The internet allows billions of people to communicate anonymously each day, “and boy, are they pissed off!”

CNN ran an article today entitled #@*!!! Anonymous anger rampant on Internet, considering everything from cyber bullying to flaming, and all of those less then polite and less than identified treasures around the net.

“In the [pre-Internet era], you had to take ownership [of your remarks]. Now there’s a perception of anonymity,” said Lesley Withers, a professor of communication at Central Michigan University. “People think what they say won’t have repercussions, and they don’t think they have to soften their comments.”

The basic theory is that computers obscure cues that can be used to identify an individual and their behavior. But does that turn us into different people?

Markman is quick to observe that he doesn’t believe there’s more anger out there. But, he said, “there are more ways of expressing it on the Internet.”

“We’ve all had interactions with unpleasant people, but we don’t confront them. We take it out elsewhere,” he said. “What the Internet has created is groups of people where there are no repercussions with being too aggressive.”

I, however, remain skeptical. Interpersonal communication shapes our understandings of ourselves. Narrative psychologists Pasupathi and McAdams have shown this over and over again. The structures (aka “technology”; see Yates and Orlikowski’s Adaptive Structuration Theory) in which those interactions occur, then, must play a role in the types of conversations that occur, and they types of people we become. Now, I am far from a doom sayer when it comes to the internet (quite the opposite, actually), and it may be that these anonymity/anger effects are contextually bound to communication on blogs and chat rooms. Either way, it is interesting to consider how anonymity is used as a tool, regardless of the objective. In the words of laywer-brother when I asked my family why they thought people go to chatrooms, “[there are] limited repercussions for participatory benefits.” Makes you wonder what makes one a “participant.”

CNN’s article is worth a readYou can find it here: #@*!!! Anonymous anger rampant on Internet