Culture Makes the Internet Cruder, Not the Other Way Around
As for polarization, certainly the Internet has led to a cluster of polarized groups, but once again we have to ask if the Internet is responsible for this. I don’t think our political differences merely come down to the triviality portrayed in Dr. Seuss’ Butter Battle Book. Rather, there are bigger differences than perhaps at any time in American history. When the differences are so pronounced, it leads to a much higher level of hostility.
Because for so many years we have settled political differences through the courts and not the ballot box, every presidential election and every administration has at its core basic cultural questions. Will abortion be legal or illegal? What will marriage mean? What level of religious freedom will be enjoyed? In essence, underlying each national election is the idea that the next administration will make either devastating or positive decisions concerning taxes, foreign policy, and defense. It will also help decide what type of culture we’ll have and what type of nation we will be.
When passions and issues get hot, politics gets coarse. But it’s been coarser at other times in our nation’s history. In 1856, two years prior to the famous Lincoln-Douglas debate, Senator Charles Sumner (R-Ma) mocked Senator Andrew Butler’s (D-SC) handicap on the floor of the U.S. Senate. The Senate didn’t even bother to sanction Sumner.
Instead, Butler’s nephew, Congressman Preston Brooks (D-SC), went over to the Senate and beat Sumner half to death, leaving Sumner unable to perform his duties in the Senate for three years. The House couldn’t even muster the votes to expel Brooks. Brooks resigned from Congress but was re-elected. His constituents sent Brooks several new canes (one that had the phrase “hit him again” engraved on it). And within five years of that beating, the nation was to begin a civil war that would leave hundreds of thousands of Americans slain
The problems Hawkins highlights are hardly new and at various times throughout our history have even been worse.
This isn’t to say that we should be complacent about the state of our culture, but we shouldn’t pursue a cultural version of the economic stimulus and just do something to say we’re doing something.
Rather, we must adopt a triage view of our nation’s culture. There are critical issues that must be solved and serious problems that should be addressed — problems that it would be nice to correct. And then there’s stuff that we’d better just accept because there’s nothing we can do while still being effective on the more important issues.
Much thought and discussion will go into what those priorities should be, and successful execution will require people to participate in the most counter-cultural behavior of our times: thinking.
I must also mention that there has grown a subsection of our popular culture that finds rudeness to be a desireable – or as they say ‘authentic’ – means of … they say dialouge but the truth is more like an effective method of gaining power by making the battle so distateful that only the power-driven will remain.
Any increased coarseness due to the internet is more likely a result of ease of access and allowing for small and geographically far flung minorities (no matter how small) to find each other and form their own echo chambers. The effect of this is generally neither coarsening nor chastening nor is it generally particularly good or bad though the effects can be either.
The ease of access also means that the more coarse elements of society that were always present are heard (seen) by people who might have otherwise been more sheltered from them by choice or happenstance.
That subset has always been there and every generation seems to think the following generation is worse.
One of my favorite quotes from Socrates,
This column was even more vacuous than the musings Hawkins penned. Without the Dr. Seuss reference and the brief Charles Sumner anecdote, there’s really nothing here. Appropriately, you concluded by vocally outsourcing thought to the future.
I love anonymity, or rather, pseudo-anonymity, as I only partially shroud my identity. I relish it. There’s a candor from people this way. I need no social x-ray. I can just stare at an electronic sheet and it leaks pure truth, opinion that isn’t hedged in plausible-deniability in meaning, no vague allusions. I get straight-shooting, not the faint lies of polite discourse.
The only triage I’ve ever found necessary is the establishment of a few big rules on a board executed with swift and visible justice. If the offender booted is a long-time member of the board in generally good standing, the rest of the community is owed an explanation for his absence. Newer offenders can be booted more routinely with less publicity, because he hasn’t earned a reputation as a contributing member of the society. He doesn’t matter, so an announcement would just be noise.
As for the world-wide elephant in the room, “shock site” message boards and troll forums, and I’m thinking things ranging from the worst parts of Something Awful and 4Chan to the worst pro-terror stuff, I’d be happy to see service ISPs decide not to be conduits for their packets.
I’ll give you an example. Details from rape victims become issues of public record. Let’s imagine the worst (no, let’s keep it vague). She died, family’s grieving, a name and photo is released in the obituary. Juveniles find some detail (and there’s no point speculating what) funny, and the most inappropriate photoshops and jokes emerge. Contact details for the family are posted, and filth gets to them.
Now let’s say these boards are havens for this sort of thing. With etiquette this bad, ISPs should collude to shun them. It should be expected and customary.
I consider myself a freedom advocate. I think everyone has a right to run darknets as crude as anything imaginable. But I’d like to see some ‘server shunning’ as far as harassing victims of violent crimes go.
Adam Graham, thank you. All the internet (or excessive alcohol) does is reveal what was already going on in the mind of a person.
Obviously that’s not always ultimately beneficial, but we should be able to have enough common sense not to blame the vehicle for the excessive speed that killed the pedestrian.
Just about all the negatives people today say about the internet were also said about TV and movies. But I believe that there are a lot more positives than negatives for the internet. Mainstream Media (MSM) companies are now posting major losses due to the greater competition on the internet. Before long, liberal control of MSM and the spread of ideas will get less as these companies disappear. True, there is more gossip and propaganda through the internet but more people in the world are now exposed to different ideas that they simply didn’t have access to before. One example would be the fact that Arab newspapers continue to publish anti-semitic dribble about “blood libel”. Now those stories have moved to the internet but at least now there is the possibility that an Arab in the mid-east may be exposed to the new idea that perhaps Jews really don’t drink the blood of babies. Sure lies are more easily spread due to the internet, but so is truth.
The internet merely amplifies and spreads opinions, ideas, facts, lies, etc.
Garbage in will probably lead to garbage out, but put some good in and you can get some good out.
The internet is great for me because it allows me to keep in contact with friends and family and hang out with nice people who I would not be able to hang out with otherwise.
I’m glad of the internet. Oh, and I won’t even go into how massively it saves time when doing research assuming that you filter through the lies and search for the truth. It would take way too much time to do it.
I was unaware of the Sumner/Butler brouhaha. Thanks for a bit of history.
I disagreed with the premise that the internet is causing the rudeness. I do agree that I’d probably not be in contact with it were it not for the internet.
Snark is in. I suppose if I think back, the sexist jokes and leers of guys at the local diner which caused me, as a young woman, to avoid those dives were similar to the remarks being made on the internet today. I wonder how many times a sexist remark was made to me during this past election. I can’t even remember.
Today on one of the blogs, a writer is giving a casual update on the Sunday shows, and there is a scatalogical description of someone he disagrees with woven in, without a care at all that it might offend readers. This site now is being given a seat at the White House press conferences. The trash is on the front page.
BUT…..there is a solution. Turn off the net.
The apparent crudeness is merely a reflection that half of us are below average. Back in the early days of computer enabled communicating (e.g. Compuserve, BIX, etc.) it was the preserve of the average and above, not much different than the sociodemographic that would get letters to editors published in the papers. It was the upper middle class and above who were able to afford buying and using these machines.
The computer revolution as of late has enabled the lower half equal access; trailer park dwellers with minimal IQ can afford a used machine and dialup connection.
In the early 80′s my company was able to update customers via BBS and compuserve. You could send a (compressed) archive of data and rely on the customer’s ability to uncompress and install it. As computers became more prevalent things got progressively stupider. By the 1990′s the average user was unable to grasp file decompression. By the late 90′s the average user could barely handle self-installers. These days the working assumption is that the average user isn’t much brighter than the typical Hibiscus. Even step by step instructions are far too difficult for them; a single PRESS THIS YOU IDIOT button is what seems required. You can look at the history of almost any software product and see the same sad devolution.
What both Graham and Hawkins are observing is that there aren’t mechanisms built in to the internet yet. We are not all equals. Sorry, but an unemployed assembler with the IQ of a potato is NOT the equal to the CEO of Intel. He has equal opportunity and equal treatment by the law. But that doesn’t make them equals. Papers etc used to be self-filtering much the same as early 80′s computer use; only the richer and the smarter were on that playground. We will have to wait before the internet develops filtering.
What you just described is equally applicable to the democratic process. The more the franchise was opened up, the less intelligent the voting public became as a whole. Today, there are no requirements on anything from intelligence, to morality, to productivity, and people wonder why voting solves nothing. Well, intelligent, productive voters are a minority, and candidates don’t have to appeal to them to win an election. All they have to do is appeal to the marginally educated simpletons.
G Alston indirectly hints at a correction I wanted to add: on-line forums pre-date nation-wide talk radio. Online forums were very active before the “Fairness Doctrine” was ended.
However, many of those forums were pretty toxic, and much of today’s terminology comes from them – troll, flame, thread, etc. Usenet’s talk.politics.misc, for example, had its share of offensive postings, with a demographic of the university community and high-tech business employees. BBS’s and online services like Compuserve had their own communities, with BBS’s having very broad demographics.
I said earlier — “It was the upper middle class and above who were able to afford buying and using these machines.”
I should add that the less well off were able to buy machines in those days, but then again most of these were an admixture of younger, more tech connected, curious, etc.; all of which point to “a bit more savvy than the rest” and indicative of the basic “g” factor that is associated with overall success.
Essentially “upper middle class” and upper middle class (a.k.a. a bit smarter) quality of thought” are roughly analagous for this argument.
For those of you unfamiliar with “g” the bottom line is that IQ is a predictor of success that is reasonably accurate. As a rule class and “g” are not necessarily synonymous (it’s possible to see idiots in the upper classes) but there is a distinct enough correlation to state generalities. Thus you might see mechanics online in the 80′s but these were the smarter ones looking for that competitive edge. And so on.
Overall the argument is that in the early days IQ and computer use were positively correlated but “a PC in every home” thinking changed this by definition.
I was hoping what I’d written earlier was plain enough, but this is, after all, the internet… and… and maybe I’d be better off spelling certain assumptions out, e.g. “g” factor.
@Jeb
Someone needs to go to 4chan.org >.> /d for diaper fetishes and /b if you want a desktop back ground of the world trade center flying into American Arlines Flight 11
Have you thought that the reason few will watch a five minute video on the net is that the net or rather the PC because the net itself only carries data, is a lousy medium for watching video. It is also a lousy medium for reading a long, detailed newspaper or magazine article, a book or short story, listening to a piece of music for most things except what computers were designed to do which is process and present data.
On top of that many technologies that have become “de facto standards” on the net are not fit for purpose. Flash movies are fine for a two and a half minute cartoon embedded in a tiny window but awful for showing images that benefit from a full screen.
I could go on for ever with examples (but I am a computer pro from the days when it was recognised PC are just toys.
The fact is PC / Internet technology has ben mis sold just as mortgages, investments, enron, worldcom, hope n change and war on terror were mis sold.
We allowed a culture of untruth to develop, having been misled by some crackpot hippie pseudo philosophies from the 1960s.
Don’t make me go ALL CAPS!
Seriously though… There are some real dunces on the internet now. Back in the days of yore with win95 bsod headaches, there were far less ‘youth’ on the internet. Young folks on the internet can be VERY dangerous indeed. People used to gripe at parents who let their kids watch too much television as a cheap ‘babysitter’ but at least Daffy Duck wasn’t talking dirty to little Jane or little John. Now, kids are often left with far too much freedom on the internet and exposed to things that are disturbing to even ponder.
Unfortunately, there will always be EVIL in this world or just plain old-fashioned JERKS. The WWW is just that… the “WORLD WIDE WEB” and that in and of itself has a lot of implications that require due diligence and maturity with regards to safety and maturity. The idiots who get on the internet without caring about installing firewalls and anti-virus programs are the ones usually responsible for spreading the bugs around.
I adore my computers because they really CAN save a lot of time and also, you get to have the chance to converse with people from all walks of life but people DO need to buck up and be careful. VERY careful.
While I agree that discourse on the intranets is vile at times,(o.k. often), some of the posts here come across as extremely classist. Mentioning farflung geographic echo chambers, and lowered intelligence of users, not to mention trailer park dwellers. I have seen things posted all around the net by people who weren’t educated, were obviously not sophisticated and struggling financially. Does this make them lesser? I feel very uncomfortable categorically stating something like that, myself. Some of the vilest things I have ever read in a political forum were posted at Think Progress, Huffington, Daily Kos, Democrat Underground, and FireDogLake. These people for the most part are educated, some highly educated, yet they seem completely ignorant of how our government works. They are petty, vicious, censor beyon belief, and casually call for people they disagree with ideologically with to be shot, hung, _______________. Their spelling, punctuation, and use of profanity, are a whole ‘nother ball of wax. This coming from the supposedly smartest kids in class. Just ask them.
I was involved in online forums back in 1982. Yes, 1982, on Usenet. The word netiquette was invented there, and rude people were called flamers. And then, the gates opened and the barbarians poured in:
(Source: The Jargon File: September-that-never-ended)
I was dissatisfied with Hawkin’s article and I welcome Graham’s rebuttal.
I usually use my full real name as a web name. Because it is unusual, I am noticeable. It keeps me honest. Since I am free with my opinions, and I have a unique name, it occurred to me to google myself. It was interesting to see my comments from several years ago. I resolved to make sure that I am willing to admit to everything I say.
It occurs to me that a mediated blog which required people to use their real names with addresses posted might produce a more polite and less irresponsible discussion.
I think Graham’s point is valid. Our culture of relaxed standards is showing in the internet.
AnninCA, your comment reminded me of a story from the late 1960s, told by a young lady who objected verbally to profanity being used in her presence. The offenders changed their mode of speech. An elderly gentleman approached her and thanked her. He said that he missed having young *ladies* around. I find myself agreeing with him.
Was it Churchill or Stalin that said culture is the state of a civilization’s plumbing? Whoever said it was correct.
Of course the concept of “culture” has many different forms;
“A nation’s culture resides in the hearts and in the soul of its people.”
Mohandas Gandhi
“You have a lot of time on these tours. As Alice Cooper said, you can either drink all day or golf.”
Justin Timberlake
Culture can be all things to all people, so to say culture varies from society to society is correct. Saying that one culture is superior to another is erroneous.
American culture is judged by many to be superior because it exports a lot of cultural products, is widely emulated, the plumbing works and more often then not the lights go on when you flip the switch.
Other people consider Chinese culture to be superior because it is older.
I agree with this article. Too much of what one sees on the Internet these days merely reflects the lack of education of the people who write. Look at so many posts on political blogs, where people show a woeful lack of grammar, spelling, vocabulary, etc.
A few weeks back I encountered a wonderful series of articles titled “What, Me Read?” by a long-time college professor of literature. He says that we are now in a post-literate age, where youngsters do not read as a matter of course (except for abbreviation-filled cell phone text messages).
I certainly don’t believe we can blame the Internet. This trend began when we as parents turned our babysitting chores over to the television.