A colleague over at Democracy in America (DiA), The Economist‘s blog about American politics, has written a very interesting post on the nature of online commenters. While the formality of composing a letter to the editor continues to generate considered and often polite prose by even the most aggrieved readers, the immediacy and anonymity of online commenting seems to encourage a tendency to insult and attack. "Faceless communication leads to disinhibition, whether it’s online, in a car or on the phone with a customer-service representative… Psychologists even have a name for the online phenomenon: ‘online disinhibition effect‘."
Publishers keen on a solution to nasty commenters will follow what happens at the Buffalo News. The paper has just proposed requiring readers to supply accurate identification if they want to weigh in, which is promising. (As one of the 65 commenters on the DiA post wrote, "I used to think anonymity was a good thing… However, over time my view has changed to the opposite. For every unique voice, there are thousands of mindless, thuggish screams.")