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!
