On the whole we're not treating one another worse, we're treating one another better. At the same time, though, as anyone who's ever spent an hour in deadlocked traffic only to discover that the crash was on the other side of the highway knows, people love to watch a disaster. So all the stories about the most fucked up things in the world are readily accessible. We can learn about horrors that we were ignorant to just a few years ago from the comfort of our living rooms. So while things are getting better on the whole, we're more able to learn about all the myriad ways in which things are bad. Then we've got the internet. As you may have noticed, people are often quite rude on the internet. How would they not be, though? Face-to-face communication benefits from countless generations of adaptation and evolution. We don't just communicate in English, Mandarin, or Dutch, we communicate with the tone of our voice and with body language. The difference between typing "go fuck yourself" onto a screen and saying "go fuck yourself" to someone's face is monumental. You don't have to watch the anger in their expression or show them any form of hesitation or discomfort in your own if you're on the internet. Likewise, any social niceties you might attempt to imbue into the text will likely be lost without your voice and face to ensure the intention is retained. Instead we're left dealing with the results of whatever tone our companions in discussion choose to assign to our text, most likely whatever the first thing that comes to mind is. Compounding the confusion we ourselves are left to our own devices when it comes to sussing out how bare text should be interpreted. That doesn't mean we're not becoming generally kinder and more compassionate.
This is part of the problem. Between how sue happy people are these days and the fact that you can hide behind your internet identity, nobody takes responsibility for the things they say. There is no real negative repercussion. You can be mean or rude and not have to deal with the actual damage/implication caused by what you said, so who cares... right?The difference between typing "go fuck yourself" onto a screen and saying "go fuck yourself" to someone's face is monumental. You don't have to watch the anger in their expression or show them any form of hesitation or discomfort in your own if you're on the internet.
Even beyond that, the normal social pressures we feel that we often don't even recognize fail to come into play. It's harder to defy social norms when people are looking at us and we have to watch their reactions. I have a strong suspicion that this is also why people are so terrible at communicating and prone to anger in regard to driving, and why small things like hand signals and nods can go such an incredibly long way toward making the difference.
I guess in weird I'm the sense that I feel the same pressures attacking someone physically as digitally. I recognize that the things I say are the same and will have the same impact/worse impact/or just wrong impact on the same situation. I wish there was a way to add stress to the submit buttons on heavy comments.
Well sure, it's still some form of communication so you're going to feel some degree of social pressure, but it's not the same. You don't see their face redden or their eyebrows furrow. You don't hear their voice become louder or start to waver or see them start to gesticulate. Even simple little things in tone of voice that make the meaning of a sentence clear are lacking. We still get some of our whole communication social pressure setup, but it's way dressed down. The really troublesome thing is, we don't even think about it. We just carry on as normal because that's how we're trained socially.
Lol. What I was saying was that I, personally, am affected/invested/care the same about both situations. As in, I probably react less about physical interaction than I should, and care more about the digital effect than is standard.
That's definitely true, but having less information doesn't change my tact, it doesn't make me feel better or worse about the way I treat people/situations. Like, I don't disassociate real people from their online counterparts.