It’s no secret that the web is a safe haven to say whatever you want about who ever you want. However the overall effect of anonymous commenting on the internet has created an unprecedented mob mentality leading to an almost constant state rage and hatred directed toward any target. What do you guys think? Please leave a comment.
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For a while after his first TV series was broadcast in 2009, comedian Stewart Lee was in the habit of collecting and filing some of the comments that people made about him on web pages and social media sites. He did a 10-minute Google trawl most days for about six months and the resultant collected observations soon ran to dozens of pages. If you read those comments now as a cumulative narrative, you begin to fear for Stewart Lee. A good third of the posts fantasized about violence being done to the comic, most of the rest could barely contain the extent of their loathing.
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It isn't really fair to expect this, because the history of genocide, for instance, isn't taught in schools from brief, cursory mentions of events such as the Holocaust, and they are never put in any real historical context. But read historian Dr. Leon Litwack's work, for instance, if you want to know more about the unimaginable rage and hatred and violence that people are capable of inflicting on each other for no rational reason at all (*Been In the Storm So Long*, *Trouble In Mind*, *The Long Death Of Jim Crow.*)Actually, I would argue that if anything, expressing this kind of idiocy in internet posts might even keep people from the real violence they might otherwise commit.