LizzieMaine
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And people wonder why so many women find the Internet a hostile and unpleasant experience.
Well put.I don't do Twitter for that reason. I liken it to the scrawlings on the wall of a bus station bathroom: nothing worth reading, and you lower yourself by posting.
That's not even the infamous Anonymous Internet at work. Their ugly mugs are proudly posted right along side the vile words and apparently within the same twitter feed that they use for work and/or school? That's not even vaguely a "Hey, no one will know, I can get away with it" thing. They're that okay with saying that crap. That emboldened.
What could the women in their life possibly think about this kind of behavior? Glad there was some real consequences for this stuff...for once.
And people wonder why so many women find the Internet a hostile and unpleasant experience.
I don't do Twitter for that reason. I liken it to the scrawlings on the wall of a bus station bathroom: nothing worth reading, and you lower yourself by posting.
I try to make it a rule, to never say any thing I would not say to the persons face! I heard a good one today, a man said, in the old days, if you got mad at your girlfriend, you would go home and write a letter, then put it on the table to mail it the next day. When the next day came around, you would realize what a jerk you were, tear up the letter, and go over and apologize. Now you text her, and a big mess ensues!
Don't blame the messenger... I'm not a fan of the medium myself, but plenty of folks find it perfectly useful. I wouldn't do these idiots the courtesy of allowing them to in part blame Twitter. It's as much Twitter's fault as an obscene phone caller's behaviour is the fault of the telephone network.!
What if your neighbors are not particularly loveable?
A lot of schools wont paddle a kid's backside anymore because they worry about getting sued...or worse, imprisoned!
Really what I'm looking for though is, aside from we as individuals being respectful to one another, is there anything that could be done to influence society to change for the better? I mean, it seems like folks were generally respectful at least outwardly up until say....the mid 60s. Then things began to change. Why? And can it be reversed?
I think it actually began with the advent of the affordable automobile- not the 60's or social media (which we can argue forever as to what extent they made things even worse).
When we all had to rely upon buses, trains, interurbans, streetcars, etc. to get around, rubbing shoulders with our fellow straphangers forced a certain degree of diplomacy on all of our parts. And although I am certain that examples of rudeness can be enumerated in the same venue, some of the nicest courtesies I have ever seen accorded total strangers have been on midtown Manhattan subways. Put people in their own cars, and I think that what we have to hone in order just to engage in that interaction is lost.
What makes the times seem so much worse is the availability of information 24/7! Back in the 60s and 70s, if a girl was killed in a school bus accident in South Carolina, you would only here about it in the general area, same goes for child kidnappings, unless it was the Lindberg's kid. We are bombarded by nothing but bad news these days. Now I know that it's not new, but it is on a much larger scale then when you read your paper and watched the nightly news. And, of course bad news sells, the old joke, "1000 planes landed safely today, doesn't sell news papers," is still true today!
Good thing, too, at least as far as a public school is concerned. If any teacher or principal did that to my son back when he was in grade or high school, he/ she would be fortunate if a lawsuit or an indictment was the only adverse consequence of such conduct. And it certainly wasn't tolerated at any of the private schools that I attended, either.