It struck me the other day, stuck in traffic, watching some asshole purposely cut someone off who was driving too slowly, that urban driving is a lot like surfing the Internet.
Every time I encounter obnoxious online commenters, I wonder why the percentage of idiot jerks is so much higher on the Internet than real life. And it’s plenty high enough in real life, as I notice every day during my commute. The answer’s pretty simple, of course: anonymity brings out the worst in us. Or is it the truth in us? I’m certainly crankier online than with off-line people I don’t know well, though my friends will tell you I can be plenty snippy in person.
Haiku for You recently received a haiku request to illustrate this very phenomenon. In part, the request read:
Some of the people who comment on these boards are friends of mine in real life and it is amazing how—safely cloaked by the impenetrable mask of the Internet—they assume arrogant, belligerent personalities they would never adopt in reality.
It is all such a charade, one undoubtedly perpetuated by web surfers across the country, all of whom are donning thinly veiled disguises so they can beat up on each other without remorse.
The haiku result:
A wise — not belligerent—commenter replied:
The question is which is the real charade—their real life persona or their online angry and judgmental persona? It’s a bit frightening to think about when you filter through the comments on most websites or worse, when you’re the one under attack for an article, a film or even just another comment of your own.
I’m inclined to agree with the commenter. I think a scary percentage of us have this seething rage bubbling just underneath the surface, ready to be unleashed at the slightest provocation. There’s nothing like someone who writes something you disagree with on a website with an open comments policy, or who cut you off in traffic, to bring it out.
A couple of mild-mannered people I know have made off-hand comments about experiencing road rage every day. Not rage directed at them, mind you, but theirs directed towards others. I was baffled. But then I drove with people who would never yell or shove someone in person, people who hate confrontation face to face, but get them inside a giant chunk of steel and they’ll obnoxiously honk, give the finger, tailgate, and generally be just as dangerous on the road as the jerks they’re protesting.
Whether it’s the anonymity afforded us by the Internet or a windshield, it’s interesting to ponder what the true self is, the one acting brave behind the impenetrable machine, or the one abiding by the niceties of social conduct?
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That was supposed to be the end of this post, until I read an e-newsletter from Social Signal with a link to this blog post, Five ways to shape the soul of the Internet, which offers a much more productive conclusion.
It’s a little mushy for my tastes, but it was also inspiring. The basic message is Ghandian: Be the change you want to see on the Internet. Visit sites that reflect your values. Approach each online interaction as if we were encountering a good friend. Let down your guard (but not too much). Contribute. And make financial transactions based on your values.
There are lots of good points there – and writer Alexandra Samuel introduced me to the cool site Etsy, a place to buy and sell things handmade – but for me, the simplest and most important takeaway was to resist the urge to trade hostility for hostility, or to fight willful ignorance with smug superiority.
That could apply to driving, too, I suppose, if we were to take the lesson that we should treat fellow drivers as though they were friends and not adversaries, people to be extended consideration instead of hostility, whether they deserve it or not. Because we deserve it, and only we can create this shiny happy new roads, just like only those who value the community spirit of the Internet can create it.
The Internet is too powerful and too pervasive to be left as the province of people who don’t need or value interpersonal connection. Every online encounter that dispenses with personal affection in favour of brusque efficiency or places self-protection ahead of empathy for others, pushes the Internet towards an online culture that is as pathological as our worst offline moments.
Just in time for the new fall season, my computer-based PVR went kaput. In its defense, it was probably broken in my move a month or so before that, but since I don’t get any of those fancy channels with the supposedly great summer series, I wouldn’t know. I only realized it wasn’t working when I came home from work to discover it didn’t record the season premiere of House on the fancy Eastern feed channel I do get, and I had to wait until the regular old time zone came through for me. It was tragic.
While I think the IR channel-changer thingamabob probably got smushed in the move (excuse the technical jargon) and it would have been a simple matter of replacing that, I figured it was an opportune time to buy a real PVR. As much as I loved my inexpensive computer-based device and got some satisfaction in figuring out how to make it work (until it didn’t), I love the real PVR even more.
The ability to pause and rewind live TV, to record two shows at once without buying another thingamajig, and, of course, to watch TV on my TV easily: it’s an exciting new toy. But it’s also made me make think more consciously about some of my viewing habits.
I’d heard that a surprising number of people with TiVo and TiVo-like devices watch commercials, and scoffed. But it turns out I often find myself watching the commercials while watching recorded shows. Why? Because I forget I’m watching a recording. Plus, with very few must-see-every-minute exceptions, I’m always doing something else while watching TV: posting, browsing, reading, writing, cooking, cleaning, chatting, whatever. Sometimes I forget I’m watching TV, never mind that I’m watching recorded TV.
Another thing I’ve learned — a lesson I need to learn every September — is that my eyes are bigger than my … eyes. My PVR started the season promising to record House, The Office, 30 Rock, Ugly Betty, Rick Mercer Report, This Hour Has 22 Minutes, Intelligence, Life, Dirty Sexy Money, Pushing Daisies, Bionic Woman, Blood Ties, K-Ville, Back to You, Gossip Girl, Journeyman, Reaper, Chuck, Moonlight, and Aliens in America.
It was so easy to tell my PVR to record them all. It wasn’t so easy to watch them all.
Technology is making it easier and easier to bring more and more television into my living room. It’s also giving me more and more things to do other than watch television. In my couch-based downtime, posting, podcasting, iPodding, Photoshopping are some of the many p’s competing with the PVR.
So I had to do another “p”: pare down. Maybe some of those pilots I reviewed got better with time. Maybe some of those shows I’d heard were good would have captured my attention. But in a cluttered world, a cluttered PVR is one inconsequential stress I don’t need. It’s ruthless, but if a show didn’t stand out before it even aired, or if the pilot didn’t grab me and shake me and never let me go, there’s no room in my life or on my PVR.
So I’ve settled on recording House, Pushing Daisies, Intelligence, The Office, and 30 Rock, and everything else I’ll catch if I’m home in a TV kind of mood. And I hate to say it, but The Office is teetering on the precipice after tonight.
Thankfully, as easy as it is to record with my new PVR, it’s just as easy to delete.
After a slight delay, the TV, eh? podcast is back in time for the fall season. Caroline, John Callaghan and I chat about Intelligence, The Rick Mercer Report, This Hour Has 22 Minutes, Corner Gas and Little Mosque on the Prairie, while Denis McGrath interviews writer and producer Mark Farrell of Corner Gas and This Hour Has 22 Minutes (thanks mef!)
See the full show notes at TV, eh?, subscribe via iTunes or the RSS feed, or listen below (it’s about 30 minutes).
My Gmail account contained this gem of wisdom today, in that spot where random links like spam recipes and news items appear:
“I think age is a very high price to pay for maturity.”
– Tom Stoppard
Coincidence? Or did they know it was my birthday? Spooky. Though when people tell me I don’t look my age, I reply “it’s the immaturity,” so I don’t think I’m even getting the benefits of aging.
But it turns out I’m not only becoming a crotchety grandmother, I seem to be channelling my own grandmother, who was not at all crotchety.
I remember her marvelling that she was born at the most exciting time in history. She’d ask me to think of all the advances in her lifetime. Cars and planes and phones and television became commonplace. Women were declared persons. World War II and the Cold War came and went. A nurse, she saw medical advances including the introduction of the polio vaccine and the birth control pill, and the eradication of smallpox. She also lived to see personal computers and e-mail and the Internet … not that she used them much.
In my own lifetime, it’s the evolution of those web technologies that have changed the scope of my world dramatically. Dissection of the large-scale changes is best left to those with big brains and more time to dash off a blog post. But the small-scale change is itself remarkable, as I’ve had cause to remember lately.
I’m moving this weekend, and the apartment search was a far less painful experience than usual. When I stopped to think about why, it was obvious: the emergence of Craigslist.
I move a lot. I love the change; I hate the moving, from the search to the unpacking. Now, the Internet has made the search part a breeze, even if it can’t yet help with lifting heavy things (though I also found my movers with an Internet search and comparison of reputation and BBB record).
I last moved two years ago, when Craigslist was already a popular place to post classified ads, and yet I found my current apartment through a newspaper ad after striking out there. Now, Craigslist has exploded, and is undoubtedly The Place. There’s no reason to go anywhere else.
Advertisers don’t pay, so they don’t skimp on the words or use obscure acronyms. No more phone call after phone call to find an apartment that’ll allow a cat, to people too cheap to put n/p in their ad. No more judging a place based on a 20 word description. Only the idiot advertisers don’t take advantage of being able to give a full description and photos. And the vacancies are virtually all there, all in one place.
It’s easy to think the Internet has expanded my world by giving me access to information from places and people that would have been out of my reach before. But another way to look at it is that it’s made my world smaller … in a good way.
I’ve recently booked flights online to meet up with people who have become great friends in real life, after initially meeting them through discussion groups and blogs and developing friendships through email.
Almost 15 years ago — oh god, I am old — I lived in a French area of New Brunswick for a year. This was before I or anyone I knew had email. I kept in touch with friends back home by phone and mail, and then after I returned, with friends I met there the same way. Contact was sporadic, and old friends became penpals more than a daily part of my life — and that only if they were good about writing, like I was, or picking up a phone, like I wasn’t and am not.
About five years ago, I lived in Mexico for a couple of years. Everyone I know had email, and that was my lifeline. I kept in touch regularly with a wider circle of people — no need to decide if a correspondent was stamp- or toll-worthy, or if they’d think I was. And some of those casual friends became close friends with the ease of correspondence allowing us to further discover our compatibility.
Now, blogs and other social media sites help me keep connected with friends from across the continent, friends I’ve met because of the Internet, or managed to keep in touch with because of the Internet.
I can’t be one to complain about the loss of the intimacy of phone calls and letters, because they haven’t been lost. I haven’t written a real snail mail letter for years, I’ll admit, but I have written many a lengthy email I put just as much effort into. I’ve never been good at the phone, but I still spend a lot of time on it. Skype even makes that cheap and easy, if not always 100 percent reliable. All of these new tools have added, not subtracted, to my options and my feeling of connectedness to friends and family.
Maybe I can’t come up with a list of advances like my grandmother’s, but just the one — the advances in Internet technologies — is enough to make me marvel at living in one of the most exciting times in history.
My latest for Blogcritics is a book review of a guide to proper email use. I don’t get into this in the article, but my day job partly involves electronic communications, which partly involves things like creating an enewsletter to compile the all-staff emails in order to reduce email clutter, and coordinating an email etiquette campaign to tell people things like “stop hitting ‘reply all’ or I will rip your face off!” So anyway, that explains why I asked to review this one from Random House:
