COMMENTARY
Jeff Simon: When the id goes on the Internet
I believe the expression is: “It’s a learning curve.” For me it is, to be sure. I just don’t expect viciousness, viruses and venality—the three new Internet V’s—around every corner.
I certainly didn’t expect to see a young woman’s pitch for her line of lingerie on my Facebook profile page. Let’s just say that if Frederick’s of Hollywood represents a certain kind of brand in the specialized field, what she seemed to be hawking was on the order of Tilly’s of Tijuana or Willy’s of West Covina.
So, a rarity for me, I removed it and “unfriended” her, as they say in FB-land. In my heart, of course, I wish her nothing but success in America. But whatever this new social networking thing is on the Internet, I do think it’s sensible to keep your own site to your own wares, services, enthusiasms and ideas and leave those you never heard of to others.
When I mentioned it in a Facebook “status report,” Ch. 4’s weather guru, Don Paul, asked why, and jokingly offered that I’d look dandy in a peignoir. An old colleague who used to work at The News guessed that “strategic marketing” in search of “the almighty dollar” would cause a lot of otherwise openhearted people to “unfriend” people they’d previously been open to.
It got me thinking about what’s been happening in general since Al Gore, um, invented the Internet. Along with all the glories of instant information available around the globe, a whole new world of malice, meanness, venality, vileness, thievery and fraud has bubbled up from the oozing id of humanity and made itself evident everywhere.
What would Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung have made of this, I wondered?
It was, of course, the theory of Marshall McLuhan and his cohort Edmund Carpenter that every new technological advance “declassifies” information, i. e., it takes something previously secret and opens it to others’ scrutiny.
Which is another way of saying that all changing information technology is an assault on privacy (think of cell phones) and possibly property, too. Not only can you now get really bad pirated renderings of brand new movies online, you can be privy to a cavalcade of god-awful behavior that people used to keep to themselves.
Consider all the open reader commentary sections newspapers now include at the end of stories. You can visit them and find civility, intelligence and occasional precious enlightenment. But you’ll also find extraordinary incomprehension, miscomprehension, meanness and the most scurrilous prejudice, all in the name of “healthy debate.”
As do many of my colleagues, I’ve had “regulars”—personal electronic bombardiers— ever since our e-mail addresses started to be printed. One is a man who can always be counted on to miss the point and find new ways to be unpleasant. As foul and rather dim as the fellow has been for a decade, though, I must say he’s no coward. In his e-mails, he always used to sign his full name.
In online commentaries now, his inimitable reptilian style is now accompanied only by one name, which seems to appear under his burning bags of dog droppings left on the doorstep of our work mere minutes after it goes online.
The obvious thing to say here is that as profoundly unpleasant and lacking as his “commentary” invariably is, he couldn’t be a more loyal reader.
What I wonder now—incurable optimist that I am—is if there could ever be a secret way that those of us of pathogical good will could instantly distinguish ourselves and communicate without interference.
Failing that, I wonder if there might ever be a time when our knee-jerk supplier of omnidirectional electronic malice will be in need of a nightgown or a garter belt to give as a present. I think I know just the woman for him to contact.
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