Everyone seems to be clicking "send" a bit too early nowadays.
We officially live in a world where internet trigger-happy world leaders can send massive populations into a devolved tail spin with erratic tweets, posts, and subsequent responses. These posts can have far-reaching consequences, and in the haste to respond in kind we've forgotten that we've normalized this kind of attitude.
Boulet is a French comic artist who has been writing about this for 15 years.
Originally he started writing an autobiographical series, but when he realized how accessible it was to his readers, he decided to make it fictional. "So it's mostly 'drawn stand up comedy,'" he explains. "I'm the main character, but in the same way comedians are there own character when they are on stage. The purpose is not really to talk about me but about situations of everyday's life everyone can relate to."
In his words, "The comic (below) was an anecdote about a Facebook mistake, I had basically two choices: Use it as a Facebook status to make my friends laugh or try to dramatize the whole process into an internal crisis to make it a story."
Comic by Bouletcorp, where it originally appeared. Used here with permission.
That "internal crisis" is something Boulet is very interested in.
Boulet enjoys using the accessible medium of cartoons as a way to explore complex issues. He loves learning about and studying consciousness and neuroscience. His fans enjoy this.
"There were fun discussions in the comments about how the brain works ... the very idea that we have a parallel process that can interfere, overlap or get in conflict is actually a thing. What I found most intriguing about this story was to literally feel my hand freeze BEFORE I could put an explanation on the WHY it froze."
He also had a great suggestion as to figuring out the motivations behind certain posts. "We should always go on social networks with EEGs on. We would learn a lot."
Men try to read the most disturbing comments women get online back to them.
If you wouldn't say it to their faces, don't type it.
This isn’t comfortable to talk about.
Trigger warning for discussion of sexual assault and violence.
A recent video by Just Not Sports took two prominent female sportswriters and had regular guys* read the awful abuse they receive online aloud.
Sportswriters Sarah Spain and Julie DiCaro sat by as men read some of the most vile tweets they receive on a daily basis. See how long you can last watching it.
*(Note: The men reading them did not write these comments; they're just being helpful volunteers to prove a point.)
It starts out kind of jokey but eventually devolves into messages like this:
Awful.
All images and GIFs from Just Not Sports/YouTube.
These types of messages come in response to one thing: The women were doing their jobs.
Those wishes that DiCaro would die by hockey stick and get raped? Those were the result of her simply reporting on the National Hockey League's most disturbing ordeal: the Patrick Kane rape case, in which one of the league's top players was accused of rape.
DiCaro wasn't writing opinion pieces. She was simply reporting things like what the police said, statements from lawyers, and just general everyday work reporters do. In response, she received a deluge of death threats. Her male colleagues didn't receive nearly the same amount of abuse.
It got to the point where she and her employer thought it best to stay home for a day or two for her own physical safety.
The men in the video seemed absolutely shocked that real live human beings would attack someone simply for doing their jobs.
Not saying it.
All images and GIFs from Just Not Sports/YouTube.
Most found themselves speechless or, at very least, struggling to read the words being presented.
All images and GIFs from Just Not Sports/YouTube.
Think this is all just anecdotal? There's evidence to the contrary.
The Guardian did a study to find out how bad this problem really is.
They did a study of over 70 million comments that have been posted on their site since 2006. They counted how many comments that violated their comment policy were blocked.
The stats were staggering.
From their comprehensive and disturbing article:
If you can’t say it to their face... don’t type it.
All images and GIFs from Just Not Sports/YouTube.
So what can people do about this kind of harassment once they know it exists?
There are no easy answers. But the more people who know this behavior exists, the more people there will be to tell others it's not OK to talk to anyone like that.
Watch the whole video below:
.This article originally appeared on 04.27.16