The Internet is making us rude.
We have become a society that takes to the Internet more and more, not to discover new information or to collaborate with the information we have, but to vent our frustrations with our political differences, our stupid bosses, our inane teachers and our unruly kids. And, damn it, if it isn't making us all rude.
But, Matt, you ask, where's your evidence? Look no further than YouTube. Glance below any video with more than 40,000 views, and I guarantee that after searching through the posted comments a treasure trove of online refuge will be found where a few users erupt over something as puerile as whether or not Borat is funny (he is) or if French first lady, Carla Bruni, puts Keith Richards to shame with her cover of "You Got the Silver" (she does).
Online message board eruptions can be epic. Three years ago, when searching online for information about the prolific Irish author James Joyce, I stumbled upon a message board discussion between two factions - those who thought Joyce was the greatest Irish author of all time, better than both William Yeats and Oscar Wilde, and those who thought Joyce was toking when he wrote "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" - and by three hours into this spat, Northern Ireland unionists and nationalists users were at an ALL CAPS war with each other.
Fortunately, there haven't been any major breaches in the brokered peace in Northern Ireland in the last three years.
This doesn't mean that there aren't real life implications for online feuds that get out of hand. A Texas couple that was accused of sexual assault but later found not guilty by a Texas jury was verbally assaulted on the popular forum Web site Topix.com. There, anonymous users lashed out on the couple, accusing them of pedophilia and even murder. The couple, though, is getting the last post on the message forum, filing a defamation lawsuit against online users who believed they could hide behind their anonymous avatars. Through tracing IP addresses, a handful of people had been issued subpoenas as of early August.
But these are extreme cases. Most people aren't accused of sexual assault and then harangued publicly ad nauseam, and most people aren't subjected to the hate instilled by fervent fans of Joyce (because no one reads Joyce).
What we all are subjected to, though, is online news Web sites. Both The New York Times and The Washington Times allow readers to post their "opinions" of a news story, and boy, does everyone have an opinion these days. Except you wouldn't know it because few online "commenters" are man (or woman) enough to put their names behind their self-revered profanity-laced thoughts.
There's little harm in posting an outrageous comment on a message board or media site like YouTube. There's actually great entertainment value for the average Web visitor in viewing epic hissy fits lacking in punctuation. But one has to wonder what the future generations will think when they search Internet archives and see how their parents and grandparents treated each other when the norms of society were suspended with a cloak of online anonymity.
Free speech is a hallmark of our society, but anonymous vulgar and degrading "comments" found online make me wonder if we're all suddenly living in one giant bathroom stall.
Matthew Christ is a political science sophomore. His column appears on Mondays.
