An e-mail arrived yesterday that accused me of being the Antichrist. I hope you are impressed.
Actually, it was the third time in the last couple of months that readers have used e-mail to call me the Antichrist. Maybe the bloom is off the rose. I earned the title this time because I had ventured to say that a constitutional amendment banning flag-burning was a bad idea.
Much has been written about Internet flaming — unbridled online invective that is the Internet equivalent of road rage. In his 1999 study, "A Short History of Rudeness," the critic Mark Caldwell offered this diagnosis: "Few people, no matter how consumed with inward resentment, would dare speak so unrestrainedly or woundingly in the living presence of strangers, but the personal computer seems to unleash the beast in those who have the urge to shatter social taboos but lack the courage or articulateness to do so viva voce."
Caldwell observes that while much insult delivered in the realm of reality refers to the target's parentage ("you bastard," etc.), web flamers tend to favor the obsessively piled-up, almost Homeric catalogue of scatological references in which — how to put this? — the anus and poo-poo figure prominently. Caldwell writes: "On-line invective endlessly recycles body parts, excretory products, and knee-jerk repulsives (like maggots)." I am especially moved by being called the Antichrist because ventures into theology are rare.
Anonymity on the Net fosters a sense of freedom. The in-person constraints fall away — as at a costume ball where the disguise is total and the crowd of guests almost infinite. Say anything you wish. Better still: Invent a new self to say it. Says Caldwell: "Strangers lurch into each other's homes, unchaperoned by the vigilance of a fixed, permanent community. Anyone can cobble a persona together out of reality and fantasy mixed."
Much of the e-mail I receive from strangers is courteous, cogent, intelligent and well worth reading. Some of it is so foaming-at-the-mouth crazy, so violent, so weird, so scary that I imagine the locked ward of an asylum for the criminally insane that offers laptops for therapy.
Most e-mail falls somewhere in between. An unhappy dynamic of the Internet seems to call forth messages of scorn and contempt, of jeering, braying insult. There's an online democracy of freelance candor that is indistinguishable from nastiness. If it's not an asylum, it may be a barroom where all the guys are on their seventh or eighth beer and have a thing or two they'd like to tell your snotty self.
So we have a Miss Manners/Emily Post/Tish Baldrich problem on the Net: How to foster a minimal civility there?
I think I have the answer.
Understand this: Your reactions to being the target of flaming, especially at first, are real enough (adrenaline flows, anger flares, you have the truly physical urge to retaliate). And yet, the flame itself was merely a kind of solar flare in some other galaxy. Whatever — whoever — sent that flame of insult was a mental evanescence, a fantasy, the passing impulse of a phantom self somewhere in cyberspace. The flamer — as flamer — does not exist. Or, in any event, will not exist, the instant you hit the Delete key.
In Vietnam days, there was a poster that read: "SUPPOSE THEY HAD A WAR AND NOBODY CAME?" Now when I read the first word of insult in an e-mail — when I feel the first heat from a flame — I do not read one word further. I delete the message. Click. Gone. I do not even read the mildly rude stuff. Be polite, or sleep outside with the pigs and coyotes.
Delete all flames, without reading. When everyone adopts this practice, flamers will lose heart, and the Web will start to get civilized.