I have endured far more than my fair share of hate on the internet, for the simple reason that in large measure I sought it out. I spent years “debating” people who more than likely wanted me dead, because I found it useful. It is useful because when you get angry, at least in my case, it heightens my focus and enables all sorts of new perceptions to occur that would not have happened if people had not been doing their best to wound me emotionally. On balance, that whole process was useful, even if I’ve transcended it, in large measure.
One thing that one immediately notices on almost all message boards the internet over, though, is emotional shallowness and lack of empathy, which of course are traits indicative of retarded emotional intelligence.
It seems to me that people express their real selves behind pseudonyms, so these boards are, I think somewhat useful in cultural analysis. Clearly, it is a certain type of person who spends all day in front of a computer, whose social contacts are primarily virtual, and who feels the need to foster group cohesion by denigrating other people whose only crime is difference and perhaps awkwardness. We read regularly about kids whose lives are torn apart by Facebook or Twitter or other aggression.
Kids that are out shooting hoops and bussing tables are not, in general, the problem.
If we generalize, humanity has spent most of its history in warfare. In most cultures for most of the time, men more or less owned their women and could hit them or their children any time they pleased. Violence has characterized our past, and it should come as no surprise that it is seen on the internet.
At the same time, it is hard not to imagine that something has been lost in our age, when children don’t HAVE to socialize, and can instead spend endless hours “playing” with interactive but more or less imaginary friends. Apparently kids that play “World of Warcraft” often play it 30-40 a week or more. Their social universe is in effect abstract, and this leads, in my view, to emotional and social retardation. The image I have is bread that is baked before it has risen properly. It is just too thick in the middle.
It is of course easy to picture the “good old days”, which I suspect were much tougher for most people than we are able to imagine. At the same time, the one concrete metric I would suggest might shed some light is our shared fondness for poetry. Virtually all cultures for all of history have had their epic stories, that made men and women rejoice and cry as the fortunes of their heroes waxed and waned. One can readily imagine a storyteller by a campfire reciting Gilgamesh 3,000 years ago, to an audience that knew the story well, but wanted always to hear it one more time.
We have lost that. We have, in large measure, lost Shakespeare, and Keats, and all the emotional “tuning” that such imaginative and evocative writing enables. We calibrate as machines, and machines are not sensitive or empathetic. They understand software algorithyms–they understand conformity to behavioral and emotive standards, normally based on shared aggression and a bestial sense of humor–but not what it means to truly see other people. They can’t see themselves. They are not developed. Why would they see others?
This is a cultural problem whose extent I find impossible to diagnose. I am simply describing it for now.