Two passages, one from five years ago and one from today, about how the anarchy of the Internet has released the devil inside us all.
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In 2009, Jim Windolf of Vanity Fair wrote a good article about Internet trolls even before the term existed, but even though biting blogs have been supplanted by social media, his prediction about the decline of anonymous online hating did not come true–at least not yet–in fact it’s taken on new and even more hurtful forms. An excerpt from his piece:
“Online rudeness probably won’t last forever. I think it’s just a fashion. Things change. Stuff that seems cool gets stale. It feels like it won’t, but it does. So it seems reasonable to guess that online nastiness will fade—not through any enforcement, but just because it will go out of style. There will always be flame wars. There will always be online lunkheads and goons. But in a few years maybe you won’t really want to be the one calling someone else a douche-tard in a comments section.”
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From Alex Hern’s Guardian article, Tim Berners-Lee on what he hath wrought, complete unintentionally:
“Tim Berners-Lee has expressed sadness that the web has mirrored the dark side of humanity, as well as enabling its ‘wonderful side’ to flourish.
The developer, who created the web in 1990 while working for the particle collider project Cern in Switzerland, said that the web is a reflection of human nature elsewhere, but that he had hoped ‘that the web would provide tools and fora and new ways of communicating that would break down national barriers and allow us to just get to a better global understanding.
‘Well, maybe it’ll happen in the future … Maybe we will be able to build web-based tools that help us keep people on the path of collaborating rather than fighting.’
Speaking to BBC News, Berners-Lee said that it was ‘staggering’ that people ‘who clearly must have been brought up like anybody else will suddenly become very polarised in their opinions, will suddenly become very hateful rather than very loving.'”