Just for the Hell of it
Don’t get me wrong here. The hell entry will be coming tomorrow. All over this fair land of Blogistan, September 11 entries have been springing like lawyers after an ambulance. I’ve been working on mine for a couple of days now, and maybe the combination of a certain emotional discomfort with the date and the event it signifies along with my, shall we say, professional meanderings, resulted in a bit of insomnia the other day. Having recently acquired some geek toys, one of them being a set of earphones and a microphone I can plug into my machine, I embarked on a bit of a tour of the land of Yahoo’s chat rooms.
The topics varied extremely, from the highly political to the ridiculous to the totally unnecessary. What I have is a couple of observations that (I think) would be helpful in dealing with the anniversary that is coming upon us tomorrow. If I were a betting man, I would put my money on the fact that there is a Sociology PhD somewhere in the land of ivory who is writing on the dynamics of the Internet chat room. Unlike a bulletin board or even an e-mail exchange, where your identity may stick around for a while, the chat room is a completely ad hoc social phenomenon that often forms and falls apart in a matter of hours. There are exceptions. There was one chat room where the people have been clearly getting together for quite some time, knew each other by moniker and had issues and relationships going back days, weeks and even months. More often than not, the gathering was that of people that have never communicated with each other, but were there because of some kind of common interest that they all felt the need to discuss, elaborate upon, expatiate or plain rave about. Being usually an old fashioned type of person, hoary and advanced in years, I try to assess whether any type of endeavor is successful or not, usually by the criteria set by the perpetrators of said endeavor, rather than my own (my attempt at contemporary thinking). So, as far as the chat room goes, I was under the assumption that the successful chamber of chatter would be the one where people can actually talk (or type), respond to others’ statements and receive responses to their own assertions. There may be quite a few other valid purposes, and those of you with opinions regarding this topic, feel free to opine away in the Comments section.
Thus armed with my “Success at chat room criteria (film at Eleven)” I ventured forth, trying to see which rooms were successful and which were not. Surprisingly enough, many more rooms where successful than I allowed myself to believe. Since the topics under discussion were greatly varied, the routes to success were as different as the said topics. The common principle was a desire to communicate, as well as having participants that actually had something to say. With these two ingredients the chat took on a life of its own and often flowered. Stay with me, as I am getting to my point; the way in which a chat room would fail was always uniform. One person (for some reason it would always be one person) would single handedly destroy what was created, with some degree of effort, by all the active participants. The very effective method would be to confront the relatively high level of content offered by the people chatting, with markedly lower level of content, or non content amounting to white noise. So in the Muslim or Arab chat it would be someone imputing highly deviant sexual habits to the Prophet; in a Jewish chat it would be someone raving about the members of the tribe being a cancer spreading over the earth, et cetera ad nauseum. What made these assertions destructive to the chat room was not the actual nature of the assertions, but the fact that they were repeated with such frequency and volume that no one could say anything else. In essence, the chat room destroyer would fill up space with statements that made little or no sense (it could be just meaningless characters in a large and bright font, or loud music), precluding others from having any conversation. And now I am really getting to my point – Why? I was trying to understand why someone would do something like that. While very fleeting, flimsy and faltering, the chat room represented a concrete community that was conducting some kind of an activity. Since none of the chat room destroyers actually participated in the business of that community – that business being a discussion – they had one purpose, to destroy it. Not to change anyone’s opinion, anyone’s ways, anyone’s take on the world; what I found interesting was that no destroyer tried to impose their opinion or will on a chat room, the purpose was invariably to destroy it, blow it out of existence, as it were. I might add that almost invariably this type of destruction by contentlessness worked.
At the end of the day I could not find motivation for this destruction, or at least motivation that made any kind of sense. It appears that there are people in the world that cannot stand the fact that there are Arabs, or Jews, Christians, Staninsts, or Belgians who are trying to have a conversation. These people are compelled to destroy the group that has for some reason provoked their ire – not to convince it of the error of its ways, suggest or even force a radical change in a course of action, but rather to destroy, blow out of existence.
Like I said, I could not find a reason for the destructive activity, a reason that would be manifested within the confines of a chat room. From the standpoint of those who were being destroyed, I did not see a need for a reasoned motivation to get rid of the belligerent party. In each room I’ve been to, I’ve tried to draw the destroyer into some type of dialogue; there was not a single case where I (or anyone else) was successful. At the end of the day I thought that whenever the other members of the chat room managed to “boot” the offending party our of the chat room, thereby destroying his (her?) identity in that small universe, they were justified in their action.
One year ago short of a day, several people destroyed in the course of several minutes what has been built with painstaking care by thousands of others for decades. It is incumbent upon us to learn some lessons and act upon what we learn. I am firmly convinced that we CAN understand what motivated the people that flew those planes into the Twin Towers, and that we can deal rationally with those who dispatched them. A unilateral war against Iraq and anyone else for that matter is not a foregone conclusion. At the same time, we have to acknowledge the possibility that rationality, reason and negotiations may not apply. In that case, and in that case only, we should feel morally justified to “boot” the offending party.
2:14:30 PM 
|
|
