Today's Youth Advisory Board post is from Liz Funk, a published author who has dabbled in both old and new media and lived to tell the tale. Today Liz weighs in on an occupational hazard of the latter — online snarkiness — and how her peers are both part of the problem, as well as the solution. Remember, you can communicate directly with any member of the Ypulse Youth Advisory Board by emailing them at youthadvisoryboard at ypulse.com…or just leave a comment.

How To Stop The Online Snarkiness Syndrome

I recently penned an article for a national magazine — my favorite magazine! — with a popular web-site. The day my piece went live online, my editor emailed to tell me that I was a good writer and not to read the comments on my article; warning that the publication's commenters could be particularly mean. Out of curiosity, I read the first few comments on piece and found my editor was right: they were vicious! Although I had certainly been ripped apart for my articles online before, I still felt compelled to lay in bed for an evening and feel sorry for myself (but not too sorry, because my editor had warned me).

These smears online are permanently changing — sometimes for the worse — the way our country does news and media. My writer friends — of all ages, genders, and levels of attractiveness — regularly report cruel comments on their articles turning a platform for questions and critiques into one for ad hominem attacks. Some of my friends won't even read the comments on the blogs they write for newspapers and magazines, in an effort to protect their egos. Many have privately shared with me that they've been censoring themselves and that, in a paranoid precaution, they triple-check their pieces before turning them in, looking for anything that commenters might poke fun at. But they always seem to find something.

The online culture of nastiness thrives on the internet because people appear as mere avatars. But behind these online personas are real people with real feelings. Despite the social networking sites that allow people to flesh out and broadcast their "personalities" — such as Twitter, Blogspot, and Facebook — it has become easier and easier to forget that other internet users have the same capacity to be offended online as they do off.

While celebrity blogs, known for their occasional nastiness, often give as good as they get, internet mockery has now leaked into authoritative news sites. These days, even the pages of Newsweek seem dotted with snark. And if one of the nation's leading news magazines is eliciting straight-up rudeness rather than any type of constructive commentary from the public, this is not an improvement for the media. And what about those who grow up knowing no other way to communicate online?

A recent PSA for an anti-cyberbullying campaign illustrated several scenarios pertaining to this nasty online culture — most poignantly a middle school girl saying shockingly mean things to another girl in front of her mom. The announcer then says, "If you wouldn’t say it in person, why say it online?"

The more interesting concept within this commercial is the tagline: "Delete cyberbullying. Don't Write It. Don't Forward It." Despite the skinny-legged pre-teen girls illustrating the scenario in this commercial, cyberbullying has become an issue for internet uses of all ages. The adults leaving mean comments on news web-sites or penning blogs that rip people to shreds are prime examples! Worse yet, these grown-ups are condoning the behavior for younger bullies. Although the internet is much younger than they are, and it's a new tool, they're old enough to know better.

Because people are going to continue participating in the new media and anonymously communicating with one another online, then we as a society must develop a code of respect for others in using the internet. Internet users seem to have a collective case of information highway road rage, but like on the real-life highway, people would never act the same if they saw their fellow drivers face-to-face. And I don't think anyone who has ever said anything nasty online about me would say things with their real names attached, let alone say it to my face.

Until internet users come to a consensus about how to be civil online, a good way young people — professional writers and casual content creators alike — can deal with the puzzling meanness in the new media is to combat it with humor. When we get cracks about our looks and other personal transgressions, we can laugh it off by making fun of the spelling and grammar mistakes, telling ourselves that they're jealous or defensive, or even questioning the critical faculties of someone who has time to write an 800 word personal diatribe during the workday.

But this is just a Band Aid to cover a bullet hole.

About Liz

Liz Funk is a freelance writer and college student. She has written for USA Today, Newsday, the Christian Science Monitor, the Huffington Post, Girls' Life, and CosmoGIRL!, among other publications. Her first book, Supergirls Speak Out, about the pressure on girls to be perfect, will be published by Simon and Schuster in March of 2009. She writes a blog for the Albany, NY newspaper the Times Union and she edits the teen culture and politics blog GirlHeadQuarters.org. She is a senior at Pace University and lives in Manhattan. Her web-site is www.lizfunk.com.

Categorized under: Web, Youth Advisory Board

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