WEEK SIX: COMMENTS FROM THE STALL

Forgive my gross cartoon this week. I never dreamed I would be drawing a purple-haired nerd sitting on a toilet, but this week’s reading on “Communities in Cyberspace” got me started on this train of thought.

I have not spent a lot of time in online communities, but I have visited a few user groups for video and audio equipment, where I found some helpful interactions, a lot of merchandise plugs obviously planted by salespeople masquerading as users, a surprising number of smartass comments and some downright rude putdowns. In many cases, the tone of conversation suggested that members of these communities had learned their social graces in the School of Beavis & Butthead.

On my first foray into YouTube, the first and only comment I got on a video I submitted was a death threat. I removed the video immediately and am still so frightened by the incident that I am reluctant to reveal any details about it here on the Web, lest my would-be killer should somehow track me down.

I have peeked around the Internet enough to know that my experiences are not unusual. Indeed, there is a unique style in much of the communications you find in cyberspace, characterized by a breezy, high-handed, cavalier, anarchic and sometimes mean-spirited tone, usually in fractured sentences and exactly the kind of chatty, conversational voice that H.W. Fowler warns against in the end of “Modern English Usage.”

But beyond all that, Cyberspace has a definite ATMOSPHERE: a sense of place so strong that sometimes I think I can actually SMELL it. And what does cyberspace smell like? I could not figure this out until last night, when I was reading about the ugly “flaming,” feuds and “virtual rapes” that occur in online communities. All of a sudden I realized what smell had been creeping up my nose. Cyberspace sometimes smells like…a public toilet.

This is a bit more than just a smartass metaphor. I will explain.

I remember going into the boys’ room on my first day of Junior High school, where I was accosted by the smell of urinal cakes, cigarette butts and other odiferous matter, and by the crudest, meanest writings and drawings, scrawled all over the toilet stalls. How anyone could think such thoughts and visualize such images, let alone scratch them onto the walls, I could not fathom.

When I went to college, I found graffiti of more literary and philosophic character, often arranged in threads of interactions between several writers that flowed down a wall or were connected by links in the form of arrows. Each thread usually ended when some writer trumped the others with an unanswerably crude summation. Does this remind you of anything?

The other night, after several hours of studying under the stained glass windows of Suzzallo Library’s Reading Room (to which I heard an undergrad refer as “the Harry Potter room”), I went into a nearby men’s room and there, in crude scrawls around the toilet paper dispenser, I found that nothing has changed. I wondered which of the scholars with whom I had been studying spend their breaks scratching the nastiest things they can think of into the bathroom wall. I wondered which of them, clicking away at their laptops, might actually be flaming on the Internet as they sat studiously in the great hall of learning.

There are a number of theories why people behave differently in cyberspace than they do in real life. Some people say that the sense of anonymity and the relative lack of repercussion to things said on the Web make people feel free to let loose the dark side of their personality. Some say the opportunity to invent a new identity, independent of physical limitations, encourages people to experiment with different selves. Chris Pirillo told us in class about a theory that part of our brain, where sympathy and humanity reside, shuts down when we sit in front of a machine.

These are all good theories. My own theory is that the Internet can function as a toilet stall: a dark, walled, private place where we can sit and do ugly things and communicate anonymously with other anonymous beings on the walls, all without being observed. Or can we? Congressman Mark Foley and others have recently learned otherwise. There’s a camera in the ceiling! The school principal is about to bust down the door and catch you in the act! Alligators in the city sewers can come up through the pipes and bite you in the…YIKES!

In order to keep cyberspace from becoming an ugly, smelly, dangerous place, like a public toilet, we need to put it into perspective. We need to keep our feet on the ground while our heads swim in cyberspace. We need to stop thinking of cyberspace as a “whole new world,” disconnected from the everyday world, where we can do anything we want. We cannot treat the people we meet there like virtual dragons or robots that can be slain for points in a game. We should not think of cyberspace as a wild frontier, where there are no rules. Instead we should think of it as an extension of our traditional world, where we can carry on our traditional quests for progress, happiness and community, using wonderful new tools. We should bring the best of our traditions, methods, rules and courtesies into cyberspace and let them flourish.