my excellent friend and IB graduate was talking to me about it the other day and he said
"anyone who has the benefit of anonymity is always going to be unnecessarily harsh, even if they dont believe what theyre saying. I studied it in psychology. Anonymity gives people power to say and do things that they know are wrong. Thats why you see people laughing on facebook groups about people who die because insensitivity becomes irrelevant if you dont have an identity"
I think that last line is fantastic - insensitivity becomes irrelevant when you don't have an identity
And i think its exactly right. When people don't have to worry about being identified they suddenly decide to throw all their morals out the window and become a new person, whether for the better or for the worst. This is evident throughout many forums, blogs and all over facebook. Anonymous comments can be seen all over the web attacking people for their beliefs and making purely insulting and unsubstantiated comments about people the don't even know.
this could also work the other way around. Insensitivity become irrelevant when you're doing it to someone who doesn't have an identithy. I believe that sort of mentality may have some relevance when mentioning certain aspects of torture during periods of war and civil unrest such as WW2. This is not in any way an excuse for the actions of course, but acts merely as a statement of the possible frame of mind and concept belief that those people may have held.
Why is this so however?
I guess a lot of people love the idea of being able to act without consequences, something that is unlikely to happen in their everyday life but in the anonymous world of the internet can be a frequent occurence.
What this says about us as people i don't really know. And i dont even know what this says about us as knowers.
But i suppose it is a good thing that we all have identities, they put boundaries on us and on our actions and make us think twice before acting the way we do.
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