Digital Identities (Tech Task 2: Internet Boogaloo)
Humans have a long history of trying to justify treating each other poorly. Something within the deep primeval psyche of our species drives us to bully, control, threaten, diminish, or outright harm our fellow kind, yet those that do so "for no reason" are shunned as degenerate or crazy.
Hence the elaborate justifications: They're a different colour than I am! They have different political beliefs! They follow a different religion! People and nations will twist themselves into all sorts of logical knots to give themselves a reason for their own malevolence, facts be darned.
Take the schoolyard bully who makes fun of the child who wears glasses. Wearing glasses has nothing to do with measuring the individual worth of a person, and the bully knows this. The glasses are just a prop, justification for otherwise baseless cruelty. Blow this example up to the level of the nation state, and you have most every war ever fought. There's even a Latin expression for it, casus belli, reason for war. Without one, the war would be "unjustified", but with one, the mass killing of human beings in service to some idea or another was a-ok.
What does this have to do with digital identities? Well, think about that little germ of cruelty that lives within every one of us. Then think about a place where the social structure that enforces morality is fluid and consequences are minimal. That germ has flourished online like nowhere else, and it's not even because people have radically different personalities when they log on. Your online persona is just a facet of what you really are, because you're the one who decides what to do there and how you act. You aren't possessed by some other being when you tweet or post on forums, you're still you. The Internet is just a place with no social rules, and without those rules people quickly let their bad sides out, the bad sides they've always had but never expressed.
I think that one of the main goals of education is teach children how to function in a society. Not that everybody has to act the same or conform to one standard, but social cohesion needs some kind of ruleset to prevent the worst part of our natures running amok. The same goes on the Internet, and the basic things we teach kids in kindergarten, about empathy, respect, and not acting like a complete bag of garbage should apply to their online life as well. Talking to them about how their online self is just a part of their real self will get them thinking more about how they act and why.
Do you agree? Am I just a bitter, cynical old crank? Does this song have the most awesome key change in 80's popular music?
Hence the elaborate justifications: They're a different colour than I am! They have different political beliefs! They follow a different religion! People and nations will twist themselves into all sorts of logical knots to give themselves a reason for their own malevolence, facts be darned.
Take the schoolyard bully who makes fun of the child who wears glasses. Wearing glasses has nothing to do with measuring the individual worth of a person, and the bully knows this. The glasses are just a prop, justification for otherwise baseless cruelty. Blow this example up to the level of the nation state, and you have most every war ever fought. There's even a Latin expression for it, casus belli, reason for war. Without one, the war would be "unjustified", but with one, the mass killing of human beings in service to some idea or another was a-ok.
What does this have to do with digital identities? Well, think about that little germ of cruelty that lives within every one of us. Then think about a place where the social structure that enforces morality is fluid and consequences are minimal. That germ has flourished online like nowhere else, and it's not even because people have radically different personalities when they log on. Your online persona is just a facet of what you really are, because you're the one who decides what to do there and how you act. You aren't possessed by some other being when you tweet or post on forums, you're still you. The Internet is just a place with no social rules, and without those rules people quickly let their bad sides out, the bad sides they've always had but never expressed.
I think that one of the main goals of education is teach children how to function in a society. Not that everybody has to act the same or conform to one standard, but social cohesion needs some kind of ruleset to prevent the worst part of our natures running amok. The same goes on the Internet, and the basic things we teach kids in kindergarten, about empathy, respect, and not acting like a complete bag of garbage should apply to their online life as well. Talking to them about how their online self is just a part of their real self will get them thinking more about how they act and why.
Do you agree? Am I just a bitter, cynical old crank? Does this song have the most awesome key change in 80's popular music?
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