In defence of flame wars
Saturday, May 22nd, 2004 12:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robinturnerIf the Internet didn't exist, it would have to be invented. Oh hang on, it was invented. You can see I've been reading too many student papers.
Much misery in human societies is caused by two things: people classifying other people arbitrarily, and people trying to make other people adopt their own strongly held but ultimately unimportant moral values (this contrasts with non-human societies, where most of the misery comes from predators and the fact that a couple of large males get most of the good food and hot chicks). Now the Internet's contribution to social and global harmony is not that it is an information superhighway or a bridge between nations or any of that nice-sounding stuff that was probably true in the days when you needed a three-figure IQ to get online. Its value lies in giving people a harmless outlet for preaching and demonising.
Take netiquette, for example. Once upon a time, it might have been a way to assist communication and defuse potential conflict, but now it is more often simply an excuse to start a flame war. Go to a sober, technical list and post something about the evils of top-posting (or bottom-posting) and see the thread grow ever longer and angrier. Or, again on a computer-related list, ask an innocent question like "What e-mail client do you recommend, Outlook or Thunderbird?" and watch the feathers fly. It is not just that the Thunderbird users think their mail program is superior to Outlook (which is not hard to achieve); they also feel in their souls that they are superior to all those depraved Outlook users who are too stupid to install anything else and flood the world with spam and viruses.
Now this, my dear Internet friends, is a good thing. If there were no Net, where would all that righteous anger be directed? At living, breathing people, that's where. (By the way, why do we say "living, breathing"? Are there dead people that breath?)
This post was partially inspired by my - for the first time ever - marking a certain mailing list poster as destined for /dev/null (of course if you don't know what /dev/null is, you're an evil Windows user who deserves to rot in /dev/null for eternity). If this had been a real world exchange, I would have had to tell him to his face to shut his face, which would have made him angry in the real world, which in turn might have led to a real-world fist making its way towards my real-world nose. As it was, he just did his feeble best to come up with a witty come back (I know because I sneakily posted my filter before actually putting it in my procmail file).
Perhaps what we need to do is get all these Islamic fundamentalists and Republican politicians to get worked up about something really important, like vi vs. emacs.
Much misery in human societies is caused by two things: people classifying other people arbitrarily, and people trying to make other people adopt their own strongly held but ultimately unimportant moral values (this contrasts with non-human societies, where most of the misery comes from predators and the fact that a couple of large males get most of the good food and hot chicks). Now the Internet's contribution to social and global harmony is not that it is an information superhighway or a bridge between nations or any of that nice-sounding stuff that was probably true in the days when you needed a three-figure IQ to get online. Its value lies in giving people a harmless outlet for preaching and demonising.
Take netiquette, for example. Once upon a time, it might have been a way to assist communication and defuse potential conflict, but now it is more often simply an excuse to start a flame war. Go to a sober, technical list and post something about the evils of top-posting (or bottom-posting) and see the thread grow ever longer and angrier. Or, again on a computer-related list, ask an innocent question like "What e-mail client do you recommend, Outlook or Thunderbird?" and watch the feathers fly. It is not just that the Thunderbird users think their mail program is superior to Outlook (which is not hard to achieve); they also feel in their souls that they are superior to all those depraved Outlook users who are too stupid to install anything else and flood the world with spam and viruses.
Now this, my dear Internet friends, is a good thing. If there were no Net, where would all that righteous anger be directed? At living, breathing people, that's where. (By the way, why do we say "living, breathing"? Are there dead people that breath?)
This post was partially inspired by my - for the first time ever - marking a certain mailing list poster as destined for /dev/null (of course if you don't know what /dev/null is, you're an evil Windows user who deserves to rot in /dev/null for eternity). If this had been a real world exchange, I would have had to tell him to his face to shut his face, which would have made him angry in the real world, which in turn might have led to a real-world fist making its way towards my real-world nose. As it was, he just did his feeble best to come up with a witty come back (I know because I sneakily posted my filter before actually putting it in my procmail file).
Perhaps what we need to do is get all these Islamic fundamentalists and Republican politicians to get worked up about something really important, like vi vs. emacs.
