It is called Twitter (cf The Birds) and, this past couple of weeks, Reddit.
If you want to do violence to someone, the correct medium appears to be massively distributed online fora. What are these media bringing out in people?
And more significantly, how can they be prevented from so doing?
The superego is not a nice thing.
2 comments:
I don't use reddit for that readon. It alway struck me as having the worst qualities of the mob. I situate the online disinhibition effect broadly under hauntology. It's the anonymity coupled the spectrality of digital media that intensifies it. I find online violence almost more harrowing than face to face violence. To me that has to do with the archival characteristics of the media. Not only is the violence there in memory ready to be represented in the cinametography of the psyche but with a digital event the representation is simply the permanent trace of the event itself. It doesnt fade or suffer distortion. More and more violence just gets graftef onto the violent thread and it becomes a hyperobjectivated monstrosity. Even non traumatic events can be jarring. Databases offer the quality of radical discontinuity and nonlinearity.
For prevention it appears "telepresence" can help but it has to be bidirectional. I've seen ppl who are extremely abusive to the avatar and text of a person who when both parties interact via video video Feed with audio will treat one another decently or will tone down from cluster fuck of sociopathic rage to maybe just passive aggressive or snarky condescension
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