People are mean. I don’t mean that some people are mean. I mean all people are freaking mean. Even me. Especially me.
If you don’t believe me, go online. There aren’t enough adjectives to describe just how mean people are on the Internet. People who are pleasant and kind in real life suddenly twist into rude, unsympathetic monsters whenever they have access to a keyboard and an online social medium. And people aren’t just mean when its justified or when opportunity strikes. No, it appears that many people go online seeking a chance to be unkind to others, even if they are total strangers. Especially if they are total strangers.
Look at common social forums such as Facebook, YouTube or Twitter and you will see the meanness engulfing the online world. People post snarky comments about their neighbours, classmates or coworkers in their Facebook statuses, hurl insults at celebrities via tweets, and demean and devalue anyone who dares post a video on YouTube. That girl is sooo ugly. He totally can’t sing. And that’s the tame stuff.
Even informative, seemingly grown-up websites such as online news sites aren’t safe from the hecklers. People will rant about the most harmless little stories on the Edmonton Journal’s website. A friend of mine who previously worked at the Journal once wrote a story about “staycations.” It was a lovely story about visiting petting zoos and berry farms. When the story posted on the Journal’s website, my friend received hate mail, and lots of it. Man, did she get told where to go. All because she recommended that people take their kids to see ponies. What kind of world do we live in that someone could not only take offence to that suggestion but actually be riled up enough about it to pour hate down on a journalist for being pro-pony rides? Who has that much hate in them? Hell, who has that much free time?
Has the Internet made us into the mean creatures we are today? Or have we simply always been this way and couldn’t properly express our meanness to a mass audience before the dawn of the World Wide Web? The pessimistic part of me thinks that we were all secretly this way long before crackberrys and chatroulette hit the scene. Maybe we all harboured these deep resentments towards strangers, family, friends and celebrities but we just didn’t have a proper outlet to express our bitterness. Maybe deep down we’re all just jerks who don’t have anything nice to say but insist on saying it anyways. This could very well be true.
But I think it’s more likely that the ability to shout our shrillest, sharpest words via capital letters to anyone in the whole freaking world using just a keyboard or a smartphone has created a whole freaking world of monsters. And not the cute, furry monsters from Pixar movies. Mean monsters, ones who aren’t shy about telling you that they don’t like your hair or that your shoes are so last season. The thing is, in the real world if you tell someone to their face that you don’t like them or you express frustration with whatever annoying habits they may possess you usually have to deal with the consequences, whether it be a painful, awkward conversation or a slap in the face. In person, there is no way to hide, no way to pretend you didn’t actually diss your friend’s mom. But online, in the virtual world, you can say anything you want, no matter how rude or untrue it may be and you may never have to deal with any sort of consequences. Most of the time, people who write unkind things about others online never have to meet the person they are being unkind to face-to-face. You don’t even have to reveal your real name online, guaranteeing total anonymity (and total false bravado). At the very least, you can pretend someone else hijacked your Twitter account and tweeted that your friend’s boyfriend is a loser. Online anonymity is also virtually guaranteeing a generation of cowards, a generation of young adults who don’t know how to express their feelings by speaking instead of typing. The online world is also starting to create a generation, if not an entire population, of people who feel they have free range to be rude to everyone, simply because they don’t have to justify their feelings online. Maybe we should all start thinking before typing, if only so that we can think of something nice to say.
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