People Do Interact on the Internet, Don't They?

One of the copout answers offered by supporters of the all-you-can-eat view of Internet access is that people are often interacting with others over the Internet. That's true and sometimes such interaction is fruitful and positive. Other times it can get downright nasty.

Let's go back to the social sciences for just a moment. Back in the 1960's a guy named Stanley Milgram did an experiment. He put a person into a room with a little button and a coach. The coach told the person that the button would give a shock, up to 450 volts, to an individual outside of the room who could be heard, but not seen. Even though the actor who played the shockee got no shocks, he pitifully protested being shocked. In spite of all this, most of the participants shocked-on, when assured by the coach that the shockee was in no real pain.

People on the Internet often behave like Milgram's subjects. They let it all hang out with little or no thought, mostly because they're pretty much anonymous and there are no real social barriers or consequences to doing so. Sometimes this can be good and quite productive as with the many blogs where the blogger simply tells it like it is and calls our attention to an issue we should be thinking about. Other times, Internet inhabitants, probably taking a lesson from overly aggressive TV and radio pundit-talk-show-hosts, go for the jugular, while paying little or no attention to the facts.

Then there are the in-betweeners. These folks know the difference between fact and opinion, but they loosen up just enough to say their piece in a way that might start a fight if they said it in a face-to-face situation. I got an email in response to one of my "Who Designed This Crap?" columns. The author took me to task for questioning the purity of Apple computer in running its Itunes division. As best I can remember it, his comment was, "Get your head out of your sandy vagina. This is a capitalist country and businesses have every right to make a profit even if you think the profit is obscene." Yikes! There was only one response to them "fightin'" words I could think of: "How did you know I was a woman?"