Is online abuse killing the Internet?

Alaska Airlines 771 was headed back to Portland from Washington D.C. on March 7, 2015.

The airline attendant was speaking to us in a somber tone, and everyone stood in silence and listened.

All of us had forgotten about needing that extra refill of soda and whether we’d make up in the air for the delayed start out of the nation’s capital.

There was something more serious on our minds.

About two hours ago, we had filed into the plane to start our 6-hour journey across the country.

Before boarding, I was complaining about a sore throat that had entered my body 4 weeks ago, and by now had made itself so comfortable I could claim it on my taxes as a dependent.

Business travelers complained about kids screaming. Parents of those screaming kids complained about the dirty looks they got.

And then, there were those complaining about politics and politicians with the emphatic certitude that is a telltale feature of the incompletely informed.

This show continued well after the flight started.

Then, when we were over Ohio, the flight attendant made an announcement.

Usually, like many passengers, I tune out these announcements since I have always tuned them out and never been worse for it. Besides, I had my smartphone and the monitor told me the time remaining on the flight. What need could I have to listen to a human being?

Then, seeing as everyone else around me was paying attention, I listened. The following is my best recollection.

“Ladies and Gentlemen: I wanted to request your attention for a few minutes. Among us on this flight is a family I’d like for us all to recognize.”

She named two passengers who were returning home after having buried a member of their family at Arlington National Cemetery.  

The attendant added, that while many of us may be regular travelers, this journey was different for these two travelers, and she wanted to thank them and the family they had left behind for their sacrifice for our country.

All arguments, complaints and neediness were on pause.

More than 10,000 feet above air, all of us were grounded in our common humanity and our shared mortality. After the initial silence, everyone applauded the family. The mom had tears in her eyes. Many of us walked over and shook hands. There were some hugs too.

Of course, eventually the flight landed, the moment passed and life resumed.

The babies still had some crying to do, and now that I was not choked up anymore, the hacking cough was back like a bad roommate.

I thought of this incident over the weekend when I was contemplating an intervention on Twitter.

An argument was in progress, and one side was dealing in a willful misrepresentation of facts. I figured that I could provide the correct facts and that would settle it.

And then, I saw the comments where people were calling each other names I would hope they would never use in a face-to-face conversation.

Why then, do we indulge in such crude behavior behind the distance and anonymity conferred by the Internet?

Social media, in its infancy, was supposed to augment our humanity.

I remember the feeling of joy when I first found a friend on Facebook I had not spoken to in ages.

And now, in our combat with trolls, we have become the very thing we claim to despise.

Even when websites force you to validate your identity before letting you post, the discourse on the web ranks somewhere between vulgar and vomit-inducing. Much like a prison run by inmates, the Internet has been taken over by the comments section.

As I resisted my temptation to interject in that particular Twitter foulfest, I remembered that Alaska Airlines flight when total strangers wanted to express admiration for an individual they had never met to his family they would probably never meet again.

A few of us even shook hands with the flight attendant and asked her name. This woman had served us food already, and I did not recall anyone asking what her name was or where she was from.

And suddenly, a hero who had given his country the ultimate sacrifice showed us he had more to give.

He gave us the gift of civility.

I wondered if any of us on that flight, united in admiration at that moment, had ever argued online. I wondered if we’d behave just as responsibly if we disagreed online without having to look each other in the eye.

Sadly, the hyperconnectivity that was supposed to open the world to us has also led us to our basest recesses and darkest impulses.

As Tom Nichols, a professor of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and an adjunct professor in the Harvard Extension School, points out, our society is increasingly  permeated by a thin-skinned insistence that every opinion be treated as fact. Being told “you’re wrong” is being heard as “you’re stupid.” Disagreement is tantamount to disrespect.

Far from remaining a platform to exchange ideas, the Internet is becoming a sandbox where the close-minded congregate amongst the like-minded to convince themselves that they are more numerous than they are, and anyone who disagrees must be set straight.

Amid this cacophony, the safety-valves of decency and kindness shut quickly, and we are left in a pressure cooker with temperatures rising fast as we suffocate in the putrid stench of hating someone we have never even met.

The statistics bear that out, as FIGURE 1 shows.

FIGURE 1 (SOURCE)

In a research study reported by The Guardian, nearly half the 1,000 respondents had experienced some form of abuse or harassment online. Among women under 30, the incidence was 76%. CNET called online harassment of women “an epidemic.”

This is confined not just to Twitter and Facebook. LinkedIn is often infected by this too, with arguments that are as fruitless as they are endless.

This has a cost in how we live and work and how we do business.

The Internet is a vehicle to engage your customers, present and future, and engage with resources for learning and improvement. If people exhausted by such conduct were to withdraw from online interaction, would that not undermine its potential to help us personally and professionally?

I am not sure the Internet is responsible for our incivility, only exposing it and augmenting it.

So, before you add your insult to cause someone injury, remember that there is a human being at the other end with a story and a reason of their own.

Disagree is you must, but don’t let your electronic anger convert an adversary into an enemy.