The internet as an amplifier for passive-aggressive behavior
I don’t know what it is, but there are people in the world who are completely incapable of confrontation. The Internet has given those same people the perfect opportunity to take their passive-aggressive behavior to a whole new level, sociopathic in nature. It occurs to me that many of the “new modes” of communication, such as Twitter allow for the kind of insight into the mind-numbing tedium of people’s lives, while at the same time providing illumination into the thoughts they are simply incapable of expressing in a more productive method, or to a more appropriate party.
The thing to always remember on the Internet is that there is forever a record of your writings, and that something dashed off in the heat-of-the-moment can sometime come back to hurt later when others do a simple Google search.
This entry was posted at 7:00 pm on 21 July 2007 and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the post-specific RSS 2.0 feed.
[...] Disturbingly, I’m sure this author is spot on. [...]
We are all faulty people, that much is certain, but there is a certain disfunctionality that results in an intense passive-aggressive behavior that grates at my very core. I have always been, if overly so, confrontational. It might be a revolt against my parents, who sometimes excelled at not addressing issues, but it is also a long-standing desire to not see things fester longer than they must. This is most especially true when it involves the relationship between two people, whatever shape it might take.
I believe my point, which may not have been made as eloquently as I might have liked, was that sometimes we spout off all sorts of things online, in recorded form, that we would never consider putting in a physical letter, or saying in a “public forum,” and yet what is the Internet—aided by Google—but the world’s largest public forum, without boundaries and without consideration for time and space?
Yes… everything in Google looks like it happened 5 minutes ago. Did you do something stupid 10 years ago from which you have now learned something? Too bad.
But also, it means that given our tendency to judge so harshly, Google is dangerous to ourselves because it is the tool we need when we go out and censor anything contrary to the opinion of the majority. As a result, we all have a tendency to become more or less the same. And lack of diversity is well known to be bad.
Google’s not to blame though. It’s all our fault.
This begs the question: why do we judge so harshly in the first place? I think that regardless of the reason, we are too scared to face the truth because deep inside we know what is going on. We just don’t like it, so we look away, pretend, and continue as usual.
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I think it is also a reflection of how twisted our perceptions of ourselves truly is. Now, surely nobody would expect perfect behavior from anybody—- but with the results from Google, we seem to like it so much to give ourselves the right to judge anybody without considering how our own faults bias our decisions.
Doing so is also dangerous because it may imply the assumption that, once reaches a particular age, there should be all these things that were learned and that there is nothing else to perfect.
How about we stop looking at each other so harshly? We might even realize we are all very modest live beings.