Too Many Mean Comments On Line

I have concluded that commentary on the Internet is a whole lot more mean spirited than off line. Anyone today with Internet access and a bad attitude can take to the Web to attack friends acquaintances or total strangers. I think the supposed anonymity of the Internet gives the fools and mean spirited types more reason to be cruel.

It's so bad that web sites for memorials to the deceased report constant vicious comments submitted at the a site about a departed loved one. Fortunately, most of those comments are censored before they make it on line. Legacy.com, a national memorial site, estimates that almost 5% of its almost 1 million "guest book" posts each month have to be blocked, either for reasons of old fashioned meanness. I haven't found any statistic that charts mean spirited comments on mainstream site pages, but one would think it would be a far bigger figure than the 5% that exists at a memorial site. Suffice to say, that such commentary reflects a more mean spirited population today.

Many web sites now require the person commenting to register, ending some of the anonymity that emboldens some to be mean or vulgar toward another person on line. Most of the news sites do that now, but still people are often unkind or crude when posting a remark that disagrees with another posted remark, the person who made it, or about the subject matter of the commentary.

In a free society we don't have the right to not be offended. But in a free society that is educated much of that should be eliminated naturally. The educated person knows the distinction between a nasty disagreement and a simple disagreement, and further, he or she less frequently mistakes the two when posting comments. But in our age of immediacy and shallow thought it seems we have fewer of that type posting on line.

That I can be ugly to another person because I have the anonymity of stating my comment is not a rationalization that I should do it. Why is that so hard for so many people to understand today? Good character does not make room for mean or vulgar spirtidness. Good ideas do not come from the vulgar, and proving your idea right or wrong isn't a contest in which the nastiness must be the most right.