Using social media with AS

I use social media. Actually, I use quite a lot of it – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and  MSN. Until recently, I was also clamped onto a couple of IRC channels.

I started using social media as part of my camouflage, way before I knew consciously that I even did that. I felt the need to fit in – my geek friends were all using IRC, and despite it feeling a very odd thing to do, I joined them.

Instant Messaging was a work thing – it was the defacto way to communicate in the office between people who weren’t sitting next to each other. So over the space of a couple of years, I got used to communicating with people via MSN and IRC. This was almost exclusively a work-time thing – I didn’t use computers much at home.

Over time my usage has morphed. Web 2.0 is here, and with it have come new and more “social” ways of interacting. First came LinkedIn, and then Facebook. More recently I’ve embraced Twitter. My reason for using these sites has changed a little too. I still use them as part of my camouflage – to make me appear more normal within my peer group. These days, however, I’ve also discovered the power of self expression via social media. I use Twitter in particular to express my thoughts. I comment on things I’ve read on the web, or things people have been talking about.

This perhaps shows how my use of social media is only a facsimile of how people normally use it.

I don’t use it in a very social way most of the time. I don’t add lots of applications to Facebook, nor do I throw snowballs or cows or give gifts to friends.  I don’t have a funwall. Now that I’ve built a peer-group at LinkedIn I no longer log in to keep it up to date. On Twitter, my updates are factual and stating opinion most of the time. My Twitter @replies are sparse and again usually state fact about things rather than being light, jokey, and, well, social.

What about IRC? Well, I recently decided to stop using it. With my daily use of Twitter and to a lesser extent Facebook, I found IRC just too much. I also found it never fitted my way of interacting very well. I felt compelled to scroll back and read what people had written whilst I was away. I needed to know the story – what people had been doing and saying. That was just too much of a burden. I used to justify my use of IRC with the rare times that I used it to actually interact with people rather than being the silent lurker. This was usually to ask a question of someone in particular and IRC wasn’t good at this mode of interaction. If the person wasn’t present, then they may or may not see my question when they returned, depending on much traffic there had been on the channel since. If they did see and then replied, I may or may not have seen their reply, for the same reason. Twitter and to a lesser extent Facebook both handle this non-real-time style of disjoint conversation far better and more reliably.

I quietly and without fuss dropped off my usual IRC channels a few weeks ago. I’ve had a couple of pangs of neediness for it in my more anxious moments, but I have to say that on the whole I’m not missing it.

Social media can be used by someone with AS.

Just don’t expect someone with AS to use it in the way you would use it.

Extrapolating how I work

Here’s what I do. I make it up as I go along. I bullshit, if you like.

Kids with AS are often referred to as Little Professors, and it’s easy to see why. When it comes to subjects that they are interested in, they can talk at you all day about it. They appear to know everything there is to know about the subject. The things is, generally they don’t. They make stuff up, and extrapolate, yet present everything with that same confidence that makes you think that they know what they are talking about.

I did this as a kid, and as an adult, I still do. The reason is that this is the way I learnt to do things, and I never really appreciated until recently that it might not always be the right thing to do.

Thus, when I get carried away I’ll embellish things that I say with facts and figures that sound right, but are actually made up. I feel justified in doing so, because in my head, the extrapolation of data that I do know, into something that might be true is valid. I know that’s going to sound wrong and illogical to many people, but, well, that’s just the way it is, and there’s no point in me trying to deny it.

Much of the time my extrapolation causes no harm, but from time to time I’ll do it with someone who knows more than me about a subject, and I’ll simply end up looking foolish at best. At worst, I’ll get thought of as a bullshitter and will lose the trust of that person.

There are of course positive aspects to this too – sometimes my extrapolation isn’t bullshit, and allows me to make connections I’d not previously seen, or to take a leap of faith about something. When it works this way, it’s one of the most useful of my AS traits.

The above behaviour is well documented in AS literature, but the reason behind it isn’t. I’ve been wondering why I approach knowledge in this way, and I think I may have found an answer.

It all boils down to how I learnt to cope with my invisible and undiagnosed AS, and in particular with social interaction. As a child, I copied how other kids interacted. I had to do this to fit in, because I had little in the way of natural ability with social interaction. The sophistication in a lot of social interaction didn’t make sense to me then, and a good deal of it doesn’t make sense to me now, although I’ve learnt over the years to rationalise what I see, and to disguise my lack of understanding.

So, as a child, I spent a good deal of time observing other children, and then recreating what I saw in order to make sense of it. At first, much of this recreation was in my head. I tried to understand what I should say and do, by replaying the interactions of myself and my peers in my head. Eventually, my take on these events was replayed – when faced with a social scenario I acted out what I thought would be appropriate responses, based on what I’d seen my peers doing.

This is the key, I think: When I didn’t understand the expected responses in social situations, I watched what people did, and stored away the responses to use later. Faced with a similar scenario at a later date, I extrapolated a response from the data I had available.

There’s that word again – extrapolate.

Extrapolating data to camouflage my weakness in social interaction worked well, and I use it to this day.

Perhaps the reason that I sometimes pass off extrapolated bullshit when presenting knowledge is simply because extrapolation of data was how I learnt to cope with my poor social skills as a child. I made up answers to my social problems based on the data I’d gathered through observation of my peers, just like I present made up data as fact when I get carried away.

This article, of course, is also based on an extrapolation of data, and as such could equally well be bullshit. Is it? Well, I don’t think so. I think this falls into the category of making connections and leaps of faith. I hope you agree.

The perfect cover story

I’ve ended up in the profession that gives me the perfect cover story for my AS.

I stumbled into it many years before I even knew what AS was, mostly out of luck. I work in IT, and more specifically as a Systems Administrator. If you don’t know much about this field, then you probably don’t know the significance of me having this sort of role.

I’m sure you’ll have heard of the term geek, however. Geeks work in IT. They are solitary creatures who like to sit in darkened rooms, preferably on their own, and spend their working day tapping away at a large bank of computers that tower over their desk. They keep odd hours, often rising and then working late. They are usually single, and almost invariably have poor social skills. At least, that’s the stereotype.

That sounds rather like someone with AS, doesn’t it?

I think it does, and I’m sure that some proportion of those that behave like a typical geek do have AS, or some other Autism Spectrum condition.

The majority don’t though.

I’m sure of this, because geeks may appear to be like me, but actually, the superficial comparison is as far as it goes. Most of the geeks I know are actually quite sociable, and of the proportion that aren’t, most simply have poor social skills through being hopelessly addicted to computers to the point of not interacting much with real people. I think I can spot those on the Autism Spectrum pretty accurately these days because I know the signs to look out for, and I can usually see when camouflage is in use. Geeks do not, as the norm, have AS.

Having thought back across my 14 years of work in the field, I reckon maybe 1 in 10 IT people have an Autism Spectrum condition, though perhaps 1 in 4 of them at least loosely meet the stereotypes associated with geekery.

In each job I’ve had, I’ve quickly been accepted by the geeks as being one of them. I’m not though.

My AS traits mean that I fit the stereotype. It’s the perfect cover. As long as I’m careful to deploy my usual camouflage at least most of the time, then I’m simply seen as another geek, and I don’t have to explain away any of my convention-breaking behaviours to other the geeks, or even to management.

I’ve also noticed that geeks often have a cruel streak, and an almost pack-like behaviour. This is an area where I’m most definitely not one of them. From the comfort of a private chat room, I’ve seen decent people ripped to shreds simply to provide entertainment. The act is cowardly, with the victim never in the chat room at the time. I find this behaviour intolerable, but I also have to be honest and say that I’ve often gone along with it, to protect my cover. After all, without my geek ‘friends’, what friends would I have left?

Not many. But that’s another story.