Angry Outbursts on the Interwebs

Ms. Munroe, a teacher at a high school in Pennsylvania, was fired a year following her posting insulting comments about her students on a supposedly anonymus blog that included her own picture. She called some of her students "rat-like" and "loathsome". One of the comments on the Today news website, following a few other comments claiming that Ms. Munroe should have been fired and that there is good in every student, was: "I think the little ******** should be flogged at random intervals throughout the day. That will keep them alert and teach them RESPECT! Those who fail to learn these simple tasks should be publicly executed in a morning assembly Monday of each week!" Now, obviously this man doesn't really think that students should be abused and/or executed on a weekly basis, but the question rightly asked is, "Why would he say it anyway?"

The most common answer, also the correct answer, is that people say whatever they want to on the internet because they believe that no one knows their name or face, so it doesn't really matter. People take the whole idea of "freedom of speech" a little bit too far on the Internet and seem to forget that they're speaking to another human being, or a group of human beings. When people don't feel like they're directly speaking to another person, they feel like they can say whatever they want and be as angry as they want because they remove the idea of other people and therefore other peoples' emotions from the equation of normal communication. (Of course, on the Internet, angry usually means typing in caps lock, using extra exclamation marks, leaving rude, sarcastic comments, and/or plainly insulting people.)

However, there is a considerable difference in the amount of angry comments depending on where in the Internet one is. On a standard, public, common website, such as Today's new website, there seem to be a far larger amount of angry comments than on Chris Lehmann's Open Letter to Ms. Munroe. One of the biggest differences between these two websites is that the Today's article did not make a personal stand, choosing to let people in the comments vent how they felt about the subject since the article was nondescript. This left the door wide open for people to choose to comment about how they felt about Ms. Munroe's termination, so, the commenters walked through that open door. However, Mr. Lehmann's blog post obviously sided against Ms. Munroe, saying that she was wrong for hurting her students and should apologize. This did not leave the door wide open for personal interpretation of Ms. Munroe's termination. Therefore, those who commented generally sided with Lehmann.

Question for discussion: Why do people feel the need to voice their opinion on the Internet if nobody knows its really them?