Someone Is Wrong On The Internet But It Isn't My Problem

Here's an early New Year resolution which I think is going to make my life far more relaxing.

I love the internet, I really do. But even I would admit it has its drawbacks, and one of them is that it does lead to people getting far more irritated with each other than they would otherwise. This is not, however, entirely the internet's fault.
I think the point is that people are mostly getting irritated with people they would never have come across, much less got to know in any way, in real life. Most of us move, for the most part, in groups of like-minded people. We may have spats with our relatives, friends and workmates, but they basically have quite a lot in common with us and our way of thinking – or if they don't, and get on our nerves, we avoid them.

Online, although we also have our groups of friends and colleagues in social spaces and on mailing lists and forums, the room we are in is exponentially bigger and we overhear snatches of other conversations that in real life would pass us by. This can be a blessing and an education, or it can be an eye-opener in quite the wrong way. People on our friends-lists have friends of their own, who may not be our type of person at all, and we can't help seeing their wrong-headed, ill-informed comments. The same applies, in spades, to online forums, where we come across the most peculiar individuals, the worst of whom would not, frankly, be within our orbit in real life unless we did some kind of social or medical work. But even the relatively well-adjusted ones may be from the other end of the political spectrum, or have views on race, sexuality and science which we hardly suspected were still extant - I came across an Amazon reviewer who had failed to finish a book by David Attenborough because he "never mentioned God and talked about evolution like it was a fact" (these people's notion of grammar also tends to be irritating).

In real life, if we met these people at all, we would soon glance at our watches and say "Gosh, is that the time? Must dash…". And that, I've concluded, is what we need to learn to do online. It is too easy, when we read a plainly ignorant or hateful comment online, to reply, to get into the kind of argument which some eastern sage rightly characterised as useless, on the ground that the mind of a bigot is like unto the pupil of an eye: the more light you shed on it, the more it contracts. I am as prone as anyone to the mindset satirised in that brilliant cartoon; "no, I can't come to bed; someone on the internet is wrong". But I think I'm about to stop doing that, and make my life far more relaxed and enjoyable at a stroke, by asking myself some simple questions.

Would I ever read a Daily Vile article in print? No, because it isn't my sort of rag and I know it will annoy me. So why follow a link to one that someone's posted, just because it's a click away?

Would I bother getting into a real-life debate with someone who says "evolution and creationism are both just theories so you can't say one is better than the other"? No, because that level of ignorance and stupidity in a conversational partner gets tedious within seconds. So why waste time trying to enlighten them as to the meaning of "theory" in an online forum?

Would I haunt a café where racists and misogynists hung out, listening to their conversation with steam coming out of my ears? No, nor would those of my friends who nevertheless can't seem to stop wandering over to blogs like Guido Fawkes and letting the comments below the line upset them (even I'm immune from that one).

Now I can see the counter-argument, that it is good to be aware of different world-views in the way the internet makes possible. But being aware of is not quite the same as putting oneself constantly in the way of. In real life, we are (if perhaps more dimly than we should be) aware that there are such people as racists, misogynists and general ignoramuses in the world, but if our own tastes don't lie that way, we end up avoiding their company, because life is too short to waste in constant indignation.

If we want to avoid being permanently stressed out by the bits of humanity that strike us as stupid and wicked, I think we have to learn to be as discriminating in cyberspace as we are in real life. We don't have to go anywhere, just because it's only a click away. We don't have to talk to people, just because they are in the same virtual room. And if someone is wrong on the internet, we can, actually, just shrug our shoulders, leave him in his ignorance and go to bed.