asocial is just sitting there being unambiguous.
> the term 'antisocial' has developed a decided bias in terms of its meaning, which carries legal and medical weight.
Not in American English, which is why the Americans here are so confused about this whole thing. In American English, "antisocial" means "asocial" and the other meaning is obscure. And "asocial" just isn't in the lexicon as an alternative.
They use the estate square downstairs sometimes. Jumping over the (plastic) bench is a popular exercise - alas, they're mostly not very good at it, hence the curve in the top bar of the bench, but this also means scratter-scratter-scratter-clunk-RESOUNDING-CLUNK-screams-and-shouting, repeat every 60s for 4 hours. My brain was mush at the end of hour one, I'll be honest.
I hear you - skateboarders skating on the street can be a nuisance sometimes, and yes they make a racket - but that's precisely why skate parks are such a great addition to a community.
That said, calling skateboarding an anti-social hobby is a bit misleading; on the contrary it's a highly social hobby, and in many ways can be socially uplifting.
In the part of town where I grew up, skateboarding gave my friends and I something enjoyable to do, that kept us fit - and crucially - kept us away from other more destructive past-times typically associated with rebellious teenagers (drinking, drugs etc.).
I don't mean to pick a fight here. Just felt it was necessary to better represent skateboarding culture (as a past skateboarder, who owes some of his success to the benefits that hobby provided at a very critical time in my life).