Online Meltdowns and Freakouts

So, today in class, Professor Boellstorff mentioned the online disinhibition effect, which is when people say and do things online that they normally wouldn't do or say face-to-face. The article mentions that sometimes people say or do things that are incredibly kind, which the author calls benign disinhibition, but most of the examples I've seen online have been of the negative kind. Consider the number of people online, people from all over the world, liberals, conservatives, fanatics, moderates, religious people, atheists - people of all shapes, sizes, and political viewpoints. They all have free reign over the internet, and it's not surprising that flame wars and wanky behavior crops up all over the place when you consider the high probability that two people of opposing viewpoints may end up conversing with each other at some point.

A few years ago, I myself got sucked into an online flame war of nuclear proportions. I don't even remember what it was initially about, only that I had stumbled across an argument already in process and the original poster (OP) on the blog really pissed me off with their comments. Without even giving it a second thought, I joined the some twenty other people in getting into a rabid fight with the OP, full of blistering insults and CAPS-LOCK-of-rage. Although I tried to stay calm and rational with my points, by the end of it, I was seeing red, my fingers typing at a blur, adrenaline pumping from anger so intense that I ended up calling this stranger, someone I'd never met or even talked to before, a lot of unpleasant things. 'Stupid ignorant waste-of-space, I can't believe someone as f-cked up as you is allowed to exist' was probably the most mild of what came flowing from my keyboard, never mind what the others that were attacking the OP were saying on their parts, and the OP was giving as good as s/he got. Things got really ugly, and I only managed to get out of the thing because I had to go to work. By the time I got back home, I had calmed down enough to give rational thinking another chance.

This article states potential reasons as to why people fly off the handle so much more easily online than in person. Basically, voice, facial expression, and other cues help people in face-to-face interactions; these things are lacking online, so people are often prone to misunderstanding. And if people get into an argument online, "the absence of information on how the other person is responding makes the prefrontal circuitry for discretion more likely to fail. Our emotional impulses disinhibited, we type some infelicitous message and hit 'send' before a more sober second thought leads us to hit 'discard.' We flame." Things can get so bad, that one man in London actually tracked down the man he had traded insults with in a chat room and physically assaulted him with a knife. What the papers in London called an attack inspired by "Web rage."

Looking back on it, my own experience with 'web rage' was pretty scary for me. I can't believe how quickly I was sucked into the argument, and how caught up in it I became. I normally have a very even temper, or at least very good control of my emotions, so that kind of uncontrollable anger and black hatred for some person online was really jarring. It scared me straight, so to speak, and I've never so much as exchanged conversations with someone without clarifying a comment as harmless by adding '[/sarcasm]' or a smiley face of some kind so as to keep feathers from being ruffled. However, the internet is still full of people who verbally attack each other for disagreements on anything from whether or not Star Trek Voyager is better than Enterprise to different stances on political views. And, despite my distaste for getting personally involved in these online wars, it doesn't stop me from joining communities that keep an eye on the explosions and wank that occur and, along with thousands of other members, laugh at the stupidity.