I’ve been wondering lately what it is exactly about on-line communication - specifically Facebook, Twitter-style communication - that tends to bring out the worst in people.  Why is it that folks seem to feel so comfortable speaking with such easy venom, such dismissive arrogance on-line in ways that I very rarely encounter face-to-face? Are people really full of anger and bitterness and finally feel they have the forum? I kind of doubt that.

Sure there’s the distance and anonymity - but that suggests people are essentially cowards. That doesn’t seem right either. I think there might be something about the actual structure of digital discourse that privileges ill-behaviour.

I was speaking at a ‘Digital Literacies’ forum a few months back and I remember a few academic types having a really sincere discussion about how they were so impressed with the ‘comments’ sections of popular news and entertainment sites, and were positing that we were really seeing the emergence of a new, vibrant kind of democratic culture on-line. I listened kind of stunned - what the hell are they reading? As far as I can tell ‘comments’ sections are overwhelmingly loaded with opprobrium, contempt, insult, name-calling and vapidity.  Every once in a while I have a look at the comments after a CBC, or HuffPo, or TSN, or Guardian story and I always immediately regret it. I see nothing like democratic emergence, the reverse really, and I am beginning to suspect that it is not going to improve.

As Robert Fisk, the great writer about the Middle-East wrote in the Independent last week:  “Friends who are currently abandoning the hate-hell of the internet tell me that the only good button is the one called ‘delete’. ” I’m not there yet, but I wonder if the way the internets have been conceived to this point actively discourages kindness and respect. I don’t have anything more there, just wondering.