Flame On!

When I was a teenager I read a novel by James Herbert that had a character in it who commented that he had expected his college experience to be much different from his high school one. He talked about how he had been picked on a lot in high school for being different, and looked forward to going to college where he assumed the peer group would be much more mature and accepting. The character then went on to express his disappointment that college turned out to be pretty much high school with older people, that the dynamics of the situations were almost identical and that he was no more accepted in college than he had been in high school.

I've had a similar reaction to the experience of participating in Internet message boards and forums. The promise of the net community has been that here, at last, we can all "be ourselves" and seek out and find other individuals who share our interests and accept us for what we truly are, divorced from things like appearance, economic or educational standing, gender, sexual orientation, etc. The net was to become the "great equalizer", emphasizing our thoughts and words over all these shallower concerns. We could exchange ideas and meet like minded people and generally escape all the cliqueishness of high school (and the post high school world).

After a few years of participating in quite a few different internet forums, I've found out that it isn't quite working out that way.

It's always dangerous to generalize, of course, but I've found that often the interchange on the internet is rife with the same type of rudeness, stereotyping and immaturity that characterized all we hated about similar interchanges in the "real world". Small disagreements can snowball into really nasty flame wars, people's comments are taken wildly out of context, posters get pidgeonholed and then find it hard to escape that unfair labelling...(all together now)...JUST LIKE REAL LIFE.

What went wrong? Why did the net end up being no different a community than the more general one? It's probably down to the fact that ultimately, the net is people. It's a different format for exchange, certainly. You don't have to worry about what you look like or who you are related to or what your job is, but after you have been on a forum for a while, you do develop an identity and are then evaluated and interacted with on that basis. The very positive thing about the net is that at least here you are evaluated on your words alone. The negative thing is that the anonymous nature of posting often emboldens people who would never be so courageous in real life to be much more aggressive and insensitive than they would be if they had to make such comments in person.

Another troublesome aspect of the net forums is the factor of, for lack of a better term, "topic insularity". That is, most forums deal with fairly specific issues, i.e. politics, sports, popular culture, health, etc. In fact, most are really even more specific than that. There are entire forums devoted to "The Andy Griffith Show" or windsurfing, or specific political proposals. You'd think that given such specificity, the people involved in such a forum would naturally bond together since there wouldn't be nearly as much room for debate. Guess again. What tends to happen is that people get terribly possessive of these increasingly specific interests and brook little or no disagreement upon their cherished, entrenched positions. There's nothing wrong with being so specific, of course, but when you are debating something very narrow it's easy to forget that there's a living, breathing person on the other end of your comments. I've seen people get inordinately riled up over what turns out to be a very miniscule issue, and I can't help but wonder if it's truly worth the energy expended. It's hard to imagine that if the two people debating were facing off in a bar or a living room, they'd feel quite so comfortable getting as shrill and personal as they do. It's bad enough to get red faced and short of breath over issues like abortion but when you're slandering someone's mother over when "Lost" jumped the shark, it seems like you've got a bit too much time on your hands.

Of course you can't blame the forums for what people do with them, but it just occurs to me that sometimes they fill a vaccuum in people's lives that might easily be put to more constructive use. And it seems as if the more specific you become in your argument topic, the more you hone in on some tiny bit of arcane interest or knowledge, the less you are able to see the broader person AS a person not just as a target. If you are arguing politics or ethics, at least, sometimes a personal tale will creep into the discussion threads that humanizes you and/or your opponent is forced (or compelled) to have a bit more sympathy than if you're just plain old "Tw1light R0cks88" or something.

I guess there's no medium or social format that ensures a sense of belonging or fellowship. People will find a way to dehumanize and polarize each other, no matter how specific the interest, no matter how targeted the format. It's a revelation that's simultaenously depressing and empowering. On one hand, it's sad to think that we always are able to so quickly revert our bickering and pettiness. But on the other, it's kind of nice to know that no technology can ever really defeat our essential 'humanness'; if the pettiness remains, so must the nobility.

Personally, I think the corner cafe is cheaper and less exhausting. Plus the pie is MUCH better.