[Buddha-l] Internet culture

[Richard Hayes]

Over the years a number of people have commented about the relatively crude and insensitive tone of discourse on the Internet. One former Buddha-l contributor once explained that he can say whatever he wants to say in whatever way he wants to say it, since there are no real people on the Internet and no real words. The only reality is transitory phosphorescent blurs on a screen. In other words, he said, an e-mail message must be seen as a purely abhidharmic event: nothing but fleeting flashes of phenomena that, if taken personally, cause momentary dukkha. This, in his mind, fully warranted his caustic tone. Actually, he claimed that he wrote from a place of pure upekkhā; if people chose to see his tone as caustic, mordant, acerb, abrasive—if, in short, people projected their own psychological "stuff" onto the transitory lights on a screen—then they would feel dukkha, and that was their problem, not his. 

The culture of buddha-l is endlessly fascinating. Every now and then a fleeting manifestation of civility occurs, but we can still count on a pervasive undercurrent of mean-spirited dismissiveness, just as the following apology, which manages to make the person apologized to look like a petty idiot for apparently needing an apology, demonstrates. (Please bear in mind that everything I have said is a projection of my complexes onto fleeting blobs of light on the screen. Or is it your projection?)

<transitory_blobs>
>> 
>> Dan--(my name is Joanna, not Joanne):
> 
> I apologize for the typo. Since we have communicated on and off this list 
> for a number of years, you know that this was a typo and inadvertent. Still, 
> I apologize.
</transitory_blobs>

Now, would somebody like to send in an insightful Buddhist analysis of the motion picture entitled "Inception"?

> 

Yours in impersonal flashes of phenomena,
Richard