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From: goutal@intrbas.uucp (Kenn Goutal)
Newsgroups: comp.groupware
Subject: Re: Goodbye.
Message-ID: <115@intrbas.UUCP>
Date: 19 Dec 90 01:12:34 GMT
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				<^_^>


I keep seeing this thesis -- people are more rude on the net than in
'real life' and that this is so because they don't have to physically
face the people to whom they write -- over and over again.  About once
a year somebody writes an article about it in /Newsweek/ or /WSJ/ or
someplace, and they usually quote some scholarly work such as the one
your colleague wrote.

I have been on the net since pretty nearly the beginning, and I don't buy it.

I certainly agree that there are rude people on the net.
What I don't buy is that it's peculiar to the net.
There are rude people -- violently rude people -- everywhere.
I find a lot of them on the highways, of course, where the conditions
of relative anonymity and lack of accountability exist
as cited w/r/t the net.
But I also find them in stores, at work, in church, on the sidewalk,
on the phone, ...

I don't think you need to worry about the rude people on the net
escaping into the real world and inciting riots etc.  They already have!
Or rather, more accurately, there are already people in the real world
who are violently rude and incite riots or murder or whatever.

I think that rudeness is more widespread, more widely tolerated, and
more violent than it used to be.  I don't necessarily mean over the
sweep of history, but like in our lifetimes.  There has always been
murder, but people didn't routinely murder each other for throwing
snowballs, as happens today.  People didn't routinely yell "F--- you!!!"
at each other on the sidewalk just for imagined slights.  People said
"hello" to each other on the streets, apologized for making mistakes,
etc.  

Hard to say why this is true, of course.  It's all very complicated.
There are many factors that have cause this to become more true over
time, and they all feed on each other.  Increasing violence in the
real world begets a market for it in the media, which in turn gives
the impression that it is more tolerated, which in turn encourages more
violence.  That's just one little cycle.

It's bound to spill over into the net.
I think part of what happens is that people confuse cause and effect.
They see that the net itself is new and the rudeness is new,
and so when they get on the net for the first time, they think that
the rudeness is unique to the net, and that something about the net
causes it.  I think it's just that we've all gotten used to it already
in other parts of our lives, and don't notice it there.

There is also a phenomenon of perceived density of violence that is
inherent in mass media.  It's true but less so for print media, 
especially in the old days when it took days or months for the printed
word to make the rounds of the world.  In the early days of electronic
media, things still often took the time of a plane trip to get from
one part of the globe to another.  Nowadays, the entire violence of
the planet is concentrated by high bandwidth and fast transmission
such that each one of us experiences the whole planet's violence as
if it were our own.  Yah, yah, of course I'm not *literally* being
carbombed in Beirut, or hustled off to Siberia, or starved in Ethiopia,
or held hostage in any one of a zillion middle-eastern countries.
But I'm *near* it!  I hear about -- see, in living color and full motion
-- all these things that formerly I had to live near just to hear about.

So it is with the net.  It used to be we only had to put up with
the rudeness generated by the few letters we exchanged with friends,
or maybe the occasional graffitus along the side of the road on a rock,
or among the people with whom we interacted at the store or wherever.
Now we jump on the net, and suddenly we are receiving communications
from a much larger community of people, with the requisite percentage
of them that are rude.  And rudeness often expresses itself in speaking
when politeness expresses itself in remaining quiet.  So, necessarily,
a higher percentage of what we see on the net is indeed rude.

This is not to say that the dynamics of the net does not, of itself,
induce some certain about of rudeness that would otherwise remain
unexpressed.  But I'd figure on that factor accounting for maybe
less than 5%, more like 1%, of the rudeness that people attribute
to the net.

-- Kenn Goutal

Interbase Software Corporation
209 Burlington Road
Bedford  MA  01730
617.275.3222
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