One of the things that has come to my attention in the dozen or so years that I've been on the internet is just how free and happy people are not only to judge other people's behavior and choices, but to loudly and publicly announce these judgements, as if how anyone else lives their life is any of their business. And I'm not even talking big sticky social/moral issues, like deciding for other people that they can't have an abortion or marry their (gay) boyfriend--I'm talking about not agreeing with other people's parenting or relationship or financial or, for god's sake, fashion decisions and feeling this means you have a right to comment on them.
I mean, we all make many many conscious and unconscious judgments every freaking day. And we all have our little pet peeves that make crazy with brief irrational hatreds, right? (Move *into* the train, just move into the fucking train, you goddamn fucking morons, or go back to Iowa or, possibly, Sudbury where you belong, 'k?) But here's the difference. Most of us in real life keep our little judgments and irrational prejudices and opinions to ourselves unless we are asked. Is it just the anonymity of the online experience that makes people feel free to tell other people that their choices, or other people's choices, are wrong?
Or does this go on in real life too, and I am insulated from it for the most part because I don't gossip?
xoxo
4 comments:
You don't gossip? Hey, my entire knowledge of the private lives of certain Hollywood stars comes from you. Well, and Entertainment Weekly and Brit-Watch, which has become my news source of choice in the past two weeks. :p
Seriously, there's something about the anonymity. Way back when I started using serious computers, in 1978, our university system had a local bulletin board/Usenet type system (actually a Usenet predecessor) that allowed anonymous postings and had all the same kind of judgementality and gossip that happens on the web today, and the same thing was certainly true on the Internet pre-Web as well.
I know people like Sherry Turkle have done studies on this, I don't know if they're anything other than anecdotal, but they always pretty much observe the same thing you did, in all sorts of different fora with all sorts of different populations, just so long as the people don't actually know each other.
Or if they're computer geeks or college students, even if they do know each other, so long as it's online and not face-to-face. That visual/physical proximity makes all the difference.
Myself, I just spent the last hour scouring recent blog posts and emails trying to figure out if I was possibly the JJWJ who kicked off the rant. (So far I'm figuring I'm clean, but if I'm that arrogant and obnoxious, how would I know?)
Talking about celebrity news is not the kind of gossip I'm referring to :-) What I meant about not gossiping is that I try as much as possible to distance myself from people in real life who are all about the back-biting, my theory being that if you trash all our mutual acquaintances to me, then you're trashing me to them and I don't know it.
And, no, the impetus to this entry was not personal. It was reading a whole boatload of people on a board feeling free to judge other people's parenting choices (and character) just because they do things differently thsn they would. It really makes me think, "so who the fuck asked you?"
TI's comment about 1978 brings up something else. True, people behave badly online because (they think) they're anonymous. But after umpteen years of internet life, I wonder if people also behave badly because they've gotten the idea they are *expected* to behave badly...that it is part of the culture. Comments?
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