Internet Gives Cover to the Cruelest

[Ajax]

Thought I'd post this opinion piece by Pulitzer prize winning New York Times Op-Ed columnist Maureen Dowd. It appeared in the Wednesday, August 26, 2009 edition of the New York Times. I found it thought provoking. I've highlighted, in bold, a few things I found to be particularly interesting. I'd interested to hear what you think.

If I read all the vile stuff about me on the Internet, I’d never come to work. I’d scamper off and live my dream of being a cocktail waitress in a militia bar in Wyoming.

If you’re written about in a nasty way, it looms much larger for you than for anyone else. Gossip goes in one ear and out the other unless you’re the subject. Then, nobody’s skin is thick enough.

“The velocity and volume on the Web are so great that nothing is forgotten and nothing is remembered,” says Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic. “The Internet is like closing time at a blue-collar bar in Boston. Everyone’s drunk and ugly and they’re going to pass out in a few minutes.”

Those are my people, I protested, but I knew what he meant. That’s why I was interested in the Case of the Blond Model and the Malicious Blogger.

Sooner or later, this sort of suit will end up before the Supreme Court.

It began eight months ago when Liskula Cohen, a 37-year-old model and Australian Vogue cover girl, was surprised to find herself winning a “Skankiest in NYC” award from an anonymous blogger. The online tormentor put up noxious commentary on Google’s blogger.com, calling Cohen a “skank,” a “ho” and an “old hag” who “may have been hot 10 years ago.”

Cohen says she’s “a lover, not a fighter.” But the model had stood up for herself before. In 2007, at a New York club, she tried to stop a man named Samir Dervisevic who wanted to drink from the vodka bottle on her table. He hit her in the face with the bottle and gouged a hole “the size of a quarter,” as she put it, requiring plastic surgery.

This time, she punched the virtual bully in the face, filing a defamation suit to force Google to give up the blogger’s e-mail. And she won.

“The words ‘skank,’ ‘skanky’ and ‘ho’ carry a negative implication of sexual promiscuity,” wrote Justice Joan Madden of State Supreme Court in Manhattan, rejecting the Anonymous Blogger’s assertion that blogs are a modern soapbox designed for opinions, rants and invective.

The judge cited a Virginia court decision that the Internet’s “virtually unlimited, inexpensive and almost immediate means of communication” with the masses means “the dangers of its misuse cannot be ignored. The protection of the right to communicate anonymously must be balanced against the need to assure that those persons who choose to abuse the opportunities presented by this medium can be made to answer for such transgressions.”

Cyberbullies, she wrote, cannot hide “behind an illusory shield of purported First Amendment rights.”

Once she had the e-mail address, Cohen discovered whence the smears: a cafe society acquaintance named Rosemary Port, a pretty 29-year-old Fashion Institute of Technology student.

Cohen called and forgave Port, but did not get an apology. She had her lawyer, Steve Wagner, drop her defamation suit. But now Port says she’ll file a $15 million suit against Google for giving her up.

Port contends that if Cohen hadn’t sued, hardly anyone would have seen the blog. (If a skank falls in the forest and no one hears it ... ?)

But Cohen says the Internet is different than water-cooler gossip. “It’s there for the whole world to see,” she told me. “What happened to integrity? Why go out of your way solely to upset somebody else? Why can’t we all just be nice?”

She said she may become an activist, and has been e-mailing with Tina Meier, mother of Megan Meier, the 13-year-old who killed herself after getting cyberbullied by the mother of a classmate who pretended to be a teen suitor named “Josh.”

“If that woman had started a MySpace page as herself, that little girl would still be in her mother’s arms,” Cohen said.

The Internet was supposed to be the prolix paradise where there would be no more gatekeepers and everyone would finally have their say. We would express ourselves freely at any level, high or low, with no inhibitions.

Yet in this infinite realm of truth-telling, many want to hide. Who are these people prepared to tell you what they think, but not who they are? What is the mentality that lets them get in our face while wearing a mask? Shredding somebody’s character before the entire world and not being held accountable seems like the perfect sting.

Pseudonyms have a noble history. Revolutionaries in France, founding fathers and Soviet dissidents used them. The great poet Fernando Pessoa used heteronyms to write in different styles and even to review the work composed under his other names.

As Hugo Black wrote in 1960, “It is plain that anonymity has sometimes been assumed for the most constructive purposes.”

But on the Internet, it’s often less about being constructive and more about being cowardly.

[Jed M]

There is a lot of truth in that piece. Back when I first got online I used to go by different screen names other than my real name. Maybe its because I was younger, but it felt a lot easier to let your hair down. Now that I go by my real name I find that if I am going to say something that may create tension or controversy I try to do it in a way that is reasonable and factually correct and one that won't embarass me later. Even with just regular postings I think you are more conscious of what you are typing if you are representing your "real" self. If I was just some random guy nobody would ever know who it was, who really cares if I mess up or am completely wrong? Just change names and move on.

I guess that is why 99% of a-holes on the internet have names like "bluespyder3483" and are completely anonymous.

[gonk]

I still like the way Penny Arcade summed it up a few years ago: John Gabriel's Greater Internet ****wad Theory.

[Chu Gai]

She writes as if anonymity is necessarily intertwined with both vileness and the internet. As a known commodity, Dowd can be reached a number of ways. That though hasn't prevented her from taking her own shots,

"The Internet is like closing time at a blue-collar bar in Boston. Everyone's drunk and ugly and they’re going to pass out in a few minutes"

Anonymity has had great benefits in the course of human history. Some may recall Benjamin Franklin writing under the pen name of Constance Dogood. Or Soviet dissidents who wrote and published about the good times in the good old USSR. Whether you like him or not, that fellow known as Deep Throat written about by Woodward and Bernstein. Or maybe the thousands upon thousands who've written, emailed, sent pictures or videos of what transpired in Iran. The few who've chosen to remain anonymous so that their remaining relatives in North Korea aren't sent to perhaps one of the largest internment camps in the world. Or killed.

There are equal benefits that have accrued when the person's name is known. Solzhenitsyn, that French fellow Emile Zola who wrote that J'Accuse piece. Regan at the Berlin Wall. Kennedy standing firm against the Soviet blockage of Berlin.

While one can make a case for the internet as a means of rapidly promoting character assassination, one can also make an equally strong case for writers for newspapers doing the same. For a person who disparages the internet, unless it perhaps agrees with her POV, she is well aware of it and uses it to beat her own drum.

"She took a forum, Facebook, more commonly used by kids hooking up and cyberstalking, and with one catchy phrase, several footnotes and a zesty disregard for facts, managed to hijack the health care debate from Mr. Obama." If this is so, why is Maureen on Facebook?

"...Hillary could just as well have made the same comment in Paris. (And looking unhinged about your marriage on an international stage hardly empowers women.) She may have been steamed about Bill celebrating his upcoming 63rd birthday in Las Vegas with his posse. The Times's Adam Nagourney irritated Clinton Inc. when he reported that Bill went to the pricey Craftsteak restaurant at the MGM Grand HoteltMonday night with Hollywood moguls Steve Bing and Haim Saban, and former advisers Terry McAuliffe and Paul Begala, among others." Written by a man, especially if they might be right leaning, might be characterized as misogynistic, no?

If Maureen Dowd is writing this, maybe it has something to do with job security at the New York Times which has steadily lost readership and runs in the red. Times are changing Maureen. Luddism though seems to manage to appear over and over.

[Ajax]

She writes as if anonymity is necessarily intertwined with both vileness and the internet. As a known commodity, Dowd can be reached a number of ways. That though hasn't prevented her from taking her own shots,

"The Internet is like closing time at a blue-collar bar in Boston. Everyone's drunk and ugly and they’re going to pass out in a few minutes"

Umm, if you read the article, that was a statement by Leon Weiseltier, the literary editor of the New York Republic, not by Ms. Dowd. In fact, shes takes exception to the statement by saying "Those are my people, I protested, but I knew what he meant."

[Ajax]

Some may recall Benjamin Franklin writing under the pen name of Constance Dogood.

I believe he used the name Silence Dogood.

[Cujobob]

You can't force people to be mature or responsible. Eventually, our society will stop worrying so much about appearance and put everyone else' opinions in their proper place. This will then stop people from talking out of their ass.

[Chu Gai]

Your right Ajax. Constance must've been his mother :D

[etcarroll]

As a blue collar drinker from Boston, I feel I've been defamed.

I guess I'll have to begin a multi-pronged, anonymous, smear campaign against my perceived defamers.

And Ajax as well, just because he is the OP.

"Hey Ajax, your mother wears combat boots"

There, let the bloodshed commence.

[Ajax]

She writes as if anonymity is necessarily intertwined with both vileness and the internet. As a known commodity, Dowd can be reached a number of ways. That though hasn't prevented her from taking her own shots,

"The Internet is like closing time at a blue-collar bar in Boston. Everyone's drunk and ugly and they’re going to pass out in a few minutes"

Anonymity has had great benefits in the course of human history. Some may recall Benjamin Franklin writing under the pen name of Constance Dogood. Or Soviet dissidents who wrote and published about the good times in the good old USSR. Whether you like him or not, that fellow known as Deep Throat written about by Woodward and Bernstein. Or maybe the thousands upon thousands who've written, emailed, sent pictures or videos of what transpired in Iran. The few who've chosen to remain anonymous so that their remaining relatives in North Korea aren't sent to perhaps one of the largest internment camps in the world. Or killed.

There are equal benefits that have accrued when the person's name is known. Solzhenitsyn, that French fellow Emile Zola who wrote that J'Accuse piece. Regan at the Berlin Wall. Kennedy standing firm against the Soviet blockage of Berlin.

While one can make a case for the internet as a means of rapidly promoting character assassination, one can also make an equally strong case for writers for newspapers doing the same. For a person who disparages the internet, unless it perhaps agrees with her POV, she is well aware of it and uses it to beat her own drum.

"She took a forum, Facebook, more commonly used by kids hooking up and cyberstalking, and with one catchy phrase, several footnotes and a zesty disregard for facts, managed to hijack the health care debate from Mr. Obama." If this is so, why is Maureen on Facebook?

"...Hillary could just as well have made the same comment in Paris. (And looking unhinged about your marriage on an international stage hardly empowers women.) She may have been steamed about Bill celebrating his upcoming 63rd birthday in Las Vegas with his posse. The Times's Adam Nagourney irritated Clinton Inc. when he reported that Bill went to the pricey Craftsteak restaurant at the MGM Grand HoteltMonday night with Hollywood moguls Steve Bing and Haim Saban, and former advisers Terry McAuliffe and Paul Begala, among others." Written by a man, especially if they might be right leaning, might be characterized as misogynistic, no?

If Maureen Dowd is writing this, maybe it has something to do with job security at the New York Times which has steadily lost readership and runs in the red. Times are changing Maureen. Luddism though seems to manage to appear over and over.

WOW! You and I have a completely different interpretation of the article. I don't see the it as berating or disparaging the internet or even anonymity. She is decrying the abusive behavior which anonymity on the internet permits. Kinda different things, IMO. I suspect that, if people would behave themselves no one, including Ms. Dowd, would have any complaint with anonymity.

Whether or not the two quotes of Ms. Dowd's you've presented are actually examples of character assassination is pretty much irrelevant. What is relevant is that, character assassination or not, they were presented under her own name rather than hidden behind an anonymous pseudonym, which has allowed you to seek out, find, and ascribe those statements to an actual person. Would that we could do the same with all attempts at "character assassination" be they in a newspaper or on the internet.

[Ajax]

As a blue collar drinker from Boston, I feel I've been defamed.

Wait a minute!!! I know you!!! I can say, unequivocally, that, regarding that statement about Boston bars, you in NO WAY, have been defamed.

"Hey Ajax, your mother wears combat boots"

Son of a gun!! How did you know???

[dweekie]

As a blue collar drinker from Boston, I feel I've been defamed.

I guess I'll have to begin a multi-pronged, anonymous, smear campaign against my perceived defamers.

And Ajax as well, just because he is the OP.

"Hey Ajax, your mother wears combat boots"

There, let the bloodshed commence.

I can see right through your scheme. You want Jack to sue Craig to reveal your identity so he will sue you. Then you sue Craig for an even greater amount of money, like $15 million, for revealing your name.

[Chu Gai]

I don't think Maureen Dowd's article was quite so noble in its words as she's using it to also address other matters that she has a passion for. While the quotation she pulled was not her writing, IMO it was inserted there for more than one purpose. Yes, I know how to reach Dowd if I want to. I also know how to communicate with an anonymous blogger if I want to. I can also choose to ignore either.

I am not a fan of outright cruelty regardless of whether the person has a real name or nickname. Dowd doesn't like calling people names. She should read her own articles.

[Ajax]

Hmm? Not sure why you seem to wish to make Maureen Dowd the issue. What one thinks of Maureen Dowd, or her "past articles," isn't the issue.

The issue at hand was summed up very well in the decision by the Virginia court (not by Maureen Dowd), specifically "protection of the right to communicate anonymously" vs. "the need to assure that those persons who choose to abuse the opportunities presented by this medium [the Internet] can be made to answer for such transgressions."

We know how the court felt about the issue since the judge (not Maureen Dowd) ruled "the dangers of its [the Internet’s] misuse cannot be ignored..... Cyberbullies, she wrote (the judge, not Maureen Dowd), cannot hide “behind an illusory shield of purported First Amendment rights.”

I would be interested in hearing the views of others on that clash of interests.

Disclaimer: The words "Cyberbullies cannot hide" are Maureen Dowd's words, I am assuming, because they were not enclosed by quotation marks in the original article. I include them because I cannot know what terms the judge used and, without them, the sentence wouldn't make much sense.

[Musicmaniac]

I don't see how you can close a thread because it goes over this line and then open another one preaching about it. :dizzy: Looks like we're in for another "As The World Turns" thread. :his: