Incivility in Anonymity

When I surf the internet and read articles and op-ed columns, one of my usual habits is to take a look at user-submitted comments and generally speaking, most of these comments cause reactions ranging from offended and depressed. Usually you'll get your potpourri of anti-liberal, anti-immigrant, anti-conservative, anti-Christian, anti-Obama and anti-rhetoric sprinkled in with a few personal attacks with mockfanities such as sh*t, f-ck and d*ick in order to throw off the offensive language filter. One can't help but wonder about the state of our society.

Jeff Pearlman, a writer for Sports Illustrated who hasn't shied away from controversial subjects in the past - he penned the infamous John Rocker article in 1999, unearthing Rocker quotes such as "The biggest thing I don't like about New York are the foreigners. I'm not a very big fan of foreigners. You can walk an entire block in Times Square and not hear anybody speaking English. Asians and Koreans and Vietnamese and Indians and Russians and Spanish people and everything up there. How the hell did they get in this country?") - recently decided to seek out particularly incendiary and offensive commenters of his articles. Once he was able to "uncloset" these readers, he usually found them contrite and reasonable.

I'm not sure if I should be encouraged that people are actually (largely) decent when they interact in a person to personal setting, and I can tell myself that the "true character" is really revealed when this interaction takes place. Maybe we can blame the "anonymity of the Internet" in greasing the skids of hostile, incendiary and offensive treatment of others. Perhaps it's little more than an older version of a prank phone call, where one finds irreverent humor in getting a rise out of people, with "If you're refrigerator's running, you'd better go catch it" has evolved into posting "Your God is dead" under articles in the online articles in Christianity Today.

Sadly, I don't think this is the case. While I wish that I could chalk this up to "the Internet made me do it" and a version childhood mischief, I tend to think that the anonymity of the Internet largely reveals who people really are when nobody's looking. The heart attitudes and the convictions of people are easily disbursed without consideration for others feelings because not only does it seem like a victimless crime (it's not as if you're actively e-mailing comments to specific individuals), it seems like a perpetrator-less crime ("I didn't do it. It was the online entity known as offensivefamilyguy23.") In a online society which relishes in offending and destroying others in the grandest way possible, can we really be surprised when the online behavior seeps into public discourse... and we end up with tragedies such as the shootings in Arizona? Welcome to our culture of hate, moving from online to real-life and moving from virtual to physical.