Chatrooms separate the men from the boys Polly Curtis Friday March 26, 2004 The Guardian Internet chatroom users can be so aggressive that a sociologist studying them has labelled some online communities "electronic fight clubs". According to the new research, even the most laid-back people can erupt into furious rants when debating online, and it's all part of an effort to distinguish themselves from the next user. Some even take on multiple personalities in a bid to outsmart their online acquaintances, while others adopt menacing usernames. Gordon Fletcher, an information systems lecturer at Salford University, revealed his findings to the British Sociological Association meeting this week. His paper, entitled "Fight Club: culture, conflict and everyday life amongst an online community, focussed on a sociological study of an online finance forum", describes conflict as "a unifying social force that shapes individual participant's relationships with one another". The research's abstract explains: "Conflict is an important social force among online communities, as it assists in the construction of hierarchies and social orders without the need for prior knowledge of individual participants or other forms of verification or trust in relation to the claimed identity of others." The finance chatrooms that Mr Fletcher studied were made up of stockbrokers and finance buffs, who used pseudonyms such as Moriarty and Xerxes, and repeatedly argued until they established a pattern of social hierarchy. "The hallmark observation of this forum was the regularity with which conflict occurred among the members," Mr Fletcher told the Times Higher Education Supplement. "These people are coming together because they have a common interest, but that doesn't necessarily mean they want to be friends with one another," he added. Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004 http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4888355-111163,00.html
Interesting. Online community interaction, in general, has a lot more incidents of rudeness than face-to-face interaction. I think it's precisely because the subtle facial and vocal cues that help us to communicate with each other are lost. It's easy to take your frustration out on someone you can't even see and probably wouldn't recognize in a crowd. Maybe people don't feel as hurt, or are more willing to fight back, when insulted by someone who exists (to them) as a series of letters on a screen. At the same time, interesting that they observe the same systems of hierarchy and power struggles that exist in so many human groups today. (not to mention other groups... baboons, chimpanzees, packs of dogs... I think it would be cool if the human race, with our increased intelligence, could manage to get away from this kind of social structure for a change.) Except for the things you can do online that you can't do in real life... multiple identities, fake identities, etc. (This says something, and it's not a good thing, about the ethics of the people involved. An answer to the age-old question... what would you do if you could get away with it? For example, if you didn't have to prove who you were? Obviously, quite a lot for some people.)
It sorta makes sense - in the absence of fancy cars, good looks, big spending, and so on, that are normally used to establish one's place in the typical humonkey hierarchy, there would have to be another method of deciding who eats first and who gets **** on.
Reminds me of the <a href="http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2004-03-19">Greater Internet F*ckWad Theory</a>
