So I just watched Nerve this weekend, which is a movie ALL ABOUT being online and anonymous, how perfect right?
It centers around an online dare game called Nerve where participants can either sign up as a Watcher or a Player. Players complete dares for money and watchers determine their dares. The game starts off harmless enough, with dares like kissing a stranger or serenading someone in a restaurant, but as players become more willing, the stakes and money get higher, and the watchers hide deeper behind their screen names. The game shuns those who contact anyone for help or try to get it shut down, and people abuse anonymity resulting in so any awful things that can't be blamed on anyone in particular.
While a game as dangerous as this would definitely be stopped by the government or shut down before blowing to this proportion, the movie definitely hit close to home on the topic of the potentially poison in anonymity.
People hide behind their avatars, letting their online voices speak louder than themselves. That's a fact online, it just is, and while anonymity is used for so many positive things online, the negative speaks louder. It always does that's just a fact.
When nations are bombed and people get arrested, that's the front page everywhere, the first article on every news website, the only thing on television, but nobody hears about the major leaps in clean energy or the baby elephant that was just born that the Safari Park named Peanut Butter. No one hears about the expectant mothers who use anonymity to get advice, but everybody hears about trolls. That's just a fact.
People hide behind their screen names because by doing so, they don't feel the real world effect of their words. Online and anonymous there are no consequences. What you say has no reverberations, they're just words thrown out to the void, and people don't realize that the people on the receiving end are real people with real emotions.
The show sounds really interesting and I think I will check it out, thanks for recommending. It seems like a good way to display how anonymity affects our society and what things could really happen if anonymity was left unsupervised. I also agree with you on the fact that many people focus more on the negatives than positives, as sad as that may sound. Although with this in our minds, we need to make a change. We need to spread more positive news around the world rather than tuning it out for the negative things.
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