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The Web can't make racists
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July 9, 1999 |
In the Southern Medical Journal, we read that the Net has become a popular focus among paranoid delusional psychotics: Where once it was scheming Communists or CIA dirty tricks that obsessed these poor souls, now it is the Internet that is controlling their brains. As a psychiatrist told Wired News, "Whenever there's something in the news, a lot of the psychotic patients will incorporate it in their delusions." In that same article, researchers pointed out that the affected patients typically got their information about the Net from television: In other words, they're responding to media caricatures of the Internet rather than direct experience. (Direct experience would teach them that, far from controlling anyone's mind, the Internet is fundamentally out of anyone's control; spend an hour trying to hook a new computer up to the Net and you are unlikely to see it as a source of orders, magical power or anything other than frustration.) These delusions are so cartoonish that it's easy to dismiss them and recognize them as the malady they are. But the notion that the Internet has a peculiar hold on people, that it casts strong spells on our minds, isn't confined to the mentally ill. It drives a lot of the assumptions people make in the debate over hate sites on the Web, rekindled this week by Benjamin Nathaniel Smith's murders. Scott Rosenberg's column appears once a week in Technology In case you've somehow missed the media onslaught, Smith belonged to a white-supremacist group, the World Church of the Creator, that propagates its loathsome views on a variety of Web sites. This "church" and similar groups are using the Web to post their propaganda to the world and to entice the curious and the gullible to adopt their perspective. It's a sign of progress in the media's relationship to the Net from the days of the Heaven's Gate suicides that, so far at least, we haven't been subject to a barrage of stories asking, in essence, whether the Web made Smith do it. Enough members of the media and enough of its audience now have their own direct experience of the Web; any suggestion that it can "make" people do anything sounds, well, crazy. But there's also a subtler version of "The Web made him do it" lurking in the hate-sites debate. Every time a crime like Smith's hauls the hitherto marginalized and under-visited Web site of some bigoted group like the World Church of the Creator into the spotlight, well-meaning and thoughtful people understandably react with, "Let's pull the plug on these creeps!" Shutting down Web sites that publish idiotic racist and anti-Semitic ideas might give people a sense of having struck a blow for sanity. But it's not very practical: Close down one Web site and another five spring up. And it tends to backfire, giving racists a chance to pose as martyrs in the cause of free speech.
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