'Dear Prudence

And in the tradition of Sunday posts wherein WNYC's 'On the Media' on the way home from church always seems to relate directly to whatever I had been thinking earlier in the day, here goes:

'On the Media' was on the Internet today. Well, it's always on the Internet if you want to find it, at http://www.onthemedia.org, but this time it was on the subject of the Internet. Here is the link for 'On the Media' on the Internet, on the Internet.

The show was an exploration of aspects of 'digital democracy,' in which such issues as maturity, anonymity, restraint, tolerance, hate, and even my old stand-by, compassion, arose. Surely our print selves, even with name attached and bound in book form, are not identical to our living, feeling, physical, social selves; the relationship between the two is, in many cases, increasingly tenuous the further away from the nexus of social reality, relationships, name, and reputation the writer gets. And anonymous comments on the Internet are about as void of social context as anything could be.

Some people cleave to politeness and consideration regardless of venue. On the other hand, while Ira Glass on the show told of vicious, hurtful things written anonymously to the subjects of a sad and deeply personal vignette on the 'This American Life' comments section, I've seen shockingly and unconscionably mean postings on web forums about religious life and vocations, in which troubled individuals pour out their hatred by calling non-habited religious, or religious of this or that community, all sorts of disgusting things. In the latter case, I should think the self-selection involved, in which all readers are presumably hoping for and working toward the same thing, would have precluded such puerile and nasty behavior.

And yet anonymity, and by extension all the Web, seem to offer an unlimited license to let the Id run free, to discard normal conventions and even ethics in pursuit of untrammeled expression of whatever caliber. I don't know that it's gotten worse in general, or that there are simply so many more people using it, but it does seem like now a greater number of rational arguments than before in every type of venue quickly degenerate into 'You're just stupid,' to which the counterargument these days runs, succinctly, 'F- you!'

...greet the brand new day.'