Our Words and the Internet

“People have always been rude, but what the internet has given us is anonymity. We can cut invisibly, harming each other at safe, unaccountable distances.”

A lot has been said recently about toning down our rhetoric. I agree wholeheartedly. Red, blue, purple, tea-colored, it doesn’t matter. We have a real problem with civility, and I think our culture’s biggest contributor isn’t talk radio or news channels, as accusers have said. Most recently, it’s the internet.

If you want to lose hope in the future of this great country, and in it’s young people, hang out for a while on YouTube, specifically reading the commentators who post their pithy vitriol under videos with anonymous handles like “luvdragon45” or “smellyal8tr119.”

People have always been rude, even obnoxious. It’s recorded in our earliest histories. What the internet has given us – and dangerously, in my opinion – is anonymity. We can cut invisibly, without seeing the effects of our words. We can harm each other at safe, unaccountable distances.

Visit any popular YouTube channel, and you can read the callous disregard for the feelings of real human beings on the other end of the video. Horrible things are written, unspeakable names are called with a few effortless keystrokes.

I'll never forget the vile, hurtful posts I read beneath a 13-year-old girl's debut YouTube video. It was forwarded to me by a mutual friend, the daughter of a co-worker singing her heart out. I can't remember the song, but it was taken from the current pop charts of that week. She was off key. She was chubby. She had a few zits. She was adorable.

Some thoughtless trolls began a campaign it seemed, a ruthless, cowardly digital smack down. Comment after comment under her video made my jaw drop in disbelief. One hopes the girl never read the comments, but as one who has his own modest little YouTube channel, I can assume that she was likely just as anxious as anyone to read feedback. If read, those words doubtless made her feel small, foolish, insignificant, unworthy, ashamed. As a Dad, my heart breaks to think about it.

The video was removed a few days later without explanation. My heart sank to think of this young, impressionable girl's light being dimmed, if even a little, by a few cavemen with more time than sense, sitting at their parents’ computer and throwing harmful words like grenades at an innocent girl who’s only crime was a desire to share a song. I wanted to give her a hug, and tell her to shake it off, but I knew it wouldn't do any good. I wanted to congratulate her on receiving her first real harsh lesson in life: that the world is full of idiots, and most of them have access to computers.

I wanted to contact each one of the anonymous critics and ask them a battery of questions, starting with, "What in this wide world makes you think you had the right to judge another person so cruelly?" and ending with "What have you ever built? What have you ever made? What have you contributed? Or do you feel that your purpose here on earth is simply to tear down what others build?"

As one who has spent untold hours developing a craft or two as a means to express myself – often in very vulnerable ways, with songs, poems and artwork that threaten to expose a little more of myself than I may be comfortable sharing – I feel I can be a somewhat authoritative ambassador on the potential harms of the accessibility of the internet. And I’ve certainly been the target of criticism. That’s the nature of the game, I guess. Not a big deal.

My attitude with YouTube critics has generally been to adopt a “pearls before swine” philosophy, made even more poignant by the fact that these are FREE pearls I’m giving away, watched at no cost to them, and harvested at large cost to me, in both time and creative energy. So Ihave little use for the feedback of cavemen. After they’ve spent 20 years developing an independent music career – or anything, for that matter – come back, we’ll talk.

But more to the point, the people I love most on this earth are folded in to every aspect of what I do creatively. You’ll hear my family on my albums, you’ll see them in my videos. All my dearest friends are a core part of what I do musically. I can no sooner separate them from my creative life than I could remove my beating heart and expect to live. So when I come across rude, insensitive remarks toward anyone I love, I tend to react. The pitbull that is inside all of us protective husbands, fathers and friends rages inside me, and I will do what I can to protect.

As an illustration of this, this weekend I disabled comments on all my videos at my YouTube channel. I hated to do it -- there were some wonderful comments on there, 99 percent of them, in fact -- but after reading some inappropriate comments, I decided it was time. It’s a shame that walls have to be erected around us like that, but so be it. It may cost me more subscribers, more YouTube notoriety, blah blah blah, but I refuse to align myself with that element of negativity. It won’t be the first time I made a career choice based on similar principles. Life is just too short, and careers even shorter.

And most sadly for me was the conversation I had with my teenage son, who told me he sees YouTube as a pretty harsh, ruthless environment. He has removed his own videos because of idiotic comments. He sees YouTube not for what it could be, a place to explore self expression, but as the last place he would ever want to express himself. This ruthless climate intimidates a lot of our young people. For every young boy posting a video of himself playing a Van Halen lick on his new guitar, there are thousands who would never think of subjecting themselves to the public scrutiny and potential smack downs of the trolling cavemen out there -- one more thing to separate performers from wannabes, I guess. The internet has brought about more opportunity for the young, independent artist, as long as their skin is sufficiently thick.

I try and live so that my words and actions bring no harm to people, and it’s my obligation as a human being to protect others I love from the same. I want it said that the world was a better place with my having lived in it. And it’s my hope that the careless authors of harmful rhetoric will one day mature and realize what harm can be done with words. And it’s my hope that in the meantime, the rest of us will be there to teach them. Until then, I guess I'll just use my delete key.