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Why Are We So Rude Online?
kodiaktau writes "An article in the WSJ discusses why internet users are more rude online than they are in person. The story discusses some of the possible reasons. For example, a study found that browsing Facebook tends to lower people's self control. An MIT professor says people posting on the internet have lowered inhibitions because there is no formal social interaction. Another theory is that communicating through a phone or other device feels like communicating with a 'toy,' which dehumanizes the conversation. Of course, a rude conversation has never happened on Slashdot in the last 15 years."
Oh, but this is simple. People are rude when, well... Well let me tell you a story of my friend called Dave.
Dave was an ordinary boy with wild imagination. He was popular with the guys for several reasons, but the fact that he and his mother let us play GoldenEye on his Nintendo64 wasn't easy to ignore. All of us guys used to gather at his house and play a few rounds of the great multiplayer experience that only the original GoldenEye gave.
I noticed that people tented to get angry during the game. They would verbally attack other players and even punch them a bit. Dave didn't - he actually seemed quite an non-aggressive fella. What was the secret to Dave's non-aggressive and non-rude behavior? Because his mother made him these wonderful home cooked pizzas. He wasn't angry because he ate well!
...you insensitive clod!
Leave it to the WSJ to be 15+ years behind the times in figuring this out.
Why, it's the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory that explains it
Like what?
Anonymity has always caused assholishness. People were assholes in cars before being assholes online.
I had a guy here wish me to be in hospital after a traffic accident in the cycling thread.
If one met someone like that IRL, one would generally back away, call them a fucking psycho or, perhaps if one was so-inclined and felt suitably threatened, punch the guy in the face. Usually 1 and or 2 though.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
...is that my computer screen doesn't punch me in the face when I talk about the sweet, though slightly twisted and, depending on your geolocation, illegal relationship I had with your mother...
She was great, by the way.
I'm not sure that explains it all. My girlfriend and I both hate our phone conversations but love our in-person conversations, and we certainly know each other. There's something about communicating with a device that ruins a lot of the non-verbal stuff we take for granted.
For similar reasons, I often find myself about to post my views on something and then hesitate: "Does the internet really need to hear my opinion on this? Is it worth the emotional backlash if my thoughts set off a troll?" More often than not recently I've answered "No". And before anyone leaps out and cries "But you shouldn't be so emotionally invested in what you post!" I'll assure you that it's impossible to express a considered opinion and not invest some part of yourself in it. Everyone should be able to state their point of view without being wished bodily harm as the parent was.
I like how the Hackaday forum has cleaned up its act by permabanning trolls and flamers and holding people more accountable. Yes, it's whackamole with fake accounts but if trolls don't get any traction in your forum eventually they go away. Trolls are a lot like schoolyard bullies and have similar motivations. By removing the enabling mechanism (anonimity) or removing the payoff mechanism (flame response), I expect such bad behaviour can be diminished.
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The question is not "why do some people act like fucktards online?". Deep down, fucktards is exactly what those people are. They just hide it better in real life.
The reason is very simple, if somewhat disheartening. Take a look at some of the literature on human behavior, particularly the studies on the "banality of evil" (texbook scenarios are the Milgram Experiment and the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment).
The sad truth pointed out by both of those studies is that approximately 60% of us -- all of us, even those of us who claim to be, and act like, normal ethical people in polite society -- will commit acts of cruelty upon another human being, even to the point of delivering potentially lethal electrical shocks to someone obviously in distress, if the social sanctions against it are removed.And those were both cases in which the victims had voices and (in the latter case) faces by which the perpetrators could witness the suffering they were causing.
In short, the majority of people will be cruel, spiteful bullies if they believe they can get away with it. For me, a good example is (oddly) watching how people treat pigeons (??): they're harmless, no more dirty than, say, hoboes, and live around us. But they are negatively viewed as carriers of disease ("rats of the skies" is such a cliché, and what's so bad about rats, anyway?), and most people wouldn't think twice about trying to scare them and threaten to cause them harm. It seems a bit melodramatic, but I often wonder why a person would want to be mean to some random harmless animal. I think, sadly, that it's because most people like being mean, and just need a venue to get away with it.
The Pinochet regime in Chile figured this out pretty quickly: you don't need to make people commit acts of cruelty against their will. All you have to do is provide a venue for cruelty without consequences, and the people will come out of the woodwork of their own accord. And Facebook/YouTube/your local news station's comments section are just such venues.
I doubt that. Social networks which don't warrant anonymity (e.g. Facebook) prove to have the same rude audience as totally anonymous sites. My hypothesis is that it's
a) the larger audience. Especially male persons seem to be more aggressive if the audience is larger (yes, there are extensive studies about that, if needed I might be able to google up a citation). People who are totally nice and gentle in 1-1 situations become total jerks if many people are watching. The Internet is as an audience second only to the Super Bowl and the Soccer World Championship.
b) the decoupled reaction of the audience. Face to face the reaction starts while you are still acting, and you start to adapt while not even finishing your sentence. A lot of overreaching rudeness is thus dampened before it can be acted out. In not fully real time conversations as chats, the reaction already comes late, and via email, on message boards and profile based social sites, it can be hours until the reaction is there. Until then your own rudeness rules supreme because no social control can be exercised on you.
So no, anonymity is not the problem. Size of audience and delayed social control is.
I wouldn't focus too much on the machine part of the equation.
Anonymity along with the internet bringing different cultures together creates a situation were people can get annoyed and frustrated combined with a degree of safety that allows them to become jerks with little to no repercussions.
In my travels, I have always found things people do different enough to annoy me mildly, sometime even a lot. The other people do not know it annoys me, they are used to it because it is normal for them. When we are face to face, we think more about hurting someone's feelings or the fact that they might punch us in the nose or something. When we are isolated by technology, we don't have to think about those things. But mostly, you will find other people's behavior to normally be different and that difference can be or can cause the rudeness on the interweb tubes thingy..
It's not about being anonymous or not, it's simply the mode of communication.
which is totally what she said
Like texting "You know your shit!" versus "You know you're shit!"??
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
They don't want to trick or guild-trip you, they want to see themselves being polite and convincing.
So the small talk is addressed to themselves, not you.
Knowing this will not soften your hate. Sorry !
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
The common answer to this question is that anonymity online makes us vicious, in the same way in vino veritas is said when some drunk person accidentally blurts out what they're truly thinking.
However, I think it's a combination of factors:
1. You see only the words and the ideas, not the person;
2. There is no social context, like being in line at a bakery;
3. There is little chance of seeing that person again if you don't want to, or of getting the crap pounded out of you;
4. People are very frustrated and angry in general.
If you are in real life, you're interacting with people in a community and you might want to see them again. However, in cities, people behave just about as viciously as they do online, with a slight modification to avoid starting actual physical confrontations.
It's the little things: cutting in line, being snide, bullying people out of the way with your SUV, littering, yapping on cell phones at counters.
Online, you're in a world made only of words and ideas. This encourages you to blurt out what you're really thinking, which is generally disliking most people who aren't doing things your way. There's wisdom in this in that if you've been in the world for awhile, your way evolved because it makes sense. You cast aside all the other behaviors and your way is the aggregate of what's left.
The biggest crypto-factor here however is that people in this society are frustrated. We are meat, with a for sale price on our heads, and we must constantly keep making ourselves available to a callous world in order to bring in the cash. It turns people into whores, makes them hate themselves, and makes them hate the competition, which is everyone else.
I've lived across the world in first-world nations and third-world nations, and while the first-world nations are good on everything else, the degree of self-hatred and resentment here makes me long for the jungle.
Where can you go IRL for that kind of honesty?
I recommend Germany. People often say Germans are "harsh" and "direct", but that's what I love about living here.
When someone screws up at work, you can say "hey, you screwed up" (and expect the same from them when you screw up).
And when I was dating here before I met my wife; I had women straight up tell me, "sorry, I won't go out with you because I think you're ugly". But others (including the woman who is now my wife) straight up told me, "I think you're really cute". The brutal honesty of the former is more than made up for the fact that it makes it much easier to believe the latter when you hear it.
Similarly, I feel a lot closer to my friends here than I did when living in other countries (note however, there are fewer of them), purely because they're so honest that they tell me when they've got a problem with me. I know they're not holding anything back or saying bad things behind my back (they'd just say it to my face).
Note that this is just "in general" and "in comparison to other places I've lived". There most certainly are deceptive backstabbing dickheads here in Germany as well; but in my 5 years here, I've met very few of them.
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Yes, you should be able to control your emotions, but that doesn't mean someone can't make you mad. You don't get to pick your feelings, you just have them.
When someone does manage to get under my skin that, the onus is now on me to figure out why. There'll always be lots of people who'll try to irritate me and therfore 'control' me, but only if I allow it.. Whether we know it or not, we are, with practice, fully capable of deciding if that person is going to decide our mood. If I react badly to each and every one that tries to 'rule' me, I'm gonna be an unhappy f@#k most of my life, not in my 'life plan'.
For me, I learned the trick to this is 1) Identifying the underlying cause for"why does this person piss me of so much?", then 2) Trying to put myself in that person's place. What made that person into the miserable @#%$ that they are?
Look, I'.m typing tired here, can't get my point across right. Even if you can't change the person, if you "understand" them, it goes a long way to help you realize why it's not that important what a poor angry fool thinks about you. Feel sorry for them. And I've heard that the key to happiness is... Forgive everybody everything. Across the board forgiveness. It's not really for them you do this, it's really for your peace of mind. Let that shit all go. Life is mostly little shit, and when you're 80 or 90 you can look back and see that easier.
Look, you're not gonna' get this overnight. Took me years to finally understand, others might 'get it' much quicker than me, I'm sure. It takes practice. Doing it over and over again. Some time down the road, it'll become 'second nature' for you. Do your best, that's all that's expected of us, that we're 'trying' to be a bit better than we were the day before. Peace to you, my friend. SF