Fresh, Hot Wastes of Time

Here’s an excerpt of a message I sent to someone today where I tried to distill my thoughts on “It’s just the internet.”

It may be just the internet, but there are real people behind every keyboard, and many of them are friends of mine in real life as well. I wouldn’t expect my friends to act like assholes in meat space, and if they do, it bugs me there, too.

The “It’s just the internet” argument seems to me to be a blanket excuse for bad behavior, although I know you feel totally differently about it. Good manners are so hard to come by these days, and the anonymizing properties of the internet make and schmo with a computer think he can bust out with behavior that would embarrass him, were he to do it in real life. Since it’s “just the internet,” it makes it ok for him – and it sends the message to everyone else around that, “Hey, it’s just the internet – let’s be dicks!” What if we were to say, “Hey, it’s just a sport event. Let’s go nuts!”? Soccer hooligans do that. They kill people. People at concerts bumrush the doors. They trample others. Those might be a bit extreme, but I hope you can see where I’m going. Mob mentality sucks. Dehumanization serves no purpose other than to make life less civilized.

To me, there is no excuse for churlish behavior no matter what medium. And to my friends who choose to act in a matter other than they would in real life because “it’s just the internet,” they’ll lose my respect, because it runs contrary to my personal beliefs as to how life, manners, and society need to run in order to remain civilized.

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