Are We in an Age of Rage?

As a writer for Time magazine, Lev Grossman is all too familiar with the phenomenon of angry Internet comments, even if it takes some time to decode them.

“It took me weeks just to find someone who could tell me what the words meant,” he joked with the audience at The Actors’ Gang. “They were so extreme I’d never heard them before.”

Dick Meyer, editorial director of digital media for NPR and author of Why We Hate Us, had a tip for him: “They probably refer to one or two basic physical activities.”

The two writers, accustomed to being on the business end of the online comment, joined moderator and Los Angeles Times columnist Meghan Daum to discuss what makes us so mean when we go online.

Blog barnacles

Like the creatures attached to a ship, Grossman said, “Things accrue comments.”

The Age of Rage guestsThe comments often take on a life of their own, growing larger than the article to which they’re attached, an endless thread of self-referential conversation, often peppered with the sort of things people wouldn’t say face-to-face. Their unpredictability and offensiveness make advertisers wary, Meyer said, even if they draw some additional traffic from involved readers. And they discourage what he called the “capacity for intellectual empathy.” Readers online “balkanize themselves,” he said, by getting their news and information from like-minded sources, and contrary content, especially if it’s critical, is roundly berated, as Grossman discovered when he wrote about the video game Halo for Time.

“The torrent of hatred I received in response to that piece was just enormous,” he said, noting that even though he’s a gamer, his critics seemed to believe that “the rights to their subculture exist with them. And it cannot be taken from them.”

But comments have a certain usefulness too, the panelists said. Meyer noted that comments from readers on his columns informed his book, allowing him to test the ideas “in a way that would have been impossible” had he been reporting. Grossman said he doesn’t even mind the voice he has in his head – a “little Gawker,” after the gossipy New York media site that often mocks members of the press – that helps him “Gawker-proof” his writing. And the constant interaction between writer and reader, he noted, was something like London in the 18th century, when the community of readers and writers was small, and overlapping.

If nothing else, Meyer noted, comments do tend to be equal-opportunity hateful. “I’m condemned from the left, condemned from the right, and generally just condemned for being a moron,” he joked.

Commenting Alone

What seems to allow the hatefulness of comments, the panelists agreed, is the anonymity of commenters. (Meyers’ NPR solves this by requiring real names.) Though the mid-1990s chat room era thrived on the possibilities anonymity provided, as Grossman noted, “The Internet wasn’t created as a social medium. It was created as a tool for researchers to share information.” Had the creators known they were creating a vast community, “they probably would not have done it the way they did,” he said. “[Anonymity] severs people from any of the consequences that come from making a public statement.”

The Age of Rage guestsThe angry comment has broader social and political implications, too, Meyer noted. Americans have become “almost allergic to, or disdainful and intolerant of many, many aspects of public culture,” whether it’s Hollywood, the media, the clergy, or a particular political party. Public confidence in institutions plummeted after Watergate and remained low, Meyer said, and spiritual well-being hasn’t kept pace with material well-being. He also said, in response to an audience question about real-world anger, that there has been no landmark legislation since the 1960s – that a culture that provokes caution and mistrust “hampers our ability to live in a society and solve our problems.” Grossman echoed the sentiment, adding that anger is “relentlessly focused on trivia…severed from a progressive social agenda.”

And in a “ferociously mobile” country where few people live near family or where they grew up, Meyer wasn’t sure that online connectedness could provide “the sort of thing that Homo sapiens need for nourishment.” At least, as Grossman noted, some online connections mitigate the meanness of online interactions. On Facebook, he said, “You’re embedded in that social matrix, which allows you to behave properly and not be a jerk.” And, he said, the Internet is still evolving, along with its social conventions. But both panelists were skeptical about whether the web could ever be civilized.

Octomom

The Age of Rage receptionThe reason the Internet might never be tamed is that anger seems to be a part of life. As Grossman put it in a Time magazine piece: “people are basically mean anyway.” The latest target of our collective anger, Daum noted, is Nadya Suleman, who recently gave birth to octoplets. With her brood numbering 14 total, Suleman became a target for “schadenfreude, voyeurism, hate, media exploitation, jaw-dropping fascination and just plain vitriol,” Daum said. Meyer suggested that some celebrity – whether it’s Paris Hilton or Lizzie Grubman – is always the target of public hate, even though we don’t know them.

But the underlying reason, Grossman said, might be our need to outsmart the next guy. The web, he said, “is very democratic, it’s very flat. No one is really distinguished in terms of status, and there’s a tremendous need to feel better than other people. It feels so damn good.”

Watch the video here.
See more photos here.

*Photos by Aaron Salcido.

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