Week 16 Day 1 - Netiquette
1Today we wound up the semester with a discussion of Netiquette - proper behavior on the internet. People used to be taught netiquette, at least in theory, and there was some soft pressure on people who violated it. Nowadays, there is still a pretty hard ban on doxxing in most internet forums, but by and large netiquette has fallen by the wayside.
The biggest problems with the internet today are:
1) Strawmanning - people often misread, misquote or misunderstand what other people say.
2) No subtlety or nuance - qualifiers ("some", "most", "usually") get mentally erased all the time. Likewise, when there is a principle that has some basis in reality the internet will often mutate it into something with no qualifications at all and make it completely ridiculous.
3) The media feeds into the internet's problems by making headlines that are overly dramatic or sometimes outright misleading. When people only read a headline (which is common) they will walk away with a false impression of what reality is like. Also when they highlight internet outrage posts from social media, they feed outrage culture.
4) People commonly don't seek out alternative perspectives so they never seriously encounter beliefs contrary to their own, which can lead to a false confidence and certainty they are right.
5) Anonymity and a lack of human emotion through a keyboard can cause bad behavior and flame wars.
So my advice is to avoid the internet entirely. 😉