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Originally posted by bdgee:
http://tech.yahoo.com/news/nm/20090224/tc_nm/us_internet_1

I have been calling this "Space Invader Syndrome" for years. And it isn't restricted to only teenagers.

I call it "Space Invader Syndrome" after the old computer game Space Invaders, where caricatured alien space ships on a two dimensional unicollored playing screen attack Earth intent on destroying human kind, for whatever reason, and it is the "duty" of the player to defend Earth by wiping out the invader craft without consideration that they may or may not possess some human characteristic and are simply doing as they must in order to survive. (It is a necessity in order to define the game. Sadly, it leads to imagining that real life and the people in it are but parts of a game.)

A generation of early internet posters took that attitude to seemingly impersonal chatrooms (and through actual life) to act on unbuffered instinct in dealings with others, often unsuspecting and innocent others.

Then, since that early generation of internet users were so common on the early and midlife internet, newer generations of internet freaks too often fell into the same childish self centered lack of benevolence and courtesy toward others and act as if the First Amendment requires them to be hateful, crude, and egomaniacal and drive whatever persons of differing motivation or opinion they can find off the world as they see it, i.e., to wipe out the "invaders"...that is to say, eliminate or suppress any thought other than their own. (We see it here too often with cries that anything someone with a childlike or too simple or too biased mind doesn't want to be posted being declared to be only gibberish.)

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Posts: 11304 | From: Fort Worth, Texas | Registered: Mar 2005  |  IP: Logged |