By Victor Greto
Michelle Greer sees it everyday, both virtually online and in the flesh-and-blood real world.
Rudeness and vulgarity, a lack of respect and commiseration.
“There’s a lot of decline in general manners and things of that sort,” says Greer, 30, a nurse at Wilmington Hospital and participant in online chats.
“Taking my daughter to day care, people I pass in the hall and smile and greet and say good morning, they never change the scowl in their faces and give no reply,” she says.
Online, she was so outraged by a fellow chat participant’s sign-on name — unprintable here — that she complained.
“These threads are getting ridiculously out of control!” she wrote in part, “and I can’t believe you even let this person have that name as a sign on at all….”
For some experts, online writers and chat participants, it’s only more evidence that the level of American discourse has coarsened.
But for others, it’s not the discourse that has changed. Technology has allowed more access by those formerly stifled from expressing themselves.
Most, however, agree that conversations among Americans – online, on TV and in person – have become different than they were only two decades ago.
Experts say the way we talk to each other actually has been changing for the past century for many social reasons. But in the past few years, the ease of Internet access and the ability to write anonymously has further accelerated the changes.
“These things went on prior, but now that you have easy access, it’s easier and quicker to show your prejudice,” says John Shure, a contractor for DuPont who has chatted online many times, and who reprimanded one delawareonline chat participant who had made racist remarks.
“People who say some things would not say them if they had to tell their real names,” he says. “Especially in Delaware, because it’s so small. People have a lot of pent-up stuff inside them.”
In the last year, hundreds of newspaper Web sites across the country have added features that allow online readers to easily and anonymously add their comments on each article.
“The notion is to afford readers an opportunity to comment on issues without the heavy hand of an editor excising words for length,” said David Ledford, executive editor of The News Journal.
“Of course, we would hope that people take seriously our policies about appropriate language, which they agree to when they register to participate in the forum. We can’t monitor the site 24-7, so we depend on readers to help us watch for people who step over the line with a post that is obviously offensive to community standards. When that happens, when a writer violates our terms of agreement, we terminate their ability to comment.”
By merely making the service available, however, news organizations have encountered a phenomenon long known to sociologists who study human interaction.
“The more you diversify your identity with multiple IDs, the less primary your physical relationships become,” says Margaret Chojnacki, 29, an assistant professor of communications at Barry University in Miami. “You have this escape or online community that provides all your needs, and you don’t have to be accountable to anyone in person.”
But that doesn’t necessarily mean that people and discourse in general have changed.
“I don’t think we have changed in the coarseness of our discourse,” says Elisabeth Gibbings, chair of the Delaware public education committee for the Delaware Psychological Association. “We’ve just changed the likelihood of it being heard in a public forum.”
John Sweeney, editorial page editor at The News Journal, agrees.
“At some level, discourse in America has always been rough, crude and offensive,” he says. “What has happened is the loosening of controls.”
That loosening has allowed “ordinary people like me to have a technological means to reach people that a couple of years was scarcely imaginable,” says Dana Garrett, who runs the politically-oriented “Delaware Watch” blog.
“We have the illusion of it being more coarse only because communication is everywhere now.”
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The Internet is only the latest twist on changes in social discourse over the past 100 years, says Kathy Giuffre, a cultural sociologist at the Colorado College in Colorado Springs.
Many years ago, she says, more people used to live in tighter, smaller communities where there was a lot of social pressure to conform.
“When you have that situation, you have relatively polite behavior, a lot of informal social control that keeps anti-social and negative dispositions at bay,” she says.
But Americans have been changing from that toward a fragmented series of “networked individuals” for many decades.
That is, as members of extended families left their farms and ethnic neighborhoods throughout the 20th century, they tended to team up or group themselves with people who thought like themselves.
“Because we’re isolated, we make ties with others that we like, but we come in contact with lots of strangers during the day, and that means we are free to engage in behaviors that are anti-social because we are not going to be held responsible for our behavior to the larger community.”
These anti-social behaviors may happen as we drive, shop or even park.
Here’s a good example that has nothing to do with the Internet but that many have experienced.
Say you’re in a long line at a grocery store and a cash register opens up.
Who goes — or runs — to the register first? Who should?
Is it the little old lady? The person who is in line first? Or is it the person who runs the fastest?
In that situation, Giuffre says, “We’ve never spoken to each other before, nor battled out these issues (in a family or neighborhood context). We’re strangers to each other, but we’re all there together in the supermarket bashing our carts into each other. What’s the most appropriate behavior?”
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That social disconnect is something Michelle Greer sees both online and during her day-to-day life.
“Even when I’m walking the crosswalk with the light in my favor,” she says, “people (in cars trying to turn) make rude gestures and threats at me. I have had a gentleman threaten me over a parking space. He threatened to slash my tires over a parking space while I had my toddler in my arms. This was a man twice my size.”
Mike Matthews, 24, a local blogger, says the Internet has been “the impetus for everything,” from both the shape of the dialog of the debate to inflating the number of players in the debate.
Although Matthews says the online community is really only a small portion of the population, it’s composed of “people who are interested in the subject. So, it’s a natural progression to go from the Internet into other forms of media. It sells. It works. People respond to outrageousness.”
Greer, however, says she doesn’t see the discourse coarsening any more than it has been during her lifetime.
“It just feels that way because of the Internet,” she says.
Acknowledging that some of the stuff on the Internet and in story chat is juvenile, “Much of it is good,” Sweeney says. “People have always had the right, but now they have to the ability to answer back to the professional press. Much of what they have to say is on the money.”
Although they dislike the racist comments they read online, readers such as Greer and Shure say they like online chat because it is their forum to express their frustration that the mainstream newspaper tries to be too many things to the broadest spectrum of people.
Racist comments, Garrett says, are from a small minority, and they have been discredited.
“It’s a wonderful development in society,” Garrett says. “When I was a child, I had relatives who would make me recite [racist slogans]. These same people would never say anything like that today.”
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Andrea Greenbaum, an English professor at Barry University, thinks that while discourse has gotten cruder, it is more democratic.
“People are creating blogs and Web sites and the public conversation has gotten greater,” she says. “They’re more globally informed.”
Internet anonymity also has a positive, democratic place, says Tim Burke, an associate professor of cultural history at Swarthmore College.
It allows for the “anarchic creativity of people who are online,” he says. “People who defend anonymity make a distinction between anonymous Internet writing and pseudonymous writing — people who use anonymity to protect themselves because they feel vulnerable.”
Anthony Oakman was banned from chatting on delawareonline because of numerous choice words he used.
Although he threatened to cancel his subscription to The News Journal using even more choice words, he says he still reads it everyday, and brings it with him to work. When he gets home, he’ll click online to check the latest news.
“I don’t consider myself to be an obnoxious bully,” says Oakman, 40. “I shoot from the hip.”
It’s those who act different in their daily lives from what they present online who should be ashamed of themselves, he says.
“The shameful part is the front they put up at work, and then they go and put out what they really think on the Internet,” he says. “They harbor resentment.”
A resentment not all that different from what had been felt centuries ago, Gibbings says.
“I can imagine Thomas Jefferson and John Adams going off for a drink and being upset about George Washington being distant,” she says. “But they wouldn’t go to a local reporter or text message George and say, ‘Get down off your high horse.’ Now, everything is much more out there.”
And that’s good, Sweeney says.
“The two-way communication provided by the Internet offers a wonderful amount of freedom,” he says. “It really is a marketplace of ideas. It offers an opportunity for a speedy exchange of thoughts from a wide variety of voices. But, by the nature of that speed, some of the messages will be too hasty and unpolished. And, in reality, some of the voices will have little to say. But it’s a big Internet.”
The Internet’s role in changing social discourse is different from the changes inspired by the advent of radio and television, says Chojnacki, the communications professor.
“TV and radio were criticized by their effects and messages,” she says. “The Internet is about something else. Even then, the family would gather round the radio or TV, they were mediums for messages, not substitutes for social structures and communities in our lives.”
Blogger Dana Garrett, however, says that a polite, if virtual, community can be created through vigilance.
“I’m willing to engage in harsh discourse when I come across someone I consider who has attitudes and engages in language that reflects anti-social discourse,” he says. “I want to marginalize them so that those who can have a serious conversation can have them. Some of these people are absolutely incorrigible. So, the hell with them.”****