Time magazine vol 172, no 3, 2008, p60 has a thoughtful article about whether comments on forums and blogs are ruining the internet through posting deliberate cruelty.

A random example--a user posts a video to utube of his new gerbil--a balck and white fellow sniffling along cutely in someone's hand. It is 11 seconds long. It generates 102 comments which start out benign, how cute! sweet!
and before long degenerate to why don't u shove that 'gerbil up your azz' and 'kill your self fast' and so on.

The author's point is that internet anonynimity is disinhibitng and people are basically mean. Internet content is about advertising which is based on traffic volume and comments mean traffic.

Rhetorical slap fighting is becoming the norm, anyone who feels otherwise is 'think skinned' and 'humorless'.

What we have are two incompatible views of what social conventions of the internet should be. One is based on 'real worl' standards the other is a communal game in which whoever wins is whoever is cleverest at pushing the most offensive buttons and getting away with it.

It's a great article, I read it yesterday. The author is Lev Grossman.

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"To be a warrior is to learn to be genuine in every moment of your life" ~Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche~

Seems to me that interacting via the internet removes much of people's superego. I wouldn't say I'm a Freudian by any means, but I'm willing to borrow his notion that we all have higher functions that act towards self-regulation, and it is the anonymity of the internet that eliminate the necessity for people to act in the same ways they act in "real life".

THen again, perhaps people ARE acting the same way as they act in real life and are so margainilzed by their behavior in real life that they look to the internet as their outlet for the self expression they are denied otherwise.

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I've had a perfectly wonderful evening......... but this wasn't it. -- Marx

I think you may be right, Lackluster. Sobering thought.

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"To be a warrior is to learn to be genuine in every moment of your life" ~Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche~

i have a slightly different take on the modification of human behavior due to technology. i reject the notion that online culture and the anonymity of the internet are simply allowing already present behavior to expose itself to the public eye without threat of ridicule. such behavior occurs in the public eye anyway.

the other day, for instance, i was riding my bike down a main Missoula street, when one woman, dressed in slightly masculine clothes and with a close-cropped hair-cut, crossed the street in the opposite direction. a passing vehicle of idiots yelled sexist, derogatory terms and flung a cigarette butt at her. in the middle of downtown Missoula!

obviously, the human race has always supported a wide variety of diversifying features that allow certain people to be marginalized as different--be it by sex, color, clothing style, or toothbrush brand; but i get the distinct notion from today's culture--at least in the U.S. where i live--that the reasoning behind the newest cruel tactics is not so much group-exclusionary behavior, but the lashing out of caged, lonely individuals. internet chat rooms and the very streets we live in have become places for the isolated individual to manifest dying gasps of the civility and community that is increasingly being replaced by defensive narcissism and rampant materialism.

i blame it on a disconnect from nature; the forgotten ability to become lost in savage wilderness, and, in doing so, gain a perspective on life that thoroughly maps one back into the waiting arms of civilization and community hospitality. the technology itself, indeed due to anonymity, but also due to the indoor nature of its use and the entrapment of the mind that it permits, has entangled humanity and constrained it from embracing the world we live in.

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May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.

I think partly it's dehumanization. The internet only sticks out because it is the area where the most isolated souls lash out.
But in general, communities are shrinking and growing more distant. People are way out of touch with each other... and I think some young people are being raised with stunted empathy due to lack of human content.
That only really shows up in the overly serious clashes that we see sometimes though. Not all net-trolls take themselves so seriously.

But that only explains part of it. The bulk is like prank calls. It's fun for dumb kids to annoy others, especially if they pay no consequences because they don't know the people. Over time they grow out of it.

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"Man lives in the sunlit world of that which he believes to be reality. But unseen by most is an underworld, a place that is just as real... but not as brightly lit... A DARK SIDE!"
-opening from Tales From the Darkside

Actually, they don't pay consequences because of the structure of all those various sites that allow them to behave in the way they behave without any consequences at all. Ultimately, the responsibility for site content rests with those running it rather than those using it, and so all these "prank calls" are a product of a decision making process that acts to support them (or not, if that is the decision).

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I've had a perfectly wonderful evening......... but this wasn't it. -- Marx

I agree with the author's comments.
There is no accountability in anonymity.

OMG!!111!!! Civilization is dying!

I think this is a reach, personally. Americans have not EVER had the most civil of public discourses. Hell, in the 1780s, we had political figures DYING in duels over personal insults.

In Kansas, entire communities of abolitionists were wiped out by criminal gangs who killed them in horrific ways: men, women and children. Americans are so now-focused that we lack perspective.

Our violence problems in this nation have actually GONE DOWN, significantly, since the mid 1990s. Our schools are safer than they were 20 years ago.

But, that doesn't sell magazines.

We always have to have a crisis du jour, as a nation, to focus on. In the late 1990s, it was Columbine and disaffected youths. Now, it's a few internet-related kid squabbles.

I remember everyone wringing their hands about the plague of superpredators that was fixing to descend on us like locusts from the youth culture, and you know what? NEVER HAPPENED. Crime actually went down.

I'm sorry, the world is NOT going to hell in a handbasket. Cultural norms change with technology, and that's what's happening. It will sort itself out. I see my daughter and her peers using technology to interact, and they're doing just fine. The people on this forum who do the most hand-wringing about teenagers don't have any and rarely interact with any.

But, in honor of this thread:


p.s. I post often (and read daily) on the Tucker Max forums, one of the most hardcore, offensive places you can find on the internet. It is ALWAYS funny, often sobering, and quite often, poignant. It actually gives me faith in humanity. But, then, I liked hanging out with gang members for the same reason.

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Catz Meow
Badly behaved.
Hedonistic Lemming.

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JW Frogen, my new favorite noob poster:

If you are such a weak jellyfish you can be bullied on a forum where you can ignore any poster you do not want to read than I suggest you move to Tibet, convert to Buddhism, protest the Chinese occupation, be killed as you will by the Chinese and hope you come back with some form of backbone.

this isn't about crime or violence, but about civility--and definitely not just in teenagers or gang members. you say that social norms change with technology, and i agree; but i see said change to be a marginalizing, isolating force that threatens many common bonds of humanity.

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May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.

There is certainly a phenomenon in this country leading to more isolation and fewer and weaker community bonds.

I don't think net-trolling is the best evidence of it however.

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"Man lives in the sunlit world of that which he believes to be reality. But unseen by most is an underworld, a place that is just as real... but not as brightly lit... A DARK SIDE!"
-opening from Tales From the Darkside