It is said that 'you can't have a good story without conflict'. But constant fighting isn't what Tim Berners Lee and the boffins at CERN had in mind when they launched the World Wide Web. It was created to give people a means to communicate across physical and virtual borders.
These days though, the web's full of ads, porn and in the case of forums, people crapping on each other's opinions, choices or beliefs.
Over the many years I've had access to the web, I have read (and occasionally participated in)
countless forum discussions. As time passed, a definite pattern has emerged. If a thread contains anything that can be seen as contentious, things will always play out the same way.
has one point of view and
has an opposing point of view. It becomes a sort of holy war to the protagonists to prove the other party wrong/stupid/incompetent. Once they get started, there's no stopping them.
No matter what the topic may be, much to-ing and fro-ing ensues, sometimes over many pages. In the end,
hasn't changed
's mind, and
hasn't changed
's mind. They both leave the conversation thinking the other is an idiot ...or worse.
I have seen tons of people belittling each other over just about anything - Politics/Government, Religion, Software/OS choice, Game console A versus Game console B, etc etc etc. You name it, someone out there has slagged off someone else about it.
Reading through the diatribes of people you'll never meet may be funny or entertaining at first, but after a while they just get repetitive and tedious... and in the end, utterly futile. In the grand scheme of things, all those angry words count for nothing but animosity aimed at complete strangers.
Global communication doesn't seem to be the boon everyone was hoping for back when the web was launched. What it has done though, is show us humans our true colours. Sadly, they don't make a pretty picture.
On the other hand, with all the conflict going on, the web must be a
really terrific story.
I doubt it'll have a happy ending though. I wonder what Sir Tim thinks of us now...
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