Law Students

Like Fistfuls of Mental Manure

By Anonymous

I love this article. It's wry, depressingly true in many respects, and delightfully quotable. Every time I read it I giggle and then shake my head a little and click out of the window before I start contemplating the deeper meaning of our potential label as a nation and/or generation of whiners.

But even though it contains marvelous tidbits like, "I want my goddamn apocalypse, and I want it now", the real reason I wanted to write about this article is because of the paragraph below:

You have but to take a peek in the comments section below this column, any column, any article on this or any news site whatsoever, to see just how mean and nasty we have become. It does not matter what the piece might be about. Obama's speech. High speed rail. Popular dog breeds. Your grandmother's cookies. The anonymous comments section of any major media site or popular blog will be so crammed with bile and bickering, accusation and pule, hatred and sneer you can't help but feel violently disappointed by the shocking lack of basic human kindness and respect, much less a sense of positivism or perspective.

I'm in far too good a mood to write about this topic with any real force or anger behind my words - though maybe that's exactly why I should write about it now, but I've had a post percolating for weeks about commenting and etiquette on the internet.

I'm blessed with generally polite commentors on this blog and I am very thankful for it. Not that you all always agree with me- that's neither desired nor expected; after all I've been training JP for nearly 9 years and he still disagrees with me all the time. But your disagreement (like his) is phrased thoughtfully rather than angrily or scornfully, and because of that, the comments section for my work/life posts are some of my favorites to read. And that's sadly rare for any site that allows anonymous comments and is read by a good number of anonymous people.

I actually banned anonymous comments for a period of about 6 hours after this post. I also deleted a lot of purely vitriolic tripe published by people whose opinions I decided did not deserve to be heard. Your First Amendment rights don't get you anywhere on my blog- it's not a public forum and I'm not the government, I get to moderate at will. But I don't want to delete. I don't want to have to squint my eyes and skim through every anonymous comment to check to see if I really want to read it or just delete it quickly. I don't want to think about the negative ones long after they're deleted and mentally draft and re-draft responses I'll never publish.

And what I don't understand- what I will never undersatnd- is the sense of entitlement some people feel to be mean just because we're online. I can't tell you how many times I've heard some variation of - well you're the one putting yourself out there so you should expect criticism (and impliedly deserve it). But why? I leave the house every day without a need to steel myself against criticism or nastiness from those I encounter. Is it possible someone will be rude to me? Of course, but it's not expected and certainly not accepted behavior the way some people seem to think it is on the internet. Are there two sets of rules? Are we really going to teach our children, the next generation will which likely have so much of their lives revolve around the internet, that it's important to be nice or polite to those we meet, but on the internet making someone feel like shit is perfectly okay? And it's more than okay, it's practically your duty.

I don't understand that. With any amount of thought and intelligence it is possible to disagree with someone, and disagree forcibly, without being insulting or sending them the electronic equivalent of a punch in the stomach. And this goes far beyond my little website- as I've said, I'm blessed with a pretty awesome community of readers whose comments I genuinely look forward to reading. But some of the big mommy blogger sites can get so nasty that I've stopped clicking on the comments. And isn't that sad? They're such an opportunity for discussion and commentary on parenthood and working and life.

I wonder what those sites will be like in the future. Will the internet become friendlier under a generation of children raised with the possibility of speaking anonymously and hopefully given the guidelines and ability to handle it? That's probably too optimistic, but I like to think it's possible. I definitely think that if some people's parents could read what they've been commenting to a person, a real live person, on the other end of the internet, they'd be put in time-out immediately.

Full post as published by Lag Liv on February 09, 2010 (boomark / email).