From The Wall Street Journal
.
When Blogs Rule
We Will All Talk Like.....
April 21, 2006
By Daniel Henninger
I don't think the blogosphere is breeding cannibals. But it looks to me as if the world of blogs may be filling up with people who for the previous 200 millennia of human existence kept their weird thoughts more or less to themselves. Now, they don't have to. They've got the Web. Now they can share.
Technorati, a site that keeps numbers on the blogosphere, reports that as of this month the number of Web logs the site tracks is 35.3 million, and doubling every six months. Technorati claims each day brings 75,000 new blogs. We know something's happening here but I'm not sure we know what it is.
But in a "Blogs Trend Survey" released last September, America Online reported that only 8% blog to "expose political information." Instead, 50% of bloggers consider what they are doing to be therapy. Some might argue that using the Internet to self-medicate includes many nominally political blogs, but more on that shortly.
Not surprisingly, a new vocabulary has emerged from clinical psychology to describe generalized patterns of behavior on the virtual continent. As described by psychologist John Suler, there's dissociative anonymity (You don't know me); solipsistic introjection (It's all in my head); and dissociative imagination (It's just a game). This is all known as digital identity, and it sounds perfectly plausible to me.
A libertarian would say, quite correctly, that most of this is their problem, so who cares? But there is one more personality trait common to the blogosphere that, like crabgrass, may be spreading to touch and cover everything. It's called disinhibition. Briefly, disinhibition is what the world would look like if everyone behaved like Jerry Lewis or Paris Hilton or we all lived in South Park.
Example: The Web site currently famous for enabling and aggregating millions of personal blogs is called MySpace.com. If you opened its "blogs" page this week, the first thing you saw was a blogger's video of a guy swilling beer and sticking his middle finger through a car window. Right below that were two blogs by women in their underwear.
In our time, it has generally been thought bad and unhealthy to "repress" inhibitions. Spend a few days inside the new world of personal blogs, however, and one might want to revisit the repression issue.
The human species has spent several hundred thousand years sorting through which emotions and marginal neuroses to keep under control and which to release. Now, with a keyboard, people overnight are "free" to unburden and unhinge themselves continuously and exponentially. One researcher quotes the entry-page of a teenage girl's blog: "You are now entering my world. My pain. My mind. My thoughts. My emotions. Enter with caution and an open mind."
The power of the Web is obvious and undeniable. We diminish it at our peril. But what if the most potent social effect to spread outward from the Internet turns out to be disinhibition, the breaking down of personal restraints and the endless elevation of oneself? It may be already.
Disinhibited vocabulary is now the normal way people talk on cable TV, such as on "The Sopranos" or in stand-up comedy. On the Web and on the street, more people than not talk like this now. What once was isolated is covering everything. No wonder the major non-cable networks are suing to overturn the FCC's decency rulings; they, too, want the full benefits of normalized disinhibition. Hip-hop, currently our most popular music form, is a well-defined world of disinhibition.
Then there's politics. On the Huffington Post yesterday, there were more than 600 "comments" on Karl Rove and the White House staff shake-up. "Demoted my --- the snake is still in the grass." "He should be demoted to Leavenworth." "Rove is Bush's Brain, and without him, our Decider-in-Chief wouldn't know how to wipe his own ----."
From a primary post on the same subject on the Daily Kos, widely regarded as one of the most influential blogging sites in Democratic politics now: "I don't give a ----. Karl Rove belongs in shackles." "A group of village whores have taken a day off to do laundry."
Intense language like this used to be confined to construction sites and corner bars. Now it is normal discourse on Web sites, the most popular forums for political discussion. Much of this is new. Politics is a social endeavor. The Web is nothing if not "social." But the blogosphere is also the product not of people meeting, but venting alone at a keyboard with all the uninhibited, bat-out-of-hell hyperbole of thinking, suggestion and expression that this new technology seems to release.
At the risk of enabling, does the Internet mean that all the rest of us are being made unwitting participants in the personal and political life of, um, crazy people? As populist psychiatry, maybe this is a good thing; the Web allows large numbers of people to contribute to others' therapy. It takes a village.
But researchers note that the isolation of Web life results in many missed social cues. It is similar to the experience of riding an indoor roller coaster, what is known in that industry as a "dark ride." This dark ride could be a very long one.
note: Sent to RPR by a reader and excerpted, thanx.
gf
When Blogs Rule
We Will All Talk Like.....
April 21, 2006
By Daniel Henninger
I don't think the blogosphere is breeding cannibals. But it looks to me as if the world of blogs may be filling up with people who for the previous 200 millennia of human existence kept their weird thoughts more or less to themselves. Now, they don't have to. They've got the Web. Now they can share.
Technorati, a site that keeps numbers on the blogosphere, reports that as of this month the number of Web logs the site tracks is 35.3 million, and doubling every six months. Technorati claims each day brings 75,000 new blogs. We know something's happening here but I'm not sure we know what it is.
But in a "Blogs Trend Survey" released last September, America Online reported that only 8% blog to "expose political information." Instead, 50% of bloggers consider what they are doing to be therapy. Some might argue that using the Internet to self-medicate includes many nominally political blogs, but more on that shortly.
Not surprisingly, a new vocabulary has emerged from clinical psychology to describe generalized patterns of behavior on the virtual continent. As described by psychologist John Suler, there's dissociative anonymity (You don't know me); solipsistic introjection (It's all in my head); and dissociative imagination (It's just a game). This is all known as digital identity, and it sounds perfectly plausible to me.
A libertarian would say, quite correctly, that most of this is their problem, so who cares? But there is one more personality trait common to the blogosphere that, like crabgrass, may be spreading to touch and cover everything. It's called disinhibition. Briefly, disinhibition is what the world would look like if everyone behaved like Jerry Lewis or Paris Hilton or we all lived in South Park.
Example: The Web site currently famous for enabling and aggregating millions of personal blogs is called MySpace.com. If you opened its "blogs" page this week, the first thing you saw was a blogger's video of a guy swilling beer and sticking his middle finger through a car window. Right below that were two blogs by women in their underwear.
In our time, it has generally been thought bad and unhealthy to "repress" inhibitions. Spend a few days inside the new world of personal blogs, however, and one might want to revisit the repression issue.
The human species has spent several hundred thousand years sorting through which emotions and marginal neuroses to keep under control and which to release. Now, with a keyboard, people overnight are "free" to unburden and unhinge themselves continuously and exponentially. One researcher quotes the entry-page of a teenage girl's blog: "You are now entering my world. My pain. My mind. My thoughts. My emotions. Enter with caution and an open mind."
The power of the Web is obvious and undeniable. We diminish it at our peril. But what if the most potent social effect to spread outward from the Internet turns out to be disinhibition, the breaking down of personal restraints and the endless elevation of oneself? It may be already.
Disinhibited vocabulary is now the normal way people talk on cable TV, such as on "The Sopranos" or in stand-up comedy. On the Web and on the street, more people than not talk like this now. What once was isolated is covering everything. No wonder the major non-cable networks are suing to overturn the FCC's decency rulings; they, too, want the full benefits of normalized disinhibition. Hip-hop, currently our most popular music form, is a well-defined world of disinhibition.
Then there's politics. On the Huffington Post yesterday, there were more than 600 "comments" on Karl Rove and the White House staff shake-up. "Demoted my --- the snake is still in the grass." "He should be demoted to Leavenworth." "Rove is Bush's Brain, and without him, our Decider-in-Chief wouldn't know how to wipe his own ----."
From a primary post on the same subject on the Daily Kos, widely regarded as one of the most influential blogging sites in Democratic politics now: "I don't give a ----. Karl Rove belongs in shackles." "A group of village whores have taken a day off to do laundry."
Intense language like this used to be confined to construction sites and corner bars. Now it is normal discourse on Web sites, the most popular forums for political discussion. Much of this is new. Politics is a social endeavor. The Web is nothing if not "social." But the blogosphere is also the product not of people meeting, but venting alone at a keyboard with all the uninhibited, bat-out-of-hell hyperbole of thinking, suggestion and expression that this new technology seems to release.
At the risk of enabling, does the Internet mean that all the rest of us are being made unwitting participants in the personal and political life of, um, crazy people? As populist psychiatry, maybe this is a good thing; the Web allows large numbers of people to contribute to others' therapy. It takes a village.
But researchers note that the isolation of Web life results in many missed social cues. It is similar to the experience of riding an indoor roller coaster, what is known in that industry as a "dark ride." This dark ride could be a very long one.
note: Sent to RPR by a reader and excerpted, thanx.
gf
8 Comments:
Thanks for bringing this to my attention. Of course, I don't really agree with the commentator's premise.
The blogosphere is a new form of interaction that involves a different perception of "private" life. As far as I can tell, everyone has a perception of privacy, but what gets put in that category differs from culture to culture, and from time to time.
It's not that we don't know what you do in the bathroom when you go there. It's that we want you to go through the ritual of going to the approved room to do these things. In the time of public bathhouses and chamberpots, the rituals were different. But if a group of us were locked in a room together, we'd quickly develop a comforting ritual about a particular corner of the room. There's no overt reality about what's private - it's the willingness to follow agreed rituals that makes actions socially acceptable.
The social fabric is not falling apart. Scantily clad teens and drunken frat boys still do these things in approved physical spaces. However, some proof that frat boys drink too much will get posted in the new "private" space of blogs. There are probably pictures of worse things, along with "things I wish I could say to my wife." People have always had these thoughts, and have always found an outlet for them. The need to pace the border of privacy is not new.
The blogosphere is a new "space" which requires new rules. Of course, the first people to enter it and test its limits are the people for whom the older limitations didn't sit well. People who find the established rules comforting will complain that the new place feels strange. Yet eventually, they'll find their own way in it as well.
thomas-
thanx a lot for your thoughtful comments and i have some thoughts of my own but some other responsibilities are calling right now. i'll get back to you.
Hmm. I seem to agree with Paradise, for once.
One man's blistering attack is another man's well-reasoned argument. For example, supposing Person A goes through life spouting meaningless namby-pamby pleasantries ad nauseum, and Person B wants to point that out. Is that best done in person? It might be better to voice that kind of sentiment in a blog, where Person A might pretend not to have noticed, or where Person A might have more opportunity to think through a response than would be possible on the fly, in person.
I mean, Person A might be getting blistering attacks because it's a blog. Then again, Person A might be getting blistering attacks because of how he chooses to present himself and his ideas.
Y'know?
I think that Henniger's comments were about two things: lack of any inhibitions and use of foul language. Society, and the 'net is society, requires a certain baseline in etiquette. That's not to say there should be no porn, no outrageous speech, etc. but that a complete lack of inhibition is a form of insanity. Personally, I steer clear of the completely insane and totally repulsive, and I'm not a big fan of sites full of swear words (if only because so much of it is simply boring and not creative at all; amazing the # of people unable to swear with any panache at all). And the anonymity thing can be a problem for it allows people to attack and spread false claims and victims of such have almost no recourse. Henniger is not criticizing robust debate, or even sharing private thoughts, but the extreme, and he's suggesting that what was once is extreme is being embraced by "normal" society. Can you imagine a society where people are free to come completely unglued, where there are no norms that demand that we filter ourselves, where we are required to behave a certain way, simply out of courtesy? Increasingly I experience people behaving in uninhibited ways in real life as is being done on the net and it's unpleasant and scary.
"Can you imagine a society where people are free to come completely unglued, where there are no norms that demand that we filter ourselves,..."
No. But I can definitely imagine that a world in which people allow themselves to cut loose on blogs. You may be naked, swearing, and on drugs, but you're also sitting at home, typing on a computer. It's not exactly the pinnacle of anarchic hedonism.
tom-
i'm not sure it has to be the pinnacle to have a negative influence. i think there is an accumulative affect that blog behavior gets added to what is portrayed in movies, music, lyrics, how political leaders interact, scandals and violence around the world and it all begins to add up.
some of us who are slightly older, have a basis for comparison in how we think we should interact with one another. younger people might begin to think the blog interaction the author was writing about is the norm. i think there is a powerful validation when you see something in print.
Gary said: "i think there is a powerful validation when you see something in print."
Aha, but that begs the question, doesn't it? Is the problem that good conduct in writing is being abused? Who sets the standard? I think the problem you expose is that people lower their skepticism when something is written down. Now that any old idiot can have a blog and a website, the need to maintain skepticism with all forms of communication should become more apparent. I perceive that to be happening.
There have always been bad ideas issued in print, but in the past, it was only the rich and powerful who could do so. The internet, with all its warts, exposes the weakness of the printed word. We can either attempt to suppress the speech (or writing) that displeases us, or we can assist others in seeing why the speech is wrong.
Of those options, I'm in favor of allowing "bad" speech to occur (by whoever's definition of bad). It makes its own arguments, and puts an onus on people of good will to actively promote their ideas. Democrats above all need that kind of kick in the ass to turn off the TV and go explain why the current situation is not right.
Let's say I call Person A an incompetent, pompous jerk. I believe democracy is better served by allowing the general public to decide whether my choice of words is justified. Too often in history, suppression of speech has been used to support tyrants and bad ideas.
Sometimes, calling someone an asshole is excessive, improper, and ultimately undermines my point. Sometimes, it's exactly the right thing to say. It's up to me to find the mot juste for each situation, and you can hold it against me when I get it wrong. But that's true whether we are talking about namecalling or the use of faulty logic.
Suppression of ideas, even unpleasant ones, is always a step backwards.
thomas-
i don't know about you, but i don't have the time or the inclination to set standards for others and go about trying to convince other adults that my standards ought to be followed. rarely can one adult change another adult's mind either in person and i've rarely if ever seen it in conversation on blogs.
we tend to do this all the time as humans. we invent something new, we take it to extremes and then we complain when the government steps in and regulates the activity. some of us self regulate according to some civil standard of behavior and some don't and unfortunately as is usually the case, the few spoil it for the majority.
anonymous posting only exarcebates the temptation to vent in public because there are no consequences to the behavior. many responsible blogs require a commenter to have a verifiable e mail address and real screen name. that way, if you want to call someone an asshole, that comment can be identified to you.i think that's a fair standard to set.
the problem as i see it in the free for all commenting policy is that thoughts and accusations are printed for all of us to see but there is no resolution to any of these so-called debates. people aren't really talking "to" one another, they are talking "at" what they disagree or are angry with.i don't happen to think that's helpful for us as a community or a society.that behavior only heightens tensions and hardens suspicions and i really don't see the point.
there is a right time for anger, i agree. but again, time after time there are commenters that spew anger and hatred on a daily basis and i certainly don't see the point in that. i don't want to read those comments everyday and personally don't need to be associated with people like that. that's just my personal choice.
suppresion of ideas has never been good policy and i don't encourage censorship of new ideas or concepts. But there is nothing new or original in name calling, racial insensitivity, prejudice and disrespect of any kind. There are valid reasons why civil societies have encouraged and mandated civil and respectful behavior in our interactions with one another. the alternative is chaos and anarchy with no resolution and i think it affects people deeply when they see those commments everyday, whether they are concious of it or not.
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