Opinion
 

Web reveals society's callousness

By Jim McCormick

The other day, I was browsing The Cougar Web's forums, which I do every so often when I'm bored. That day, somebody had posted a link to a woman's Web site, where she went motorcycle riding through the dead zone around Chernobyl. It was an amazing, shocking and well-done photo essay about how conditions were there as well as how lives were interrupted by the nuclear meltdown.

However, the part that really disturbed me wasn't the photos. Instead, it was the reaction of one of the other posters on the forum's attitude to the story, whose first reaction was, "The sad part? She lives so close to Germany ... and BMW motorrads (sic)... and rides a Kawasaki. Sad."

It was this callousness that really disturbed me. Here was this woman, trying to show the world the devastation that still exists in Belarus (which is where the Chernobyl nuclear accident took place) because of this accident, and all an American college student could think about was what kind of motorcycle she was riding.

Perhaps that's the big problem with the world today. We don't seem to care about the message. Instead, we waste our time on small details about the person telling the story.

Of course, you can browse The Cougar Web's forums and see an astounding display of people being rude to each other. Quite frequently, people would spam those boards with pornographic images, until the site owners finally forbade the practice. They still will drown out people with legitimate questions by simply posting, "This thread is gay."

One more example came from a thread on the politics forum campaigning for UH4U during the elections. The Cougar Web had formally endorsed that party during the elections, and someone had posted a link to the party Web site on the message board. 

The first three replies on the thread, however, did not discuss the party, but instead proclaimed the thread and Web site pointless. Instead, it seemed that they were more interested in finding porn than actually getting decent people in the Student Government Association. One poster even stated, "i (sic) clicked one link and then went back to my pornography."

Even I have been harassed on the Internet. Somebody had found my Weblog and then proceeded to harass me with anonymous comments. The twist is that I have logged the Internet protocol addresses of the attacker, and have found out that the person is somebody from the University who actually knows me. Instead of facing me like a decent person would do, he chose to don the mask of anonymity and post rude comments about me.

Perhaps it's the impersonality of the Internet that causes people to act like this on message boards, chat rooms and Weblogs, but the fact that people feel that they can get away with rudeness on the Internet is disgusting. It seems that people are more interested in harassing each other than actually working together.

This isn't a problem with just the community at The Cougar Web. It is all over the place. People just can't seem to grasp the fact that the Internet is populated by people with feelings, not computers, which don't have emotions.

McCormick, a columnist for 

The Daily Cougar, 
can be reached at rantman_2000@yahoo.com.