Are blogs, emails, and texts making us too mean?

This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replying the story in its archived form does not constitute a re-publiccation of the story.

When commenting on a blog, or "tweeting" about a live event, do you find yourself saying things you wouldn't say to a person's face?

This came up when a loyal ToastedRav.com user passed along this article about an on stage interview at South x Southwest in Austin with the founder of Facebook.

Apparently the interviewer wasn't doing a very good job in the eyes of some audience members. A flood of texts and Twitters soon turned into a feeding frenzy of heckling. A sort of mob mentality appears to have ensued as described in the article:

""Never, ever have I seen such a train wreck of an interview," read one "tweet," as a post on Twitter is called.

The heckling soon migrated from the online space to the real world. Audience members started yelling out comments that reflected the online chatter. When the CEO suggested the interviewer might want to ask some questions, the audience erupted into cheers vigorous enough to surprise those not following the tweets."

In the same setting without the technology, I wonder how many in the audience would have been willing to walk up to the interviewer after the talk, look her in the eye, and say her work was "a train wreck." (Maybe it was, but that's not the point.)

This is something that's popping up more and more. When WIL radio conducted a "social experiment" trying to get two strangers to marry one another, the comment boards exploded vicious attacks on the contestants and other posters. Some of it was so obscene it had to be removed from the site.

The nastiness has extended to all sorts of posts by all sort of people on this site. It seems some folks can't intelligently disagree with a person. They have to resort to name-calling.

Blogs can go that route as well. This is not to say bloggers shouldn't voice their opinions loudly, or be critical when they think it's legitimate. But there is a way to do it in a respectful manner, like you would if you were having an "in person" conversation.

Hiding behind a nom de plume has become another habit in all these areas, further emboldening people to attack mercilessly without fear of repercussion.

All I'm saying here is we should have a little bit of a filter on what we say and how we say it in the cyber world. When talking to someone face to face, you're going to be a little more diplomatic, if for no other reason than the fear of being punched in the mouth. I wonder how many people in cyber-space might get a little nervous if their name and address were attached to everything they posted online.