One Year Later

So here I am starting the second year of this column, and I was sitting here thinking of what to write about, what would be the perfect thought-provoking topic for the occasion, and I came up with the Internet. No, wait, let me rephrase that, don't want you to all think I'm pulling an Al Gore and saying "I invented the Internet". I mean, my topic shall be the Internet. Now I really don't want to bite the hand that feeds me, nor do I mean any disrespect to the over 1000 people who have been fortunate to cross this site in the past year, but seriously, this Internet thing of ours has some serious problems. By that I mean both with the Net and ON the Net.

Take for example the hubbub that erupted over a simple poll question on the website of my soon to be former employer. Over the ten-plus months that I have produced Local Talk Host's show, we have gotten so many negative calls about Hillary Clinton, it really has to make you wonder about the mental state of some people. Now, I certainly don't support her as a senator, I voted for Rick Lazio, even though his campaign press manager ripped me a new one over the phone at one point over something Local Talk Host said on the air. I do not agree with her politics, however, I could never really come to the point where I would blatantly say that I HATE her. Some people do, though; actually, a lot of people, and most of them, curiously enough, in Central New York. So, in keeping with that recurring theme/nightmare, the poll question this week is "Do you hate Hillary Clinton?"

A perfectly harmless question in my estimation. However, one philosophy professor at Syracuse University did not think so. He chose to take umbrage in print in the Sub-Standard, errrr, Post-Standard the other day, with a letter to the editor in effect trashing us for the so-called "hate" we were portraying through this poll question. However, the topper was when the paper, in its infinite wisdom, threw the following headline on the professor's letter: "Why is WSYR Promoting Indiscriminate All-Purpose Hate?" No "are we doing it?" Instead, it's "we're doing it, so why?" So, in keeping with this tempest in a teapot that has been created, Local Talk Host devotes the balance of his show to said letter, and the lines are jammed. Mostly people wishing to defend us, both on the phone and on Local Talk Host's interactive website, which is really cool, because it's true what they say about how in situations like these you find out who your real friends are. However, there were the obligatory yayhoos who were looking for an excuse to harass the host, only since I screen the calls, all they wound up doing was harassing ME. Which led me to go on the air and say the following: "This SU professor doesn't know what hate is, because he's never had to screen calls on this show!"

Anyhoo, the professor fires back by fax (from Paris, no less) today, and includes in his message that he had just revisited the website (probably the interactive one in this case), and was appalled at the hostility therein. He was referring to the myriad posters who rushed to Local Talk Host's aid and called the professor everything from "The Nutty Professor" to a PC Socialist. All of this really leads me to wonder about the mindset of the people who without hesitation express their views online every single day, and in a variety of forums on a variety of topics.

Take for example the number of forums the local litterbox-lining devotes to sports, high school sports, college sports, and the like. Here is where you have the people conducting nit-picking of all kinds of high school programs to the point where they believe that ultimately any problem is the coach's fault and that the coach should always be the one held responsible for any negative, and thus must be summarily canned. Here is where you find the SU fans who respond to positive support of the football team with "we got a life" or "shut up, Pasqualackey".

Then, I go to the local radio posting board, and the newest ratings came out, and the monthly or tri-monthly pissing contest starts between the two Top 40 stations in town, although the "established" one seems to be less a Top 40 and more an Adult station. Anyhoo, on nights like these, you will see one person posting under five different aliases to tell the world how much station B sucks in as immature a fashion as possible. How do I know that this person is using five aliases? Easy, the IP address is on the screen for every message, consider it the "Caller ID" of the Internet. Ironically, when I inquired on said board as to why people do these things, the respondent (who told me that maybe it's different people on the same network) had the SAME IP ADDRESS as the nitwit with the 5 aliases.

Worse yet is this person who makes a point to visit the local news forum every so often and post repeatedly, on nearly every running thread, slanderous comments about Syracuse policemen sodomizing young boys. Not only is it sick, but then the moderators have to go in and delete all the threads these posts appear on, thus snuffing out whatever rational discussion had been previously going on.

And then there's this Code Red "worm" that is causing trouble for computers all over the world. Of course, this isn't the first time that such a problem has occured; viruses are unfortunately a part of everyday life for the computer user. Our local resident computer guru at the radio station puts it perfectly, that if these people were smart enough to create such havoc, think what good they could have done if they had just used their powers for good. Something to chew on...

Consider it something to think about any time somebody throws up some ignorant, ridiculously pointless garbage on your local cyber-gathering place. Sure it's idealistic, but as I have admittedly been one to consider those types of ill-advised public displays of stupidity, it's perhaps a goal we all can aspire to, myself included.