Why don't you come over here and say that? Not a question I ask much, largely because the kind of people of whom I'd like to ask it are precisely the ones I'd rather stayed over there. But you don't need to be a coward like me to realise that the censorship built into physical proximity is often our best pre-emptive defence.
It turns out, though, that actually coming over here and saying things seems to be growing in importance. As a report in the New York Times explained earlier this week, the added license conferred by virtual conversation - and instant text message and email in particular - is causing problems. Last year's first instance of web rage in Essex, is but the tip of an iceberg that internet users know as "flaming" and which psychologists and neuro-scientists call the "online distribution effect".
Besides referring to the way in which our inhibitions about offending people come and go with the sight of their faces, the effect is also found in the way we are apparently now much more apt to read offence into messages because we can't see the face of our interlocutor.
It's all very interesting, particularly to read about research being done on "circuitry centered on the orbitofrontal cortex", the use of "emoticons" in text messages, etc. But it's worth pointing out that philosophers have been discussing this kind of thing for years, at least since Plato's castigation of writing on precisely these grounds in his dialogue Phaedrus. It's also worth saying that, if messages are being misread, it's probably got more to do with their having been miswritten than because of a "design flaw inherent in the interface between the brain's social circuitry and the online world".
But then that's easy for me to say, without any menacing illiterates in the vicinity. Oh, but what's that on my phone? "ur dead meat m8". My delivery from the butchers must have arrived at last.
