The Internet in general, and social networks in particular, have certainly brought a lot of good things into our lives. But at the same time, forever changed our communication.
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I think many of us – from personal experience and (or) culture – are familiar with specific situations of embarrassment. For example, when you yell something to the interlocutor, shouting over loud music, and the music suddenly stops, and you yell in silence. Or when the one you’re talking about is standing behind you. Or you blurted out something in polemical fervor, simply without thinking, but it was saved, recorded, quoted and remembered.
Until recently, such unpleasant situations were, rather, still exceptional – an adequate and well-mannered person fell into them, at most, several times in his life. The Internet and social networks have changed a lot: they seem to be specially sharpened for the multiplication of such embarrassments.
For example, chatting is a complete analogue of irresponsible chatter in a smoking room. Whatever you say in passing, in passing, as if in rhyme to the previous remark. As a result, millions of kilometers of human chatter are stuck in the dimensionless deposits of the Internet and are publicly available. Said in passing, for five people to smile for a couple of seconds, hangs for years. Over the years, it will be read by those to whom it is not intended, and perhaps quoted (copy-paste, in a couple of seconds) in a completely different context. Imagine a cursed smoking room, where everything blabbed out mystically appears on the walls, like burning letters at Belshazzar’s feast, and hangs, if not forever, then until the next whitewashing. Thank you, let’s smoke in another …
Is it possible to speak on the Internet in such a way that your own people hear you, but others do not? Any techie will answer proudly and positively: there is such a regime, information protection and all that. But the user will delay the answer. It is, of course, yes, but in some mysterious way, said to a narrow circle one day becomes public. At the same time, of course, there is also a guilty person, the same “sneak”. But the network environment frees the carrier of the infection from the labor of expressing someone else’s in their own words. In general, if we liken information to an infection – and sometimes this metaphor is quite justified – the Internet turns into an ideal contagious environment. At the same time, the abundance of nicknames, pseudonyms and masks only multiplies situations when we do not know with whom we are talking.
Summing up, situations fraught with conflicts have become thousands of times more frequent. What can be said about the conflicts themselves?
Probably still not. Not everyone can quarrel with everyone, and even a thousand times, especially if they all form one environment with close interests. Again, an analog of an infection – well, you got into a subway car, where there is a crazy amount of viruses and bacilli, well, you got the flu, acquired some kind of immunity. Not every time to get sick.
And just this immunity is the most unpleasant legacy of the network environment. Thick-skinned, acquired property not to be offended by really offensive things, vileness and abomination, tolerance for vulgarity. Strictly speaking, as they want, they live; you don’t like it – well, don’t go to our kindergarten. It’s true. But a dirty, hurtful, provocative manner of communication is carried offline from online communities. Okay if I’m wrong.