Why we crave internet justice
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jan/02/george-saunder...
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.
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.
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.
So the rule seems to be that people are awful when there is a piece of glass between them.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
-- Larry Wall
And a lot of enabling of biggest psychopaths due to fear.
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.
>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.
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.
The answer is it's been that way since Sept 1993.
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.