This month, it has dawned on some people that it's possible to be rude on the Internet. Don't care for tenderly served personal revelations on Twitter1? Ticked off by an eager attempt to amuse you with a timely joke? Unfollow with impunity, these monsters advise, citing a sense of euphoria or "joy" after hitting the mute button on a human being (or its parodic equivalent).
Angered to the breaking point by the use of cellphones during a movie screening at the Toronto International Film Festival, one movie blogger decided to file a formal complaint with the local police.
Let's just say for argument's sake that you enter a New York City subway station and step onto an escalator that's headed down towards the train tracks. At that moment, you must choose one of two clear courses of action: walk down the escalator, or stand still. Put more precisely, you can either walk down the escalator, or you deserve to be pushed down the escalator.
Natasha's roommate, Eric, had finally done it. He had truly crossed a line. He existed now beyond the pale, in a lawless wasteland populated by bandits, brutes, and bad, bad roommates. Natasha sings now, of his treachery, in an email forwarded to Gawker.
There are two kinds of phone users in the world: people who leave voicemails for other people and people who ignore voicemails from other people.
Jon Lee Anderson, a writer for a weekly magazine called the New Yorker, got angry on Twitter today. A reader with the Twitter name of Mitch Lake (@mlake9) had tweeted at Anderson (@jonleeanderson) to dispute a claim of fact in Anderson's online story about the death of Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez. Anderson had written that Chavez had left his country as "one of the world's most oil-rich but socially unequal countries," and Lake countered that in fact Venezuela was the second-least unequal country in the Americas.
