Trapped in a Cell (Phone) 0
Glen Geher explores the dark side of living in a screen-based world. A snippet:
Intuitively, we can understand why. Someone who is posting anonymously to a blog probably will never meet the blogger in person. They probably have little investment in the blogger’s personal success. Further, unless the blogger is some kind of super computer hacker, the anonymous commenter is probably never going to “get caught.” So the possibility of retribution is unlikely.
Of course, evolved human conditions were not like this at all. However, the “anonymous blog comment” is, as we all know, just the tip of the iceberg. These days, people are regularly, across a broad array of platforms, communicating with others in anonymous, deindividuated* ways. This is a highly mismatched, unnatural way for humans to communicate with one another, and for a variety of reasons, it brings out the worst in us.
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*From Britannica.com (more at the link): “Deindividuation, phenomenon in which people engage in seemingly impulsive, deviant, and sometimes violent acts in situations in which they believe they cannot be personally identified (e.g., in groups and crowds and on the Internet).”
