The irony of my coming across this opinion piece by Stephen Marche, The Epidemic of Facelessness in the New York Times Sunday Review, so soon after I stopped being anonymous here, is not lost on me. In it, Marche decries the endless sewer of hate speech that thrives online, which he attributes to the very anonymity so many desire, and to be fair, may need. And yet, he has some damning points to make about our brave new world of social media, when he argues that outrage and venom have come to dominate so much of our online discourse, where it does not stay contaimned but spills over into the “real” world.
A PART-TIME delivery driver named Peter Nunn was recently sentenced to 18 weeks in a British prison for tweeting and retweeting violent messages to Stella Creasy, a member of Parliament. […]
When the police come to the doors of the young men and women who send notes telling strangers that they want to rape them, they and their parents are almost always shocked, genuinely surprised that anyone would take what they said seriously, that anyone would take anything said online seriously. There is a vast dissonance between virtual communication and an actual police officer at the door. It is a dissonance we are all running up against more and more, the dissonance between the world of faces and the world without faces. And the world without faces is coming to dominate. […]
The Gyges effect, the well-noted disinhibition created by communications over the distances of the Internet, in which all speech and image are muted and at arm’s reach, produces an inevitable reaction — the desire for impact at any cost, the desire to reach through the screen, to make somebody feel something, anything. A simple comment can so easily be ignored. Rape threat? Not so much. Or, as Mr. Nunn so succinctly put it on Twitter: “If you can’t threaten to rape a celebrity, what is the point in having them?”
Anonymity protects our privacy from strangers, but it also encourages so many, under the cloak of their secret identities, to abandon all compassion, all empathy, all fellow feeling for other people and unleash their worst, most base emotions upon people they do not know, and have usually never met face to face. Sadly, this phenomenon seems an inevitable result of online interactions, because of the beast we call homo sapiens.
Inability to see a face is, in the most direct way, inability to recognize shared humanity with another. In a metastudy of antisocial populations, the inability to sense the emotions on other people’s faces was a key correlation. There is “a consistent, robust link between antisocial behavior and impaired recognition of fearful facial affect. Relative to comparison groups, antisocial populations showed significant impairments in recognizing fearful, sad and surprised expressions.”
To be sure, the problems of envy, of bigotry, prejudice, fear of the “other” and all such related evils existed long before the internet came along. However, our instant communications technology acts as an accelerant for spreading the flames of hate faster and farther than ever before. It is no surprise that we have seen an explosion of sites devoted to generating outrage and encouraging the demonization of almost any group of people one can name for any reason one can think up. The internet has become a recruiting tool for terrorists of all stripes, including by way of triggering episodes of stochastic terrorism, as we have seen most recently in any number of violent acts committed by isolated individuals around the world.
For all its benefits, for all the joy we take from our use of this technology, we cannot ignore its dark underbelly. Ask all the teenagers who have been bullied online, leading to a rash of suicides in the worst case scenario, and a lifetime of painful memories and mental scars in the best. We could encourage people to ignore the hate so many spew forth, i.e., adopt the eponymous advice to “not feed the trolls,” but is that really our best answer? Marche does not believe it is, and I agree with him.
In a world without faces, compassion is a practice that requires discipline, even imagination. Social media seems so easy; the whole point of its pleasure is its sense of casual familiarity. But we need a new art of conversation for the new conversations we are having — and the first rule of that art must be to remember that we are talking to human beings: “Never say anything online that you wouldn’t say to somebody’s face.” But also: “Don’t listen to what people wouldn’t say to your face.”
The neurological research demonstrates that empathy, far from being an artificial construct of civilization, is integral to our biology. And when biological intersubjectivity disappears, when the face is removed from life, empathy and compassion can no longer be taken for granted.
Easier said than done, obviously. However I am reminded of a recent diary on Daily Kos, An amazing woman fields a troll on MLK Day and it was nothing short of inspirational, about one young woman who confronted an abusive and race-baiting “troll” on twitter using the tactic of compassion. By persisting in engaging him with respect and empathy, she finally broke through his mask of hate. By the end of their exchange, he had stopped using hate speech, had stopped objectifying her, i.e., making her a target for his verbal violence, and engaged her as another human being. So, it can be done. We just have to have the willingness to take that step.
Indeed, for the sake of our society, we must make the attempt. We will never eradicate all hate from the online world, but we can make an impact. I truly believe that. I count as a success stopping even one person from continuing to use social media as a way to deny and degrade the humanity of the people he or she chooses to verbally assault, but I suspect we can do better than that, don’t you?
Anonymity protects our privacy from strangers, but it also encourages so many, under the cloak of their secret identities, to abandon all compassion, all empathy, all fellow feeling for other people and unleash their worst, most base emotions upon people they do not know, and have usually never met face to face. Sadly, this phenomenon seems an inevitable result of online interactions, because of the beast we call homo sapiens.
I call BS on this. It’s not confined just to online. Just look at today’s GOP. Maybe Stephen Marche should look into, and write about, that.
Well, this post is about online use of social media, not specifically the GOP’s use, but certainly a lot of the nastiest stuff you see in the US comes from those who support conservatives, Repubs, Fundies, etc.
Obviously, we’ve done lot’s of posts here at BT regarding the strategy of the Republicans to appeal to base emotions, racism, hatred of anything “liberal” or “left” etc. This is more focused on the medium that allows people all too easily to put aside the better angels of their nature, or if you prefer, that allows them to amplify their hate, viciousness and lack of empathy to a far wider audience.
By the way, Marche didn’t write those words you cited, I did.
Steven:
I know you did. I guess I’m annoyed at these NYT op-eds/stories whining about how uncivilized online behavior is. I presume you saw the one last week about Justine Sacco? It just annoys me to no end that they don’t mention the stuff that goes on IRL, as one would say.
I’ve always gone with nicks online. I probably picked up the habit early on with instant messaging clients and email accounts, since even from the beginning it was impossible to register your real name with that.
Now I stick with nicks as standard practice because I’m not a public figure and don’t have any particular desire to be one. I have no illusions about protecting my privacy from the big bad gubmint, and the day is rapidly arriving when it won’t protect me from intrusive advertising either (I still manage to avoid some of that).
But it’s already been the reality for several years now that anyone with someone else’s real name and a vague notion of where they live can, in a matter of minutes, obtain their street address, get a Google map to their house, complete with a picture of their front door from Google Street View.
In a hyper-reactive culture in which people routinely get shot for looking at their phones in movie theaters or because they chose the wrong parking space, there’s every reason to expect that there are people out there who might find a comment of yours so unbearably offensive that they just have to track you down and show up on your doorstep one day and, who knows, shoot you in the face. Marche’s column and others decrying the coarsening of human behavior in social media make a pretty good case for the existence of such people.
I don’t know how it works on social media, but the rest of the web seems to have a massive imbalance of active users vs lurkers, with the vast majority in the latter category, so even in a world without internet anonymity you’d still be subject to reprisal from someone who never speaks up online. And it’s not as though antisocial or assholish behavior is the only way to arouse online ire. If you look at the recent Gamergate phenomena, just advocating for women online can inspire the worst in human nature from a significant segment of internet users.
At bottom, I think it’s a mistake to blame this behavior on anonymity. The social web has thrown people closer together, despite the ironic effect of perhaps stripping away some of the empathy that Marche notes (I’ll have to read the rest of the column later, I don’t mean to pretend that I’ve done so already).
In the realm of instant text and image exchange irrespective of the distances involved, we’re now sharing a greater and much more intimate portion of our lives with each other–including total strangers–in a common thought space. We’re still learning how to do that, and it gets ugly: many people naturally treat the online space as they would normal life, in which they expect their voices to be the loudest and their opinions to carry the most weight (e.g. mansplaining), and many others are finding a new voice and outlet for expression that they lacked or were denied previously. A lot of people apparently were never all that good at the whole “social” thing at all.
But we’re all in the mix. The internet and social media is providing a vast new layer of democratization to human social interaction. In a group of 10 people having a face-to-face conversation, 2 or 3 tend to dominate while the rest struggle to get a word in edgewise, and unskillful attempts to interject risk a scornful reaction from the group as a whole. The social web requires a new model for interaction, and it’s presently in a state of constant construction and reconstruction. In the meantime, people are still dicks–which is to say, I’m not suggesting that all the bad behavior is inadvertent or otherwise excusable. But in the long term, I see tremendous reason for optimism.
For now though, I’m not a public figure, and I choose not to be one for as long as I can avoid it.
Point of Order: The web is NOT anonymous. It is actually fairly easy to find out who is behind almost all the BS. There are some exceptions but for the most part …
The procedure is not particularly arduous, is not intensly studious and does not take a genius.
Certainly not for the proprietors who allow said “anonymity”
It’s not anonymity that causes folks to “abandon all compassion, all empathy, all fellow feeling for other people and unleash their worst, most base emotions upon people they do not know, and have usually never met face to face”. It is the disconnection from recurring relationships with the people on line and the blanket legitimation that talkers like Rush Limbaugh (and worse) have given under the cover of challenging “political correctness” for that sort of behavior.
In short, it is not the ravages of human nature under anonymity, it is a deliberately encouraged right-wing tactic of intimidation meant to shut of contrary opinions that has roots that go back to McCarthyism.
And guess who is one of their heroes.
Noisy, rude, boorish, and stupid people have long been with us. On-line anonymity just allows those with few manners to shed them and display their ugly faces. Although in the real world they have plenty of competition.
One quality that Elizabeth Warren and Barack Obama share is that they are polite to others in their public interactions. It makes them stand out from their peers and a majority of the public does respond favorably to those that are authentically polite and well mannered. The majority isn’t interested in seeing the Kardashians and other female celebrities with their boobs and asses hanging out or thugs prancing around with guns either real or symbolic.
I think I found your problem:
The Interent is the real world, same as the local shop or forest or church or cinema or restaurant. The idea that it is somehow lesser or different is a large part of the problem. The scare quotes don’t take that away. It’s real people.
The advice to not feed the trolls is taken out of place and time: trolling was designed to provoke arguments not bullying and abuse.
Recycling “troll” as cover for bullies and abusers is yet another cock-up by the immensely clueless media – for some reason journalists and politicians seem to be the least well mentally equipped to deal with the new world.
Amen. I always keep this in mind when I post on the Internet. However, I am fond of calling people like Ann Coulter “media trolls” or “meatspace trolls”, which perhaps doesn’t help.
Using the Internet is like drinking alcohol. When some people get drunk, they lose some inhibitions and suddenly feel smarter, wittier, bolder, and more aggressive. Those who remain sober don’t appreciate the behavior of drunks, but most politely refrain from interfering with them.
I place a high standard for myself as a member of this huge society of people online. It’s taught me so much; it’s an endless source of information that seems magical to me. But there will always be those who abuse it, who choose to exploit the wonder and power of it all.
What we sober folks can do is watch out for the drunks. There are ways to deal with them, downplay their hate and dispense some calm and peace amid the anger, bigotry and intolerance. I try to avoid sinking to their level, because then nobody is listening.