From China Media Project:
…The benefits of the Internet are apparent to all, especially insofar as many people now have a channel for expressing their own thoughts, perspectives and feelings such as they never before had. But I also believe it’s inadvisable at the moment to get one’s hopes up too high over the Internet. I’d like specifically to address the healthy development of ideas and some of the rather unwholesome characters that have lately appeared on the Web – I’m talking about [the phenomenon of] online abuse. On the slightest provocation it becomes, “Kill X”; “you’re an ass!”; “Oh, hell!”; “I’ll kill your whole family” or some more extreme form of personal attack.
Why are things this way? Perhaps it is because our politics over the past century have been marked with a tradition of such cruelty, and because our longer-standing spiritual traditions lack the sort of deeper reckoning with our darker selves that might lead us to tolerance and reason. Perhaps it is because a great many of these scorn-heapers are inhibited in their actual lives and have no other avenue of release, and so use the Internet to vent their anger and resentment. This has already become one reason why people are calling for an intensification of controls on the Internet….[Full Text]
