Civil Simian - Anonymous Snark, The Sub-Culture of Internet Forums

Anonymous Snark; The sub-culture of Internet Forums

By Shawn Rohrbach

Two years ago, I was teaching a class in Rhetoric to technical students who would be employed in the world of Information Technology. There was some resistance to studying something "soft" like speech and communications; that resistance ended when we discussed the social implications of free speech over the Internet. Now I had their attention.
During the quarter, I showed a slide of Normal Rockwell's painting “Freedom of Speech". I lead a discussion around the notion that we have changed since the painting first appeared during the Second World War. Rockwell had a middle aged white man serve as the model of American Free Speech, and there were no women or minorities depicted. The other models in the panting, typically older men or young boys, looked up to this middle aged white male as the voice of American Freedom. Aside from the dated and narrow view of who really has free speech in America, I used the illustration to point out that while the man was speaking his mind, we can assume most people in the room knew who he was and he was not afraid to stand up and express his opinions in public.
One astute young woman in the class claimed no one does that any longer. Some people are paid handsomely to appear on provocative talks shows to express opinions that we do not believe are their own but are scripted to entice ever larger audiences. She claimed people hide on Internet based forums and chat rooms using anonymous monikers and the opinions they express are as scripted and provocative as any sleazy talk show. I made as a study of this a class assignment.
The next week, I was flooded with lists of user names and comments posted on a variety of topics. I had also done my research on various forums serving the interests of experienced and aspiring writers. No matter the topic or focus of the virtual community, the pattern was identical. Members joined with anonymous user names and commented on various topics using these pseudo names.
The problem was the quality and tone of these anonymous comments. I learned the term that week of “Forum Whore"; a person who uses a pseudonym and attempts to dominate a discussion thread with belligerent and unverifiable opinions and crude insults directed at other members. I learned quickly new members who use their real names are flamed in the forum and their names are researched through every internet search engine and they are attacked outside of the forums as well.
I remained a member of two writers forums long after the assignment and discovered that more than just being abrasive and insulting, some members of these forums were intent on belittling and demeaning new members to the point of forcing them to quit the forum and hopefully writing altogether.
I asked a psychologist about this and he gave me an interesting lecture I could barely understand about how humans, when given the opportunity to voice anonymous opinions, will lower themselves to the basest of human form but when asked to associate their real names with the opinion, will opt to remain silent.
Where I come from, we called that being plain chickenshit.
After two years of attempting to find forums that I think contribute to public discourse and are not just an online version of the scripted talk show fights, I gave up. I have seen a few attempts at raising the standard of discourse, but that fails as soon as users are allowed to post anonymously. While I remain a passionate follower of all things technical, I will in the future seek out opinions of people who are brave enough to use their real names and express opinions that, if not learned and polite, are at least original and can be attributed to the person expressing them.