Slashdot Mirror
The Internet's Age of Rage
RackNine sends this excerpt from an editorial at the Guardian:
"The worldwide web has made critics of us all. But with commenters able to hide behind a cloak of anonymity, the blog and chatroom have become forums for hatred and bile. ... The psychologists call it 'deindividuation.' It's what happens when social norms are withdrawn because identities are concealed. The classic deindividuation experiment concerned American children at Halloween. Trick-or-treaters were invited to take sweets left in the hall of a house on a table on which there was also a sum of money. When children arrived singly, and not wearing masks, only 8% of them stole any of the money. When they were in larger groups, with their identities concealed by fancy dress, that number rose to 80%. The combination of a faceless crowd and personal anonymity provoked individuals into breaking rules that under 'normal' circumstances they would not have considered. ... One simple antidote to this seems to rest in the very old-fashioned idea of standing by your good name. Adopt a pseudonym and you are not putting much of yourself on the line. Put your name to something and your words are freighted with responsibility."
'deindividualization' is actually 'REindividualization.' IE bypassing today's increasing pressures to conform, individuals are saying what they really think, and, according to this article anyway, that's a bad thing. I disagree completely. Feelings, consensus, and politeness should never outweigh rationality, truth, and objectivity. If they do, then we've lost the whole point of communications in the first place.
I grasp your concept about cues, but it's also supposed to be understood that those on the internet are unaware and (usually) don't care about any particular user's personal problems. The user is supposed to understand this by default. This isn't a rule I made up, it's just part of the deal. There just aren't any other cues other than the language used by the user and the peers he is communicating with. I remember a time when this was considered a good thing because irrelevant attributes were not used to judge.
Whose tolerance? If anything, the tolerance of the overly sensitive, emotional types that make up the majority of society is what's lacking. This was always true, but, like the anonymous users they whine about, systems like the internet allow them to hit critical groupthink mass as well, forcing their censorious expectations on ever growing amounts of communication between individuals. No matter what they say, their feelings do not justify censoring uncomfortable truth, which is the real reason they would like to stamp out anonymity whereever they find it.