the internet and kids today

I was browsing through some stuff and started reading a blog entry from this guy, David Pogue, who blogs for the NY Times. He starts off his post with this letter some 15-year-old wrote him, in which the indignant teenager criticizes another post of his. Anyway, the whole thing basically gets down to his point that a lot of people are not so civil on the internet. These are his theories why:

* "On the Internet, you’re anonymous. Since you don’t have to face the person you’re dumping on, you don’t see any reason to display courtesy.

* On the Internet, you’re anonymous. You worry that your comments might get lost in the shuffle, so you lay it on thick to enhance your noticeability.

* The open toxicity is all part of the political climate. We’ve learned from the Red state-Blue state talking heads that open hostility can pass for meaningful conversation.

* Young people who spend lots of time online are, in essence, replacing in-person social interactions with these online exchanges. With so much less experience conversing in the real world, they haven’t picked up on the value of treating people civilly. That is, they haven’t yet hit the stage of life when getting things like friends, a spouse and a job depend on what kind of person you are.

* Many parents haven’t been teaching social skills (or haven’t been around to teach them) for years, but Web 2.0 is suddenly making it apparent for the first time. (”Web 2.0″ describes sites like Digg and Slashdot, where the audience itself provides material for the Web site.)"

At first I was like yeah, I too have noticed that a lot of the comments on the internet are pretty damn vicious. But I don't know, then I began to wonder just how valid his point is. It's a point that I feel gets made a lot and is targeted at our generation. Things that get said about young people on the internet: we (and even more so for people younger than us) grew up on the internet and never learned that treating people with respect is of value, our parents aren't teaching us social skills or how to treat people, etc. Pogue makes a final remark about how schools and colleges should teach "Internet: Civility 101" because online behavior is actually important. I agree that online behavior is "important," (although I don't even really know what that means I guess) but part of what makes the internet the internet is that people are, in certain situations, uninhibited, whether for better or worse. One person who commented on the post had this to say:

"The solution is complex and begins at the individual level of doing things clearly and with our names on them, asking our friends to do the same, expecting it of others, teaching our children, and demanding that our officials step up to the plate as well."

Does that not seem ridiculous? Trying to eradicate all anonymity from the internet so then people won't say mean things?

Pogue goes so far as to say he'd give anything to hear what the 15-year-old's parents would say if they knew he had no respect for adults. When I was 15 I sure as hell didn't have that much respect for adults (although I felt at that time that adults didn't have much respect for me, so why bother), but that really had nothing to do with my time spent on the internet, and if i was disrespecting adults, I was disrespecting them on the internet and in person...but I guess where I'm going with this is that judgments get made about young people and their use of the internet, and I'm not sure these judgments have been decided by any sort of thorough process.

The reasons as to why civility does not control the internet must be so many--you would have to take into account the anonymity, the fact that people can respond to things almost immediately, the fact that maybe the internet is just reflecting general society, the fact that without face-to-face interaction and getting to see people's expressions it's easy to just tell people how terrible and stupid you think they are...Obviously I haven't thought of how this all really works out yet, but I'm wondering what people think about this issue. A lot of comments on the post were basically like oh yeah well what do you expect when all those uneducated masses have access to the internet. I was getting the sense that people think that only certain people know how to properly use the internet and everyone else is driving those proper users away, which seems ridiculous to me.

Sigh. This has been a long rant.