Those of us who’ve been participating in Internet discussions for decades (me since 1976), starting in the identified days of ARPAnet and now in the potentially anonymous or pseudonymous mud-slinging days of Internet, associate the technology with a certain amount of incivility (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flaming_(Internet) for example).
My friend Kyle took me out dinner this evening at No. 9 Park, an extremely civilized venue. She works in the health care industry where it is conventional to have 100-person conference calls. She said “I’ve learned that you never ask a question of the group. The answer always comes from an angry crazy person.”
http://www.zewg.net/dump/photo/greaterinternetfuckwadtheory.jpg
It would be interesting to hear about your 1976 experiences sometime, especially in light of the largest TCP/IP network at the time having only two computers, and Al Gore was still in his 20s. (Or did you mean “online” instead of “Internet”? Either way, I’m sure it’d be interesting; I didn’t even do email until 5 years later. In 1976, did email consist of sending boxes of punched cards? 🙂
Sorry, do I get it right, 100 people in one single conference call, hear-no-see who is talking and what’s going on? is that a good idea? and what does your friend mean ‘ask a question OF the group’? even with 100 people in one room that’s way too many people for any discussion unless it’s strongly chaired and possibly pre organised in advance — but what’s the bloody point then if you cannot have a open discussion? Just send a bunch of emails and an online poll…
Jeffrey: When I wrote “ARPAnet” I meant “ARPAnet”. There were thousands of people online in 1976, all connected together via a worldwide network. The fact that the text of a discussion arrived on their desktop via a protocol earlier than TCP/IP did not affect the character of the discussion. What did email consist of in 1976? It consisted of email. You typed a message on a keyboard on top of your desk. You received a reply from a person or a mailing list on a display on top of your desk. That’s how radically different it was. See http://philip.greenspun.com/business/internet-software-patents , especially the link to the Douglas Engelbart video from 1968.
The main difference between ARPAnet and present-day Internet, aside from scale, is that users on ARPAnet were identified and authenticated. If you got an email from “Joe Smith at Stanford University” you could look him up in an ARPAnet directory (printed like a phone book) and you could be sure that you were in fact corresponding with the person in question. There was nothing like hotmail where I presume that I can register “George W. Bush” King.Bush.II@hotmail.com and start emailing folks with suggestions for how to clear brush or whatever.
I guess the question is, has the internet made people more uncivil, or have people always been this uncivil, and just express it more directly on the internet?
In the wake of the Rutgers suicide, for example. It seems the kid, after his escapade was broadcast via webcam, went to some discussion forums looking for support. A bunch of people posted things like “You deserved it!” and “I just feel bad for your roommate, having to share a room with a fag!” It’s of course been suggested that those postings contributed to his mental state.
If the discussions hadn’t been anonymous, if they had been more like ARPAnet was, would people have still posted things like that, where their public identities were known?