The internet is like an invisible, lower class bully, beating you in the face: another careful Maureen Dowd analysis

Maureen Dowd keeps chugging along with her contributions to the fearsome internet corpus.  The recent supermodel insult-Google story gives her a chance to write about the awfulness of the Web:

“The velocity and volume on the Web are so great that nothing is forgotten and nothing is remembered,” says Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic. “The Internet is like closing time at a blue-collar bar in Boston. Everyone’s drunk and ugly and they’re going to pass out in a few minutes.”

Ouch, blue-collar!  What a sting.  (How would a fern bar be different, I wonder?)

And some of those drunks are bullies, violent bullies!  Their words are like, well, broken glass cutting into the flesh of your face:

In 2007, at a New York club, she tried to stop a man named Samir Dervisevic who wanted to drink from the vodka bottle on her table. He hit her in the face with the bottle and gouged a hole “the size of a quarter,” as she put it, requiring plastic surgery.

This time, she punched the virtual bully in the face, filing a defamation suit to force Google to give up the blogger’s e-mail.

Those bullies are not only savage terrors, but cowards, too:

Hugo Black wrote in 1960, “It is plain that anonymity has sometimes been assumed for the most constructive purposes.”

But on the Internet, it’s often less about being constructive and more about being cowardly.

Dowd also compares the shank blogging incident to the Megan Meier case.  A few words of insult, suicide - it's a sliding scale of pain, I suppose.

Dowd hits several classic elements of the fearsome internet culture here, including a fear of violence based on assuming real-world effects of its representation.  She also rings the anonymity subtheme.  And she's careful to summon up traditional authority in defense of her argument: the New Republic, a Supreme Court justice.

Note, too, her emphasis on class.  The internet is a blue-collar bar, not a yuppie one.  And see how she inserts "the masses" into this passage, between selections from a Supreme Court judgement:

“virtually unlimited, inexpensive and almost immediate means of communication” with the masses means “the dangers of its misuse cannot be ignored..."

Is a Fashion Institute of Technology student part of "the masses"?  Or akin to a blue collar bar denizen?  No matter; analogies can be elastic.

Daniel Drezner takes this article apart in even greater detail, for those with strong stomachs.

We noted Dowd's most recent cybercultural analysis last week.

Comments

[peter naegele]

I have found that when bullied on the net, as in real life, mockery is the best response. Just this past week, an anonymous forum poster decided the best way to promote one local political candidate over another was by calling the opposition "hillbillies"....being in the opposition camp, I decided to take matters into my own hands.