100 Things We've Lost to the Internet by Pamela Paul

Author:Pamela Paul [Paul, Pamela]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2021-10-26T00:00:00+00:00

[ 48 ]

CIVILITY

Goodbye, dear. Actually, goodbye “dear.” This auntie-scented nicety of a word, the one that used to signal the beginning of any decent-minded letter, has been lopped off the top of emails, texts, Slack conversations, and other online correspondence, just as atavistic epistolary sign-offs like “Best,” “Sincerely,” and “Yours” no longer wrap things up at the end. So, too, go our titles and our given names, a waste of precious thumbwork. (Who else would be reading it?) The utility-minded Internet weeds out the extraneous.

With those lost words of personal acknowledgment and endearment, we also lose the insulating effects of kindness and—forgive the old-fashioned term—civility, two virtues that were already in jeopardy, victims of the increase in partisanship and the general coarsening of culture. Our online lingo, with its casual-to-dismissive terminologies, not only reflects that decline but also pushes it not-so-gently along.

It’s easy to lose your manners online. People who would at least hesitate before yelling at their kid in person quickly resort to the ALL CAPS version in text (ARE YOU THERE!?! ANSWER ME!). Colleagues who have never met in person feel free to unleash on one another in a “private” channel. Have you ever been spoken to more viciously than you have on social media or been so vigorously upbraided for the merest of slights? It’s not just everyone else; let’s be honest, it’s us, too. Even within the confines of a text, have you sarcastically responded to someone else in a way you’d never dare to in person? You have.

Among the unhappiest workers in the Internet economy—and between the Uber drivers and food app delivery people and the warehouse managers, the competition is stiff—are the comment moderators. Imagine being forced to tune in to this negativity all day: the attacks, the complaints, the loaded encounters and threats, not only from dedicated trolls but also from the mentally unstable and from the people just having a crappy morning. They are exposed all day to everyone else’s spleen. These employees describe burnout, depression, anxiety, and the ongoing toll of stress as the daily baseline of their jobs, interspersed with jolts of anomie, misanthropy, and indifference.

The Internet was never intended to work this way. It was supposed to open people up to self-expression and connection. It was supposed to allow people to show who they really were or, under the cloak of anonymity, to break free from who others expected them to be. The Internet was meant for strangers to exchange freely with one another and in good faith. In a speech at Davos in 1996, the late poet and cyberactivist John Perry Barlow said, “We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.” The bitter irony is that rather than bring us together into any kind of Kumbaya, the fraught setting of the Internet pits us against one another.

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