Losing Civility Online

YOUR AVERAGE AMERICAN has her own smart phone by age six. Your average millennial American screws around with her smart phone about two hundred times a day, usually while driving or walking, making a butchered mess of the King's English, and we baby boomers aint all that far behind, text wise, if a bit slower with our opposable thumbs. Thumbs up! In a fascinating new monograph, "The Cyber Effect", Mary Akin, America's premier cyber psychologist, explores an even darker, more ominous phenomenon; the monster effect, consisting in the fact that turning on a computer and communicating online alters the personality of human beings, mysteriously turning them into inveterate devils, after the fashion of Jekyll and Hyde. She explore reasons for this, which everyone else and I figured out fifteen years ago, and suggests potential ameliorations, and potential solutions to the bullying effect, aka "trolling". She proposes regulating internet behavior globally, excluding the Chinese, who have their own thing going, and claims that trolling could easily be eliminated by merely tracing it to its source, easily enough done, although high tech corporate entities steadfastly deny its possibility, owing to its unavoidable costing of money. How surprising, right? Fifteen years ago I was a forty five year old cyber neophyte, single, all juiced up on the raging testosterone often associated with late middle age bachelorhood, and blindly I jumped into the AOL chat room scene, thinking myself some kind of Don Juan, and quickly discovered that people in chat rooms behaved like Attila the Hun. Everyone else made the same discovery, and, wala! Chatrooms went the way of Edsels. End of story, but not quite. AOl went straight into the toilet, and along came Facebook and other lesser manifestations of social media, which have the very same darkening effect upon the fallible human soul, only society hasn't yet figured that out as of this writing. It will, soon enough, and Facebook and its ilk will go the way of "Thirties Love Arkansas" and "Gardeners Flower Room". Too much back biting and general acrimony, way too much, even for your average caffeinated American slob. What we all realized fifteen years ago, some even earlier, is that without faces, names, and addresses, people go crazy, allowing their evil twin to emerge, without relent. Yet, all is not yet lost. Assuming people like Mary Akin continue to delve into our darkest online psyches, solutions will ultimately emerge, much like polio was defeated and the Third Reich evolved by brute force into today's magnificent modern world leading, example setting German Democratic republic. until the, good luck online, you'll need it, and, to the extant that its still an option, happy interfacing!------------------------------------JOIN WITH US IN SUPPORTING ORIGINAL, FREE THINKING, CREATIVE WRITING BY UNKNOWN WRITERS. SHARE THIS SITE WITH AT LEAST ONE OTHER READER! THANKS!