Crude Anonymity

I watch Martin Periard’s drumming on youtube once a day – it’s like my daily treat. Usually the comments are laudatory, but they can get vituperative. I can't help but think after seeing some of these comments that crudity is some sort of concomitant of anonymity. While there is clear value in loosening the inhibitions that accountability engenders the downside is substantial. As a culture, are we really this ridiculous?

Like all things of this sort, I tend to be curious about the 'why?' As a strategist I tend to think in terms of advantage, sort of the cui bono of a given thing. So, what is the advantage to the anonymous contributor? What is actually happening here? It seems like it is simply displaced expiation of an emotion: fear, anger, loneliness, inferiority. Is the sole contribution to allow someone to have their schadenfreude moment? Why do we tolerate this?

As much as anything, it may be a reaction to our culture’s emphasis on ‘political correctness’ in public speech and the self censoring effect that has on us all. Perhaps we are lashing out with a heightened version or our true feelings, like a scream in a closet, in the one arena we know we can get away with it. This gets weird because if political correctness has an original intent, it is to centralize those on the margins and decrease victimization. Yet, it may be having the opposite effect.

In our carpool the other day I was talking to one of the kids about how out of hand bullying is now because there is no accountability. You take a compromising picture of someone, post it, and voila! Since they can have no idea who did it there is no restraint on behavior. I suggested that in the pre-web days there were certainly rumors and bullying, but that they were constrained by the simple fact that with enough diligence, someone could always find out where they started. Even this small amount of accountability kept things somewhat in check.

So, too much liberty constrains liberty? That is, we are left in a world where you have to be very careful about what you say and do – someone is always watching. You can’t get too wild with your friends, someone has a camera phone. You can’t say something provocative – someone is always listening and recording. Information, particularly of a scandalous kind, is a valuable commodity. And there will always be those who are interested in trading on this to increase their status or simply to bring others down.

So, have we come full circle, through the tumult of the 60s and 70’s, and back to the Victorian era, where issues of ‘face’ and ‘proper behavior’ were necessary considerations for those who wish to succeed in society? Instead of ‘manners’ and ‘etiquette’ we use the term ‘politically correct’ which is just ‘etiquette’ pushed through the filter of post-modernism. People rebelled against Victorian constraints and seem to be doing so against PC ones as well.

Whatever the technology and time, people are feeling, opinionated beings. Though we would love to have a world of ‘happy shiny people holding hands’ it’s just not in our nature. Stuff happens and someone always has an axe to grind. If you think I’m wrong wait till you see the anonymous comments on this post! 


BTW, this is the event that started me thinking about some of this: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/local/daily/jan99/district27.htm .