By: Sarah Jones
The question, "Is the online world making society nastier, or is society just taking advantage of the ability to express what it's always felt?" was posed for one of my classes and I think the answer is a little bit of both.
The online world is the perfect place for people to express their opinions no matter how offensive they might be. However, that's not what the purpose of the online world was to begin with. Starting out it was a way to share things with friends and family when you weren't around them. It was a way for long distance friends, family, and significant others to stay in touch. It was an innocent place meant as a way to keep memories around forever. Sadly, that has changed. It's now a place where there are "Twitter wars" and "Facebook fights." Where people share offensive pictures and articles for their friends and families to see. A place where people shove their views down people's throats no matter if they asked to hear it or not. It's where cyber bullying was created.
It seems that the places where you can find the nastiest of society is in news article comment sections and Facebook pages. Just the other day I was reading an article about a woman who was five months pregnant when she got into a car accident and went into a coma. She woke up four months later to find out her baby had been born and was alive and healthy. Great, uplifting story right? Apparently, not to the hundreds of people who commented negative things onto the comment section. What was supposed to be a wonderful story turned in to something ugly because people decided to rage war on one another about religion and the medical field. Why can't people just accept a great story and move on? There's a saying that's used in the online world, "don't feed the trolls." I think society isn't listening to that advice and feeding the trolls like it's no big deal.
So, the online world might egg people on and make it seem like what they're doing isn't wrong, that it's just freedom of speech, but that doesn't make it okay for society to turn and make it into something that people are now ashamed of being associated with. It's society's job to be the mature people I know they can be, and know when to say enough is enough. We need to teach younger generations how to behave on the Internet. They need to think twice before posting something that can be found years after it's been posted. It's society's job to make the online world a safe, fun place, and so far we're doing a really bad job.
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