Virtual bullies
In Will Self’s novella The Quantity Theory of Insanity, he posits that there’s a set amount of madness in any given area if one goes away, another takes its place. The number is maintained. It’s an intriguing idea: that we’re all effectively, mad. Given the right conditions, environment or impetus (which could even be something as banal as having to retain the status quo) we can all get a bit crazy, like Norman Bates himself said in Hitchcock’s famous movie, Psycho.
With the Internet and the easy access to it from just about everywhere by a variety of devices, the delineations of space are less rigid. Essentially, the whole world is our funhouse and the distorting mirrors can make monsters of us all. Just logging in is reason enough.
“I changed my mind about the online community this year,” wrote Xeni Jardin, tech-journalist, NPR commentator, and co-editor of popular online tech site Boing Boing in the collection What Have You Changed Your Mind About (Ed. John Brockman). “When our audience was small, in the early days, interacting was simple: We tacked a little href tag to an open-comments thread at the end of each post: Link, Discuss. No moderation, no complication, come as you are, anonymity’s fine. Every once in a while, a thread accumulated more noise than signal, but the balance mostly worked.”
Eventually, Jardin and her co-editors decided to remove the comments section feature entirely.
“But then the audience grew. Fast. And with that grew the number of anti-social actors, ‘drive-by trolls,’ people for whom dialogue wasn’t the point.
“I grew to believe that the easier it is to post a drive-by comment — and the easier it is to remain faceless, reputation-less, and real-world-less while doing so — the greater the volume of antisocial behavior that follows.”
This might be only of minor interest if all of this remains between consenting adults. But the sobering fact of it is that most of the so-called “net-izens” are children or underage youths. After all, this is the generation that seems to have been born with email addresses already set-up for them if not Facebook pages or any other social networks. “My best friends are avatars,” is not only a cute putdown or a mere punchline anymore — after all, it’s fast becoming less of an exaggeration. Given that, it’s no wonder that the numbers of people going online or the hours spent in cyberspace is increasing. It feels a lot safer than actually spending time with actual people-, so that a distance is maintained. But our atavistic tendencies soon adapt.
The Internet is a medium where children are exposed to abuse,” says Atty. Ani Saguisag, UNICEF Child Protection Specialist. “Cyber-bullying is a phenomenon involving cruel, humiliating language or defacing a person on a website. It can ruin a person’s reputation overnight. And the damage cannot be undone. Once the information has been posted, even if you take down the words or the website, people have seen it. So the abuse of violence persists, even if the website is no longer there.”
UNICEF has since identified that cyber-bullying as a growing problem. “Technology provides a new medium for abuse. The Internet and mobile phones have provided new opportunities for bullying through online chat lines, personal webpages, text messages and transmission of images.” It also says that the “unique aspects of cyber-bullying are that it allows perpetrators to remain anonymous, it allows for quick distribution and replication of messages, and it can turn masses of children into bystanders or witnesses of non-physical bullying of a highly malicious nature as perpetrators hide behind their anonymity.”
Jardin notes that, “no online community could remain civil after it grew too large.”
Last year, Boing Boing put back their comments function on their site. The solution? “Human hands,” she says.
They hired a community manager to monitor the threads and installed a “disemvoweller.” The way it works is that the administrator can remove all the vowels from an abusive comment with one click. “The dialogue stays but the misanthrope looks ridiculous, and the emotional sting is neutralized,” says Jardin.
“(T)here is still no fully automated system capable of managing the complexities of online human interaction — no software fix I know of. But I’d underestimated the power of dedicated human attention.”
Douglas Rushkoff, author and media analyst, writes that he once thought that the Internet would change people, saying the experience of going online for the first time would be as conscious-expanding as dropping acid had been in the 1960s. “I thought it would allow us to build a new world through which we could model new behaviors, values, and relationships.” He no longer thinks that way.
The question is no longer how browsing the Internet changes the way we look at the world,” writes Rushkoff. “(I)t’s which browser we’ll be using to buy and sell stuff in the same old world.”
Francis Crick, the famous English molecular biologist, physicist, and neuroscientist, once remarked in an interview to the New York Times just shortly before he died that we will eventually disabuse ourselves of the notion that we actually have souls. “In the fullness of time, educated people will believe there is no soul independent of the body, and hence no life after death.”
Commenting on this, scientist Lee M. Silver writes that, “(w)hile its mode and expression may change over cultures and time, irrationality and mysticism seem to be an integral part of normal human nature, even among highly educated people.” Unfortunately, this “irrationality” — as Silver terms it — doesn’t pertain to just a belief in the supernatural. Rather, our animal natures will always find new ways to adjust and make use of any cage.
Cyber-bullies are the lions in this circus. And, if we’re to make sure that the show goes on smoothly and without a hitch, we better find out who exactly are the ringmasters especially if we’re not taming the lions ourselves.
What Have You Changed Your Mind About — Today’s Leading Minds Rethink Everything (Edited by John Brockman) is available in Fully Booked.
