Jekyll & Hyde: An Email From Your Alter-Ego

I like Jerry Lewis movies and my favorite is without question, The Nutty Professor. It is a take-off on the old Jekyll and Hyde theme -- combined with those old comic book ads for muscle-building. Remember them? The muscle man at the beach kicks sand in the guy’s face, but he’s too puny to do anything about it. So he bulks up and is ready the next time it happens?
In the film, Dr. Julius Kelp, a meek and mild college chemistry professor who is picked on by just about everyone from the college president to members of his class, uses chemistry to create a special elixir that allows his alter ego Buddy Love to come alive. Buddy is everything that Kelp is not. He’s hip and cool, but also very self-absorbed. He is focused only on his own wants without regard to who he might hurt in the process.
So, what does any of this have to do with “Dish-ing It to Downing”?
I recently received two anonymous letters.
I routinely get emails from people who don’t leave their name – letters that usually have a very hateful tone to them. This doesn’t particularly upset me. It’s an interesting phenomenon, but is it a sign of the times?
Last April, David Vaina wrote an online article called, “New Media Versus Old Media”. His summary: new media don’t follow the same ethics as traditional media. Just look at some of the hate mail (yes, it is hate mail) generated by our story on “The Real Housewives of Taylor County”. Some of it was just insulting and maybe it was because the authors didn’t have to put their real name on it. Parked in front of a computer screen, “Mr. Hyde” took over, saying what they wanted because there was no accountability or policing. It is, afterall, a free country and your right to say what you want is guaranteed by the Constitution right?
Not really. The Constitution keeps the government from making laws abridging your freedom of speech. Sometimes going on a "rant" can end-up villifying you just as much as the person you are attacking. Vaina says there are justifiable concerns about potentially negative ramifications as we transition from traditional journalism to “one shaped, at least in part, by a decentralized biosphere.” According to Vaina, advocates of this new form of journalism say that overtime the media landscape will be enriched, not degraded, by this public discourse. Admittedly though, it may take decades, not years, for that to happen. In the meantime, who weighs the damage done against the benefits to society?
Site managers for Technorati, a recognized authority on blogs and user-generated content, report that they are now tracking almost 113 million blogs and more than 1.6 million blog posts each day. I suspect one of the biggest problems with the internet is that it’s “different things to different people”. I know people who consider the internet a valuable source for information. I also know people who think it’s a big game and, using a pseudonym, you can do just about anything to anyone you want to. Consider this: research from the Pew Internet & American Life Project show 55 percent of bloggers write their online blogs under a ficticious name. The concern of many is that these bloggers will be more likely to publish false rumor because it’s harder to trace the mistake back to its source.
There are times when anonymity is justified. I think, however, most of the time you should have the courage of your convictions.
Everyone is entitled to an opinion and I really do care about what you think, but when it comes to emails and letters that have no redeeming value, I will do what I have always done with them: send them to the trash/recycle bin.

Downing Bolls