The internet is no stranger to heated arguments which degenerate into flame wars thinly disguised as “civilized debate,” and it’s more than likely that you’ve heard some variation on the phrase “the only way to win an internet argument is to not participate it one.” Why does this seem to inevitably happen? It’s a simple, yet complex topic to study, and I want to share with you my thoughts and feelings on just why arguing online can become so vitriolic, as well as the effects it has on online socialization.

Despite the huge leaps in progress for viewing and sharing audio and video on the internet, the primary method of communication is still text, just like what you’re reading right now. Here on the internet, whether you’re discussing anime and manga, religion, politics, your favorite pets, or any topic, the way we are portrayed is typically through our keyboard. The only thing the other person ever sees is our words, and in that sense the internet can be an excellent venue for intelligent debate. However, writing has its limits. Certainly it’s a powerful tool in that as a species it has allowed us to record our history, our ideas, our thoughts and feelings, but words can only approximate the subtle shifts in tone and the way our emotions might come through in how we speak and act and influence the meaning of what we say beyond simply the words we’ve chosen. Our view of the other person’s emotions is blurry at best, and we can only imagine how the other person is reacting in real life to the words being sent to them online through their text response. That is four or five layers of removal from the person you’re talking to.

So you focus almost entirely on the words on the screen, which only makes sense when you’re in an environment that is primarily text. What ends up happening however is that your image of the person is formed primarily from those words and suddenly their opinions on anime or politics or religion or cats, something which would normally be considered simply a facet of their character and being, grows and mutates in your mind to become the entirety of their personality. This is the myopic focus that occurs in online discussion, where your interactions with another are entirely through one topic via text-only communication, and you extrapolate from that interaction an assumption of how they are as a human being. From there, it’s easy to make things personal, or to perceive them entirely as dumb, worthless, assholes, crybabies, man-children, attention whores, or any number of insults.

The realization that you’ve been treating another person as simply an amorphous blob of ideas manifested into a human body becomes all the more evident should you ever meet that person in a real-world setting, and seeing as Otaku Crush here is a site all about befriending and perhaps dating fellow otaku, that’s a fairly likely scenario. Whereas your interactions were once entirely through text, you now experience them as whole people, with facial expressions and body language and histories, and suddenly you see that while the words they put on the internet can say a lot about them, they do not say everything. Now, some people claim that this just has to do with internet anonymity making it easier to get away with hurting another person without repercussions, and I do certainly think that the internet does make that sort of thing much easier, I don’t think that’s all there is to it. As I said, I think the real significant factor here is that looking at someone through the internet makes it very simple to view them as almost inhuman, as simply a target of ridicule or distaste. It’s not unlike turning someone you’ve never met into a villain by incubating a sense of hatred to the extent that you might not even remember why you hated them in the first place.

Now that’s not to say that people who are jerks online can’t be jerks in real life, and just the same people who are nice in real life can also be nice on the internet, but simply because real world interaction and online interaction are so very different, people can change anywhere from a little to a lot when switching between the two. Personally speaking, I’ve been told that whereas my words online tend to be focused in intelligence, in real life while my thoughts and opinions are the same as they are online, my words and the way in which I express them are more heavily tinged with emotion. In that sense, you can get the wrong impression from me that I’m always in this logical thought mode, and while I certainly have nothing against my own writing style, I prefer to be thought of as a person before I am a series of paragraphs. I’m sure you all feel the same.