Order C.B.S. Today:
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The Internet: For Entertainment Purposes Only?
Set off by the kid on his lawn who left this comment:
It’s sad, really. You’re like Alkon, unable (or perhaps unwilling) to understand the culture of the Internet. So you take offense at our customs and violate our most sacred taboos, and when someone comes to educate you, you blow him off as a “narcissi(s)tic idiot.”
Scott Greenfield writes:
My child commenter, the World Ruler, is wrong, yet right. There is a culture of which I am not a part. While I may know more about it then most people of a certain age, it moves so quickly and morphs in ways I would never anticipate that it’s impossible to stay on top of it while watching from the outside. And I have no delusion that I’m not on the outside.
My own theory of this cultural divide: as we get farther and farther from the Great Depression, America’s young become more and more comfortable that their basic needs will be met without a struggle. This leaves them free to focus on entertaining themselves with anonymous comments and practical jokes.
There are no “sacred taboos” in such a world. Lying is okay in the context of a prank, so the Amazon-bombing of Amy Alkon (who may very well be a repugnant human being) seems to them a perfectly appropriate response. In this new online world, perceived transgressors are not entitled to common decency.
Add to this the failure of U.S. public schools in the last century to teach rhetoric and logic, and it becomes obvious that those who call out the new generation for lying will be seen as racist neocons like Alkon.
The culture clash is between those who have character in the real world, and expect others to behave with character online; and those who don’t; between those who view near-universal online anonymity as a detriment, and those who view it as a benefit.
Oddly, the same clash could be described as being between those who treat the internet as a serious extension of meatspace, and those who don’t. Everything anonymously written on the internet suddenly makes sense if it’s labeled “for entertainment purposes only.”
That’s why we need have no fear that Scott’s World Ruler and his ilk will ever actually rule the world. No matter how carefully they craft their pseudonymous online personas, those personas will not (except in rare pathological instances) help the people in the real world get elected, hired, or even laid. Should the actual people accidentally reproduce, those personas will not help them feed or protect their offspring or themselves.
Despite cyberpunk dreams, human beings still exist in the real world, and in the real world, people can tell you’re a dog.
1 responses to “The Internet: For Entertainment Purposes Only?”
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I’m with you on much of this, and I’m glad to see you’re posting on this, but “racist neocons like Alkon”? That’s just how they paint me so they can go after me since they only go after people they perceive to be on the right.
Frankly, if I ever had a neo-con decoder ring on hold for me, they must have taken it away long ago for, among other things, being very anti-Iraq-war, very pro-gay-rights and pro-gay-marriage, and for voting for Clinton and Kerry (although I did vote for the execrable loser Bob Barr in the last election, since Obama was taking California and I’m fiscally conservative and socially libertarian).
While these tiny little thugs go on and on about how I’m “racist,” I actually get off my ass and do volunteer work to make things better for “at-risk” kids. I created a program called WIT: What It Takes, that I’d like to see administered across the country by Boys and Girls Clubs of America. At the moment, I speak once a month at an inner-city school to demystify “making it,” and, no, not in a pointy white hat and a sheet, just my street clothes.
And, finally, while some idiot on Sadly Juvenile recently claimed that my site was largely “Judeo-Christian,” or something along those lines, I’m actually a staunch atheist with a business card reading “Amy Alkon, godless harlot,” and I attend a lot of evolutionary psych conferences. And, no, I’m not standing outside holding up a cross and shouting — I’m in there hearing the latest research so I can put out evidence-based science in my column.
Since you seem a bit unclear on why they started going after me, I’ll post a bit of a comment I posted on my site and Patterico’s to clear it up:
Their hatred is mostly due to their continuing need for a new kickball, and loosely connected to the fact that I blogged my opinion that black activists like Jesse Jackson should work to stigmatize single motherhood in the black community. I blogged that after reading a news story about an Ohio woman named Tarika Wilson, who had six different children by five different drug dealers by the age of 24, and was living, along with her children, with one of those drug dealers. Mmm, wholesome!
Yes, I’m of the mind that children need daddies, and that you don’t bring more children into the world than you can afford to feed and care for. Crazy, I know.
Wilson, tragically (but not surprisingly) was killed in a SWAT raid on her home when police came for her drug dealer boyfriend. Live with a drug dealer, die in a SWAT raid…it’s not a surprising outcome. Wilson herself spent a year in prison. I wonder who took care of her children during that time.
And yes, I also believe white children need daddies, and I’m appalled that there’s a trend for rich white women to be “single mothers by choice,” but, apparently, in the minds of these “progressives,” if you criticize a black person, it automatically means you’re racist.
The Wilson story and Sadly Juvenile’s attacks on me are actually detailed in Chapter 9: Modems Without Manners, in the book the tiny little thugs are “reviewing” but haven’t read. Just so ugly, what they’re doing.
Thanks for listening, and thanks again for your post.
Amy Alkon February 21st, 2010 at 22:26