Cyber Culture

With advancements in web based interaction there is a wider platform to interact anonymously, at least to a certain extent.

I earlier discussed the concept of avatar use and this week I want to delve into an aspect of that: how web users use their option to be 'faceless' to offer their opinion or interact with other users and how this impacts on our culture.





Traditionally people would have to use appropriate forums to make comments in a way that conformed to social etiquette. Now users can say anything they want to on any topic presented online.

In the early years after the millennium, chat rooms were beginning to explode with hate speech, verbal assault about sex and violence and general threats on peoples lives if they logged on to private chat rooms.

Before the MSN people closed their chat room systems down I was making full use of a chat room with my sister. We invented a name for our online personality and after visiting and participating in conversation several times the 'regulars' would start to greet us every time we logged in.

It was a chat space aimed at tattoo-loving web users and being sixteen and fourteen we felt it was a 'rad' place to hang out and chat since we were based in a remote town in Tanzania. One day a new web user called Ahmed logged on and we witnessed him getting verbally abused for the 9/11 incident and for being a 'rag-head'. Little did we know that our favourite chat room was in fact a 'whites only' space for white Americans. Horrified we logged out and never logged in again. The MSN chat rooms closed a few weeks later.

One can only imagine what this situation would have been like in the context of our 'real' world interaction in context of our cultural values and norms. There would be 40 to 50 people, crammed into one room, covered in tattoos and probably not looking exactly as they said they did online. Then someone 'different' enters the space and there's a blood bath before our eyes. Of course, this exact mix of aspects probably wouldn't arise but that is the point I would like to make; is web anonymity allowing us to forgo our cultural values to use the web and its online interaction tools to generate hate and purity groups.


Now that chat rooms are gone web users are simply using social networking tools like Facebook to create groups where they can create groups that are "pro-white" or "pro-black". I recently received a forwarded email that had images of a Facebook wall-chat. It showed 'black', South Africans reciting Julius Malema's famous public quotes and later saying things like "kill the boer" or "kill 100,000 whites".



This public space combined with web anonymity -to an extent- has allowed racisim and classism to fester and one can only wonder when and where this is going to start leaking into the 'real world' and what the repercussions of this will be.