| | |
|
TheInternetAndTheNewRacism 3 - 11 Apr 2012 - Main.CameronLewis
|
| | Every time I read a news article, a blog post, or anything else on the internet related to the issue of race, I try to avoid reading the user comments. The reason is that I know, with all certainty, that there will be a small but vocal group of anonymous posters who thrive on using their anonymity to incite racial hatred. I wish I could say that this was limited to an uneducated group of Mississippi rednecks, but even comments on race-related posts on Above the Law can rise to this level of small-minded discourse.
In fact, with the increasing popularity of twitter, many people don’t even try to hide behind a shroud of anonymity anymore. Most recently, with the release of the Hunger Games movie, there was a widely reported instance of apparent dissatisfaction and disapproval with the fact that many of the “good” characters in the movie were black. Of course, as soon as these users became aware that their tweets were being reported on major news sources like the Huffington Post, without their usernames redacted, they either deleted their tweets and made their accounts private or shut down their accounts altogether. | | | What do you think? Are internet posters generally just trying to be obnoxiously offensive or are they voicing their actual views? Can someone be obnoxiously offensive by saying racist things and yet not be a racist? Is racism what you say or what you think?
-- KensingNg - 11 Apr 2012 | |
>
> |
Jason, I’m glad you brought up this issue, the poisonous discourse on most comments sections on the internet are discouraging for their display of a really ugly side of our cultural psyche that apparently goes unexposed elsewhere. As the author of the article you linked to said, for all the insults and bigotry she has been exposed to on the internet, she had never experienced such name-calling in person.
I agree with Kensing that the author’s characterization of these people’s motivations does little to credit the broader point she is trying to make. We all like to envision Internet hatemongers, cramped in their dark bedrooms and desperate to make up for some lack of “real life” with a vindictive internet personality. Whether that’s the reality of the situation we can’t know, but even on more reputable sites where names and faces are linked to more substantive profiles than just a news site membership, people are saying really terrible stuff. The notion that their motives are merely antagonistic doesn’t explain why they would spend the time to write such hateful things, and surely the satisfaction they derive from “flaming” such comment boards can’t be enough to sustain that.
Kensing arrives at a conclusion I agree with: either people are provocatively posting, actually believe these things, or some combination of the two. I think the broader point is that the Internet represents a novel forum for people to air these types of beliefs, and find support for them amongst all the people who aren’t immediately repelled. Coupled with that is the troubling trend of young people (read: 50%+ of Hunger Games fans) sharing the slightest details of their lives and beliefs with infinite strangers on the internet. I can’t forgive a 14-year old who says something ignorant and stupid about how Rue being black “kinda ruined the movie,” but I can understand why, given that every other insignificant thought is already posted to her account, she would share that one as well.
The fact is we all make poor decisions all of our lives, hopefully more as teenagers, and the Internet provides a public forum for these mistakes and their resolution. Reading the Hunger Games article reminded me of something that happened in November, where Kansas Gov. Brownback was forced to apologize to a teenager for his staff, after they demanded she apologize for a “disparaging tweet” saying something along the lines of “#heblowsalot.” Regardless of how we feel about the underlying controversy, free speech in schools, arbitrary disciplinary procedures, etc., the prospect of a state governor apologizing to a teenager for her immature and unproductive behavior seems unprecedented.
The Internet is undoubtedly transformative, and in my example above it acts as something of an equalizer which is in most cases valuable. However, what is also does is allow people to air these types of beliefs that have long since become taboo to acknowledge out loud. These bigots find an audience, and among that audience they find some sympathizers. That organizational aspect is one of the most valuable and troubling aspects of the Internet, but the downsides can't so easily be separated from the benefits, as you noted. Ultimately, what happens on the Internet, anonymously or not, is a broader reflection on our entire society.
-- CameronLewis - 11 Apr 2012 |
|
|
|
|
This site is powered by the TWiki collaboration platform.
All material on this collaboration platform is the property of the contributing authors.
All material marked as authored by Eben Moglen is available under the license terms CC-BY-SA version 4.
|
|
| | |