> If, as the communications philosopher Marshall McLuhan famously said, television brought the brutality of war into people’s living rooms, the Internet today is bringing violence against women out of it.
Go on 4chan and 4chan-humor derived Facebook groups, and you'll see that it's not just women who are very aggressively and obscenely made fun of- it's also jewish people, black people, muslims, gay people, transsexual people, handicapped people, and so on and so on (you'd think it stop, but it really doesn't). Maybe the women harassment is so visible and has reached such epic proportions recently because out of all of these demographics, they constitute the largest one at about 50% of all humanity.
If that "humor" sounds similar to the humor of a bunch of dumb 14 year old boys at recess trying to out-wit each other by the grossness and "edginess" of their humor, that's because it is- but on a worldwide scale, and with no way for the adults to step in at some point and tell them to shut the fuck up.
While TV brought the brutality of war only into living rooms and only when it was turned on, the internet is bringing the bored, testosterone fueled, aggressive, group approval-seeking teenager into people's lives 24/7, with no way to turn it off. The internet is now everywhere- we spend time on it in the bus, at work, at home, at the doctor's office, in bed, and virtually everywhere else, which raises significantly the odds of crossing the digital paths of said teenagers.
Especially because those teenagers have hours and hours of free time to spend making violent photoshops and creating fake twitter accounts.
(and yes, sometimes the trolls are 24 year old grown ups, not teenagers, with much more means to harass those populations - but for all intents and purposes, they can be psychologically considered on the same level as immature teenagers. Those should be dealt with by law enforcement, but that's treating the symptom, not the root cause. In the short term you want to treat the symptoms, but in the long term you also want to treat the root cause. That last part is yet unclear).
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 9.1 ms ] threadGo on 4chan and 4chan-humor derived Facebook groups, and you'll see that it's not just women who are very aggressively and obscenely made fun of- it's also jewish people, black people, muslims, gay people, transsexual people, handicapped people, and so on and so on (you'd think it stop, but it really doesn't). Maybe the women harassment is so visible and has reached such epic proportions recently because out of all of these demographics, they constitute the largest one at about 50% of all humanity.
If that "humor" sounds similar to the humor of a bunch of dumb 14 year old boys at recess trying to out-wit each other by the grossness and "edginess" of their humor, that's because it is- but on a worldwide scale, and with no way for the adults to step in at some point and tell them to shut the fuck up.
While TV brought the brutality of war only into living rooms and only when it was turned on, the internet is bringing the bored, testosterone fueled, aggressive, group approval-seeking teenager into people's lives 24/7, with no way to turn it off. The internet is now everywhere- we spend time on it in the bus, at work, at home, at the doctor's office, in bed, and virtually everywhere else, which raises significantly the odds of crossing the digital paths of said teenagers. Especially because those teenagers have hours and hours of free time to spend making violent photoshops and creating fake twitter accounts.
(and yes, sometimes the trolls are 24 year old grown ups, not teenagers, with much more means to harass those populations - but for all intents and purposes, they can be psychologically considered on the same level as immature teenagers. Those should be dealt with by law enforcement, but that's treating the symptom, not the root cause. In the short term you want to treat the symptoms, but in the long term you also want to treat the root cause. That last part is yet unclear).