When the going gets tough, caps lock goes on
By Nury Vittachi
*
Thanks for the comments and emails, guys. Today I am deep in thought on the subject of internet debates--and especially ones which contain emotion.
I spent much of my childhood lying on the dusty concrete of the playground being beaten to a pulp by larger boys. How I miss those days. Truly, schooldays are the happiest days of one's life.
Despite my unusual fighting technique ("getting beaten up"), both sides saw this as classic male-bonding, and I look back with nothing but warmth towards my most frequent sparring partner, a boy called Jeremy whose scariest weapons were his nostrils, which exuded twin rivers of flesh-melting acid.
*
But now I am adult (physically, I mean) and these days I have to settle differences by email. It stinks. Email is a terrible medium for a fight.
I often get picked to judge book prizes—but all the debates take place by email, because panelists are inevitably thousands of kilometers apart.
Having a passionate argument via the internet goes like this.
*
Stage one: Normal length emails are swapped, with little smiley faces on the end of each message.
*
Stage two: The debate gets a little heated, and the smiley icons start to look ironic.
*
Stage three: The emails become long and defensive. The smileys vanish, as does the "dear" at the beginning and the "best wishes" at the end.
*
Stage four: The emails become extremely long and tense, each one worked on for at least an hour.
*
Stage five: Suddenly the messages become very, very short.
*
Stage six: CAPS LOCK: ON.
*
Stage seven: Caps lock on and the font size grows to 18 point.
*
Stage eight: Caps lock on and the font grows to 72-point headline size and you can only fit in two words per email. (The good news is that it doesn't take long to think of which two words to choose.)
*
Stage nine: You take the other person's email address and sign him or her up for on-line newsletters such as The Daily Pervert.
*
Stage ten: In the death throes of the argument, one side mentions Hitler and the argument ends.
*
A tradition has grown up that whenever someone brings up a silly comparison to the Nazi regime, the row stops and that speaker is deemed to have lost the debate. This started in 1990 when chatroom geek Mike Godwin formulated Godwin's law, which says: "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."
The result was an unofficial but widely adopted rule that says the use of silly analogies involving Nazis signifies a debater has become too hysterical to continue.
*
Scotland's version of Godwin's law says that all arguments about politics eventually lead to references to the Mel Gibson's Scottish independence movie Braveheart.
*
The US political version says that every instance of Democrats starting to lead at the polls automatically leads to references to a socialist takeover.
*
Godwin's law is really about the way people sum up big issues with ill-judged but predictable analogies. For example, any lengthy discussion about Singapore leads to the words "Nanny government".
*
Any lengthy discussion about India leads to "call centres".
*
Any lengthy discussion about China leads to the words: "Free Tibet, scumbags" on one side, and: "Tibet is an alienable part of the Motherland since time immemorial, imperialist dogs" on the other.
*
It's so predictable. Why can't we all go back to hitting each other in the playground?
