Blogging as Therapy

I attended a seminar over the summer on Free Speech, the Internet and the Challenge of Advancing Technology at a law school conference. One of the speakers mentioned a symposium he had attended in Europe to explore violence and the internet; he indicated that the European members of this conference felt there was a need for more governmental control over speech on the internet due to the potential for violent behavior as a result of hate speech.

When it came time for questions, I asked what research this conference had access to that showed a correlation between violence and free speech on the internet. The speaker stated that no such correlation had been proven to exist as of yet, but the European panel saw the potential for violence as a concern. What about the potential for the internet to do good? Did these so-called researchers consider that there was also a potential for the internet to inhibit violence?

Perhaps these European academics should come sit in my therapy office for a week and talk to the people I have seen who use the internet as a way to stop themselves from becoming violent. Maybe they would be interested to know about the nine year old boy who made plans to kill his principal but decided that computers were a lot more interesting. Or what about the 50-year-old potential mass murderer I saw who used a journal and the internet to sublimate his feelings of aggression into words and found others in chat rooms to comfort him? It is amazing to me that academics who proclaim to use science or research to back their ideas make their suggestions for policy changes on politically correct hunches rather than actual hard core data.

To see more on the mistakes academics make about human behavior, see my article at Tech Central Station entitled, "Overhumanizing the Enemy."