Aberrant Behavior Online vs Real Life

I’ve been thinking further about my previous post on social media. In particular how some people behave very differently online that they do in person. Looking back at the example from my previous post, I have my doubts that the parties involved would have behaved the same if the online communication channel wasn’t available. In the one case, would a person exchange physical postal mail for months and then fire off a grudging missive? Probably not. Or they would skip right to the missive. It is probably the same thinking that motivates spammers – if they had to physically address and postal mail letters hawking boner pills and fake watches they likely wouldn’t. Put the ability to electronically send this same junk to thousands at a push of a button is just too easy.

Another example that comes to mind is a former co-worker who began following me on Twitter and Facebook. He stands as the only person (so far) that I have had to ban/block online because of continual obnoxious behavior. In real life he is a likable enough guy and very opinionated. He is ultra-right wing, but claims to be a Libertarian. I always suspected that this was just cover so that he could support the most radical aspects of the Republican agenda but claim ‘I’m not one of them’ when they get caught in their inevitable lies and corruption.

As I said, in person he was fine; online it was just a constant torrent of right wing talking points and Fox News propaganda and spin. The really sad thing was, he couldn’t defend or explain any of it – only parrot the shout radio spew. I debated him a few times and buried him every single time because there were no facts or logic behind his diatribes. This just made him even more radical. Not liking his online shellacking; he began posting lies/distortions about me and what I said in other ‘safe’ forums where he knew he would get no challenge from his other right wing buddies. When he made some pretty overtly racist statements on my Facebook wall, I was done. It would have been one thing if there was some intelligent debate or discussion. Instead this was just tedious, willfully ignorant, offensive, poorly reasoned noise on his part. Banned.

If you need further examples of online bad behavior take a look at the sewer that is the comment section on most posts on the Cincinnati Enquirer site. Maybe I have too much faith in humanity, but I am fairly certain that in real life a person would react with ‘they probably had it coming’ upon hearing that a person had died in a car accident – yet you see this sort of response almost daily on that site. You’ll also see the full regurgitation of the shout radio sloganeering in response to any news posting with even a hint of politics in it.

I guess the anonymizing effect of being online seduces some into the most outrageous behavior. Of course this effect also exists offline as well. As I have pointed out: “there is never a line for the toilet at the public pool”. Yes, people will do the pretty obnoxious things in public if they think they stand a chance of getting away with it – least of which is peeing in a public swimming pool.

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