Post by soothsayer on Mar 10, 2011 19:39:03 GMT -5
This is all true, no?
www.slate.com/id/2287739/
Excerpt, censored:
"What's my beef with anonymity? For one thing, several social science studies have shown that when people know their identities are secret (whether offline or online), they behave much worse than they otherwise would have. Formally, this has been called the "online disinhibition effect," but in 2004, the Web comic Penny Arcade coined a much better name: The Greater Internet Fu*kwad Theory. If you give a normal person anonymity and an audience, this theory posits, you turn him into a total fu*kwad. Proof can be found in the comments section on YouTube, in multiplayer Xbox games, and under nearly every politics story on the Web. With so many fu*kwads everywhere, sometimes it's hard to understand how anyone gets anything out of the Web."
www.slate.com/id/2287739/
Excerpt, censored:
"What's my beef with anonymity? For one thing, several social science studies have shown that when people know their identities are secret (whether offline or online), they behave much worse than they otherwise would have. Formally, this has been called the "online disinhibition effect," but in 2004, the Web comic Penny Arcade coined a much better name: The Greater Internet Fu*kwad Theory. If you give a normal person anonymity and an audience, this theory posits, you turn him into a total fu*kwad. Proof can be found in the comments section on YouTube, in multiplayer Xbox games, and under nearly every politics story on the Web. With so many fu*kwads everywhere, sometimes it's hard to understand how anyone gets anything out of the Web."
