One interacts with so many more people online. So even if the same proportion of people are awful in both spaces, the odds of interacting with someone like that go up online.
Working retail as a teenager made me lose faith in humanity -- and all the theories that blame anonymity for online toxicity. Sure, the darkest parts of the internet can be cesspools, but give the average person a tiny bit of entitlement and power, and they'll abuse others just for the pleasure of it. And this was over a decade ago. So glad I got out and into software. I can't imagine what it must be like working retail right now.
Having worked both in a fastfood restaurant and a grocery store I can definitely agree with this.
Everything from a person throwing a sandwhich at the drive through worker because her precooked ham was pink and therefore raw...people screaming and ranting because their over medium eggs, cooked on a 900° grill are too soft or too hard.
Getting screamed at because we were out of Schweppes tonic water, Nope, Canada Dry isn't the same, it had to be Schweppes, and only cans because the person was a solo drinker.
I was probably screamed at by random people more in the two years I spent at those jobs, 3 months at one and a bit over a year and a half at the other, than i have been in the entirety of the rest of my life.
I could first relate to this when I was working in a kitchen and how awful people can be when they fully assert up front that because of your job, you can be treated however they feel entitled to treat you.
Also reminds me of the Stanford prison experiment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment
People interact with other drivers while on the road, it's just a different type of communication. I think some element of feeling "removed" from the situation compared to a face-to-face encounter has an effect in our interactions.
I remember reading about a study that found people were more ethical (IIRC, less likely to cheat on a quiz) if there was a pair of eyes in their visual field. Not even real eyes, just a photo.
Every time I’m berated while playing Xbox I wonder if eye contact, or even perceived eye contact, does something to our brains that makes us behave more in accordance with social norms.
This is it, righteous internet rage is very similar to road rage. The main factors are:
- the lack of perceived humanity in the perpetrator, because they are in a car or at a distant computer.
- the inability to communicate directly in an interactive way, preventing initial release of the expression
- the reduction of the entirety of the person to their actions in this specific context without room for extenuating circumstances.
The last one is even worse online because of retention. A reverse lens can occur, instead of viewing the ‘bad tweet’ in the context of the person’s overall output, the overall output is viewed and scrutinized via assumptions made from the offending action.
Consensus building doesn't work without centralized mass media. People just have to get used to have different groups with different values inside the same country and be ok with that. Decentralized chains of trust will grow, which was the norm before mass media appeared.
Either that, or centralization will reassert itself brutally and force a new consensus.
I don't think democracy can survive if people in a nation can't form a consensus on basic features of shared, objective reality.
This type of consensus did exist, and could be reached, in the 1770s, long before centralized mass media. The creation of competing "chains of trust", which see an election as legitimate or illegitimate, a virus as dangerous or fabricated, is actually only possible by the manipulation of mass media. And social media very much is mass media. It's just a version in which propaganda is funneled through the mouths of its target audience.
Well people are already sorting themselves by moving between states based on political affiliation. If we strengthen States' rights and limit Federal government power in line with the original intent of the Constitution then I think we can all mostly get along. Americans get all worked up about who wins the Presidential election because the executive branch has gained so much power over every aspect of our lives but it doesn't have to be that way. We don't need to have all the same laws in Massachusetts and Montana.
It couldn't be reached then either. Think about how many different versions of Christianity there was then. There was no mass media to speak of then, and yet these versions of the Christian faith disagreed on some extremely fundamental points, including how to, and through whom, you could be saved.
Did it exist? In the early 1770s, there was a pretty big war on the subject of who's in charge; the late 1770s were subject to the Articles of Confederation, famous for their complete failure to establish political legitimacy for the federal government.
Even in the constitutional era, there were constant questions with foundational implications. Is slavery moral? Should Native Americans be forced to move wherever the government finds convenient? Can states secede if they don't like the election results? These were all active disputes at the time, with competing "chains of trust" on both sides.
You might want to analyze that idea of consensus in the late 1770s. At the onset of the American Revolution, at least a third of the fledgling country was monarchist to one degree or another and bloody, deadly fights between independence sympathizers and monarchists were common among the civilian population (I'm not even speaking here of military hostilities). People were often lynched or tarred and feathered in the streets for saying the wrong thing. Tarring and feathering are not nearly the funny things their description might bring t mind by the way.
Before mass media you had media delivered via Mass through the Catholic church, which was substantially the same in not just the entire country, but in all countries.
Getting out of this was a century of real and cultural warfare that ultimately resulted in some of the first rights of countries, because forcing the centralization at the point of a gun was just not worth it.
Mass media is a much more recent, much more short term and much less powerful (there never was a newspaper czar and Walter Duranty could at most destroy your career, not burn you at the stake for telling the truth).
My point is that humans have had different groups with different values living inside the same countries for a long time before they considered themselves to be members of that nation, this is going back to what was normal, not reverting to something that is new.
Of course living with these separate groups wasn't exactly peaceful or without discrimination.
This article doesn't tell you why people are awful online.
It hypothesizes that we respond to petty wrongdoers the same way we'd respond to war criminals, and that we further have been corrupted by exposure to too much bad news.
I think the basic idea she's trying to get across is that people feel helpless in our daily lives, and so the one little piece of power most people ever get is online and we take out our frustrations about our powerlessness here.
Which probably says more about the people who get a tiny bit of power than it does about the Internet, but there you go.
This story belongs to a greater category of stories with headlines that start with the word "Why..." promising an answer but never delivering. They're very nice stories. Very descriptive and well-written. But the headline is a bait-and-switch. The honest headline here would be, "Why Are People So Awful Online?" but the honest headline wouldn't get as many clicks. I hate the Internet.
Just so you know, even in print media the author does not generally pick the title. The title might tell you something about the general subject of the essay but you shouldn’t take it as a precise metadata. The predates the internet. Start reading based on the general topic. The first few lines (the “lede”) will tell you if you want to read the whole thing.
People are awful online because there's no consequences, so they're completely honest. If someone had the power of invisibility they'd say the same things in person. I know there's plenty of times I've seen, for example, someone throw their trash on the ground and wanted to tell them just how worthless an excuse for a human being they are.
Thanks to Facebook we know this theory to be falsified. It's not anonymity that makes people total fuckwads, but rather a lack of consequences for their actions. A Facebook luser who posts political drivel that just happens to agree with the position of its owners will face no repercussions and consequently will be emboldened to act like a fuckwad. A lack of anonymity hasn't changed that there nor will it, but actually moderating would.
TL;DR The whole world would be a much nicer place if some people had the testicular fortitude to tell loudmouths to put a sock in it.
It's practical anonymity anyway. No one will actually bother to dig up Joe Wilkinson from Adairville, Kentucky.
The Internet was killed by the Eternal September of everyone getting access. We forgot the age-old rule of "don't feed the troll".
Now people will respond to, retweet and amplify every village idiot's voice so that it can be heard around the globe. And The Algorithm loves that, because it's engagement and drives more people to engage and be enraged by the content.
If we would just stop interacting with idiots they would shut up or maybe, just maybe, they might learn some actual discourse.
The social environment of people willing to use violence or aggression tend to be super toxic. You get combination of direct aggression from those who would do straggling and passive behind back aggression of those who would be targets.
And a lot of enabling of biggest psychopaths due to fear.
It's humorous, but hints at the truth that the anonymity and physical distance from other people leads some to be jerks. Most people are better behaved when speaking in person, even with people they disagree strongly with.
Do you know that obnoxious friend/acquaintance/family/co-worker/boss/in-law who is a total PITA but you dont tell them anything because it is not a big deal after all? Well, in Internet you can, and the people "obnoxious" to you will be counted in the millions.
The submitted title was "Why People Are So Awful Online", which was legit because it's the HTML doc title of the article. But it's leading to shallow comments in the thread. Maybe the article's page title will prompt something more interesting.
Another is since the Web is perceived as a world different from ours people can choose to act out different parts of their personality to (mostly) vent off.
Then there are also bots. These are awful, because they were programmed to.
George Saunders gave an interview with the Guardian earlier this year[0] in which he said, “ There’s something wonderful about the spontaneity of social media, but I think at this point it’s becoming 100% toxic for people to be firing off the top of their brains. One of the things [the book I’m writing] says is that the deeper parts of our brain are actually more empathic. If you revise something 20 times, for a mysterious reason, it becomes more social, empathic and compassionate. With Chekhov, you feel he’s always saying: “Well, what else?”, “Is there anything else I should know?”, or “Maybe I’m wrong.” And all of that seems to be designed to foster love, or at least some kind of relation to the other that’s got possibility. So I’m not a fan of social media. I’m not on it. And I won’t be, because I think it’s killing us, actually. I really do.” I had never considered it from this angle before, but I think he’s right. The internet’s superpower—frictionless engagement—is also it’s greatest shortcoming because of who we are as people.
I often think about our collective perception of this shared reality, and how arbitrarily it depends on the selection bias in the population of salaried writers on the internet.
> But I have more of a life than I once did. I have a wife, a busy career, aging parents and a large family. I have more physical mobility and, in turn, more interest in being active and out in the world. I now spend most of my time with people who are not Very Online. When I talk to them about some weird or frustrating internet conflagration, they tend to look at me as if I am speaking a foreign language from a distant land. And I suppose, I am.
I’ve noticed a tendency for some people to treat twitter and reddit as representative of real life. They look at some outrage that’s viral and think everyone’s outraged. It seems strongest among twitter users. Unfortunately, a lot of journalists seem to be heavy twitter users. There’s a hive mind that they seem to assume everyone good is part of.
Jerry Pournelle on what happened after he discovered online discussions:
>I noticed something: most of the irritation came from a handful of people, sometimes only one or two. If I could only ignore them, the computer conferences were still valuable. Alas, it's not always easy to do.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 87.2 ms ] threadOne interacts with so many more people online. So even if the same proportion of people are awful in both spaces, the odds of interacting with someone like that go up online.
Everything from a person throwing a sandwhich at the drive through worker because her precooked ham was pink and therefore raw...people screaming and ranting because their over medium eggs, cooked on a 900° grill are too soft or too hard.
Getting screamed at because we were out of Schweppes tonic water, Nope, Canada Dry isn't the same, it had to be Schweppes, and only cans because the person was a solo drinker.
I was probably screamed at by random people more in the two years I spent at those jobs, 3 months at one and a bit over a year and a half at the other, than i have been in the entirety of the rest of my life.
So the rule seems to be that people are awful when there is a piece of glass between them.
Though a cute joke, I think there is something lost by reducing it to "people can be awful anywhere".
Every time I’m berated while playing Xbox I wonder if eye contact, or even perceived eye contact, does something to our brains that makes us behave more in accordance with social norms.
- the lack of perceived humanity in the perpetrator, because they are in a car or at a distant computer.
- the inability to communicate directly in an interactive way, preventing initial release of the expression
- the reduction of the entirety of the person to their actions in this specific context without room for extenuating circumstances.
The last one is even worse online because of retention. A reverse lens can occur, instead of viewing the ‘bad tweet’ in the context of the person’s overall output, the overall output is viewed and scrutinized via assumptions made from the offending action.
Either that, or centralization will reassert itself brutally and force a new consensus.
This type of consensus did exist, and could be reached, in the 1770s, long before centralized mass media. The creation of competing "chains of trust", which see an election as legitimate or illegitimate, a virus as dangerous or fabricated, is actually only possible by the manipulation of mass media. And social media very much is mass media. It's just a version in which propaganda is funneled through the mouths of its target audience.
Even in the constitutional era, there were constant questions with foundational implications. Is slavery moral? Should Native Americans be forced to move wherever the government finds convenient? Can states secede if they don't like the election results? These were all active disputes at the time, with competing "chains of trust" on both sides.
Getting out of this was a century of real and cultural warfare that ultimately resulted in some of the first rights of countries, because forcing the centralization at the point of a gun was just not worth it.
Mass media is a much more recent, much more short term and much less powerful (there never was a newspaper czar and Walter Duranty could at most destroy your career, not burn you at the stake for telling the truth).
My point is that humans have had different groups with different values living inside the same countries for a long time before they considered themselves to be members of that nation, this is going back to what was normal, not reverting to something that is new.
Of course living with these separate groups wasn't exactly peaceful or without discrimination.
It hypothesizes that we respond to petty wrongdoers the same way we'd respond to war criminals, and that we further have been corrupted by exposure to too much bad news.
Which probably says more about the people who get a tiny bit of power than it does about the Internet, but there you go.
Normal person + anonymity + audience = Total Fuckwad.
This has always been true and always will be.
TL;DR The whole world would be a much nicer place if some people had the testicular fortitude to tell loudmouths to put a sock in it.
The Internet was killed by the Eternal September of everyone getting access. We forgot the age-old rule of "don't feed the troll".
Now people will respond to, retweet and amplify every village idiot's voice so that it can be heard around the globe. And The Algorithm loves that, because it's engagement and drives more people to engage and be enraged by the content.
If we would just stop interacting with idiots they would shut up or maybe, just maybe, they might learn some actual discourse.
-- Larry Wall
And a lot of enabling of biggest psychopaths due to fear.
Another is since the Web is perceived as a world different from ours people can choose to act out different parts of their personality to (mostly) vent off.
Then there are also bots. These are awful, because they were programmed to.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jan/02/george-saunder...
We don't. If by "we" you mean yourselves (NY Times) or your buddies, then the answer doesn't have to be that long and convoluted.
I’ve noticed a tendency for some people to treat twitter and reddit as representative of real life. They look at some outrage that’s viral and think everyone’s outraged. It seems strongest among twitter users. Unfortunately, a lot of journalists seem to be heavy twitter users. There’s a hive mind that they seem to assume everyone good is part of.
The answer is it's been that way since Sept 1993.
>I noticed something: most of the irritation came from a handful of people, sometimes only one or two. If I could only ignore them, the computer conferences were still valuable. Alas, it's not always easy to do.