Long before I heard the term "road rage," I saw a Disney cartoon that starred Goofy as a Jeckel and Hyde character, Mr. Walker and Mr. Wheeler.
Mr. Walker was a mild mannered fellow: thoughtful, pleasant and kind to children and animals. Behind the wheel of his car he became Mr. Wheeler, an angry, impatient sort apt to shout at and endanger anyone else on or near the roadways if that person might hinder his progress for a millisecond or two. Once the car was parked and Goofy stepped out of it, he was Mr. Walker again.
That's real life for some folks. Encased in their automobiles, insulated from direct personal contact, piloting a mass of metal and plastic propelled by explosions - well, they get a little wild.\nA keyboard can have the same effect.
People capable of civility and consideration are capable of something quite different when they're posting to the web. People who are normally not all that civil seem to find a whole new inner Neanderthal - though that comparison may not be entirely fair to Neanderthals.
That's one of the things that make what people continue to call "new media" so perplexing.
I mean, things used to be so simple. Big institutions such as universities and newspapers doled out information as they saw fit and people soaked it up. Or not.
But the institutions had their hands on the spigots. Once a day - or three or five times a day in the big city - a newspaper's pages would roll off presses and into people's hands. Companies and government agencies used newspapers and other avenues to get their information out, but they were the ones controlling the flow.
People had avenues of recourse and comment, of course. They could send letters to editors or call up to register their displeasure or even storm into offices to have their say.
In modern times, of course, anyone calling would likely have to navigate an infuriating chain of number pressing instructions. Anyone wanting to storm into most newsrooms would have to get past the security desk and beyond doors requiring swipe cards. But, as avenues for actual human contact have narrowed, the information superhighway has broadened our access to the seats of power and to each other. Sort of.
Nearly everyone with access to electricity twitters and posts their photos and their status to Facebook, their videos to Youtube and is linked up to Linked-In and is otherwise electronically tethered to friends and family and followers worldwide. While people praise those connections as empowering, they can be monitored and/or blocked by governments, corporations, cyber stalkers and snowstorms that knock out portions of the electric grid. There are other complications, too.
For one, despite what the Supreme Court of the United States has held, corporations are not people and they're no good at acting like they are. Your mother may write and call because she loves you, but institutions' motivations are rarely so pure and their attentions are never so dependable.
The Cavalier Daily has written about the University's and Student Council's efforts to use new media and how those efforts have fallen short. Untended Web sites and blogs without recent posts are problems, as is the tendency to use new media in the manner of old media - as one way conduits of information. The magic of this new stuff, after all, is supposed to be the opportunity for interactivity.
The Cavalier Daily unveiled its new Web site more than month ago. As someone who sees the Web site much more often than the paper version of the paper, I have to say the new site is an improvement. It's easily navigated in different ways and it offers a pdf version of the paper for us old fashioned readers.
But there are issues. The paper's tweets are stale. Its sports videos aren't up to date. And there's that pesky issue of how to deal with those folks who turn into someone uncivilized when they can hide behind a screen name. The Cavalier Daily editors are monitoring the conversations, though they say they "recognize that regulating the Internet is not possible." Despite that recognition, they're trying make the conversation at the paper's Web site as civil as possible. That doesn't mean vigorous debate will be curtailed. That means jackasses may be muzzled. And there's nothing wrong with that. Mr. Jefferson said we should tolerate error so long as truth is free to confront it. He didn't say that we should tolerate people trying to dominate debates by shouting and name calling rather than by reasoned argument.
Still, that kind of shouting down is likely to slip through occasionally, as are other errors. While the editors admitted that the culling of comments would necessarily be somewhat subjective, they said that people who misrepresent their identities are certain to get comments erased. Perhaps, but I'm betting that the posters who joined in the recent "Hokie for a weekend" debate as Mike and Al Groh really weren't the father and son those names bring to mind.
Tim Thornton is the ombudsman for The Cavalier Daily. His columns run on Mondays.
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