Hey everyone, my name is Chris Barnes. I am a junior Information Science major in the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell. This is actually not my first foray into the blogosphere; I have kept a personal blog for some time, and I also blog in my official capacity as the Web Editor for our campus newspaper, The Cornell Daily Sun. In this same vein of thought, I have a new column in The Sun appearing bi-weekly in Eclipse, our new weekend edition. My column centers on technology and society, so a lot of the thoughts that I blog about here might find their way into my column at one point or another.
The Internet is such an incredibly unique place with respect to interesting phenomena that picking just one to write about is supremely difficult. However, for this first entry, let’s look at one of my favorites as an editor, the online flame war. The first two chapters of Wallace touch on it, but in case you are not familiar, a “flame war” is an online discussion that degenerates into insult-hurling and personal attacks, hijacking whatever the original purpose of the thread was. By definition, flame wars are confined to the “asynchronous” online space that Wallace discusses; namely, on newsgroups, mailing lists and Internet bulletin boards or discussion forums.
Flame wars are particularly gruesome spectacles, especially if you’ve ever been involved in one. As Wallace explains, the Internet’s cloak of anonymity “disinhibits” online posters, who might otherwise temper their messages. This effect is compounded by the cold, blunt nature of text-based communication, which causes the recipient of a message to assume the worst in the personality of the sender. Each progressive post becomes more angry and unreasoned by these processes, until eventually the whole thread devolves into pointlessness. The results of these unfortunate discussions are usually a lock or deletion by community moderators, and punishments for the belligerent parties.
A fun result of these truly tragic thread-killers is Godwin’s Law. If you’ve never heard it before, here is the formulation taken from the ultimate compendium of knowledge, Wikipedia, without a reference to which no blog post can be considered complete:
As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.
In other words, the law states that eventually, given sufficient time, all threads will devolve into flame wars. (The popular corollary to the law is that once such a reference appears, the thread is over and the one who made the reference loses.) I prefer to give humanity a bit more credit than that, but in my time online I’ve seen my fair share of online relationships destroyed by flame wars, so Godwin’s Law definitely has some merit to it.
Well, that’s all for now. Later!
3 comments:
Ive seen my share of horrible flame wars in the past. I check streetfire.net every day for car news and to check out videos. The website, while providing the best newsfeeds and the fastest streaming videos is also notorious for the horrible flame wars on its video comments section. What really annoys me is that 99% of the time the flame wars never have any solid argument to start from; someone stupid normally says something mean or ridiculous and the whole thread goes wild. I almost think that the people who use the video comments section to rip on other peoples cars don't even have cars of their own. These people ruin the comments section of the site and have given it a reputation for having rude and immature members even though the people who run the site and provide the news are extremely professional. It seems that instead of saying nothing when theres nothing nice to say, these people go out of their way to say something rude every chance they get. I find it interesting how these people use the internet in order to be antisocial and i wonder what sort of people they are in real life.
Eric
Flame wars is an interesting topic to get into. I enjoyed how you incorporated a quote to justify your point. In an attempt to do the same, here is another famous quote (I do not particularly agree or disagree with this quote, but it shows how some people feel about flame wars):
“Debate and argument on the internet is like the Special Olympics. No matter who loses or wins, everyone's still just a retard.”
I do not intend to offend and hope that this does not offend anyone.
This illustrates how people do not particularly care for flame wars. I agree with you in that flame wars obstruct the importance of the original thread; flame wars often get off topic and have nothing to do with what has been previously posted. Here is an exaggerated illustration to show this… http://xkcd.com/202/.
In addition to lack of mediation, as you suggested, flame wars also start because there is a high level of anonymity associated with the internet. As stated in class and in the reading, this anonymity leads to a lowering of the normal social constraints. So to answer Eric's question, they are probably normal people who want to argue because nobody can really do anything to harm them.
Hey Chris,
Really great analysis on what a flame war is. I definitely have to agree that the degree of tastelessness in these online wars is absolutely ridiculous. I really like your use of “Godwin’s Law”, especially since the flame wars I’ve seen come up in forums actually have mentioned Hitler before. >_>
What I kind of wish I could’ve read more about in your post is about how this pointless trolling comes about. Are there certain kinds of people who seem to cause trouble wherever they go? And why do they feel that they need to do so (all while attracting the attention of every mod and admin they come across)? I’m really glad you covered this topic, especially since many of these blog posts seem to be about Facebook in general or more ubiquitous aspects of the internet. Great job on your post and I’d really love to get more of your take on this topic!
-Kristie
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