tim's experiment

The thing which has always puzzled me about the interenet is why people sitting in front of a computer feel it is OK to be so rude.  It may well be that I am a bit old-fashioned in these matters, or a bit English. People from other ex-colonies (like the USA) occasionally admit to being amused in a nice sort of way by my habit of saying “please” and “thank you” to people who are paid to serve me. I claim no credit for this. It is, or was, an English thing. Millionaires are said to send their sons to English public schools not because they will learn anything useful (what does a millinaoire’s son need, after all?) but because on their return to the life of a playboy they will at least be polite to their speedboat drivers. I say it maybe was an English thing because perhaps times are changing. I used to have in my office a charming book about English habits and mores. One year one of my students spotted this, and said she had read it during an exchange trip to Englsnd. She had also experimented with some of the observations. Noting that if you bumped into a person in the street in England they would say “sorry”, even though it was not their fault, she had tried bumping into a few people. “And did they say sorry?” I inquired. “No,” said my student, a respectable lady and a pillar of the University Christian Choir, “They said ‘fuck'”

Anyway we seem to have digressed. My complaint is not that people do not go in for elaborate courtesies in chat rooms, comment columns, discussion boards and such like. My complaint is that they are unambiguously and spectacularly rude to each other. No abuse is too violent, no accusation too vile, to be thrown at someone you disagree with. I take it, although of course one knows very little about the poeple one meets on-line, that they are not like this at home, or even in face-to-face encounters with strangers. There would be fights all the time. At first I thought it might be the global nature of the internet which wasz the problem. People from all sorts of countries and backgrounds were mixed up together. None of them was likely ever to meet in the flesh. There were no common conventions, so there were no conventions at all. If there are no agreed standards of politeness, then perhaps anything is OK.

I had to abandon this theory when I started reading The Guardian on-line. Guardian readers are not that cosmopolitan, though I understand the on-line edition attracts a lot of Americans. Most of the participants are clearly educated members of the middle classes in an Anglo-Saxon country. Yet they slag each other off quite mercilessly. And this board is moderated – contributors know that extreme speciments will be removed. Yet they still produce a lot of them. The moderator is kept busy.

Well, I thought, perhaps its a sort of strangers on a train thing. Nobody really knows anyone else. They do not identify the other person as a live humen being. It’s a bit like a cruise – you can pretend to be whatever you like because your fellow passengers will know no better. Managers can become presidents, lecturers can become professors, police sergeants can become superintendants and ordinary decent citizens can masquerade as the sort of Glaswegian who smashes a bottle over your head if you smile at his girlfriend.

But this theory also does not stand up. I frequent a Facebook site which caters for the local bagpipe circle. A conversation started the other week which became so vituperative that the proprietor of the site eventually – and very sensibly – deleted the whole thread. This was not a matter of strangers who will never meet. On the contrary everyone involved has met everyone else at least once, and is very likely to meet them again. I suppose we shall all manage to get along but some slights are difficult to forget. One of my friends pointed out that some of the more virulent specimens had been written very late in the evening. Many people do their internetting late in the evening. I often do myself. It is OK if you haven’t spent the previous part of the evening in a pub. If you have, then maybe not such a good idea.