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Why nice people are jerks online
Spending an extended amount of time on the internet can feel like being in a bad relationship: You know it would be healthier to call it quits, but still, you can feel yourself being sucked in. And the longer you stay, the harder it becomes to recognize yourself.
Coming off a long, grueling election week in a long, grueling year, that feels truer now than it’s ever been: Our personas online, especially on social media, are often far from the people we want to be IRL. We pick political fights with relatives in the comments of a cousin’s Facebook post. Or we snark on strangers’ grammar mistakes. Or we disengage completely from the urgent problems around us, and pour our energy into crafting easy Twitter jokes as the world burns.
Of course, it’s true that every environment pulls a different self to the forefront. The person you are at the office, for example, is probably more professional than the sake-slinging, karaoke-crooning version of yourself that shows up at happy hour. But the internet has created a unique space where this effect is exaggerated, often in the worst ways — and eventually, our online personalities seep into our offline ones. As the pandemic forces us to live more of our lives online than we normally would, that separation is growing increasingly flimsy.
