Internet Comments: LOL?

If you go to Youtube and search for the Beatles, you will find many homemade videos featuring their songs. The comments on these videos are nostalgic. People praise the lyrics and discuss their meanings. One commenter writes about the deceased father of a friend, who loved the Beatles and how the music brings remembrance. There's a sense of community, as if these confessions bring people together. The mood is reflective, celebratory and friendly.

It takes one person to ruin it for everybody.

"The Beatles are crap," someone posts and right there in the middle of all that goodwill and music appreciation, there will ensue a heated digital argument full of expletives and racial slurs with "All You Need is Love" in the background.

Who logs onto the internet and searches for a video with the intention of picking fights with people they don't even know? Do they do it professionally, I wonder, or is it a deviant compulsive habit, like stealing from the elderly or hitting a puppy?

I gained insight into the mind of people like the Beatles meanie while reading an online article about Youtube comments. One person commented "I watched a video on Youtube the other day. I loved it. It was hilarious. So, I posted a note saying it totally sucked and everyone got mad. It was great! It's funny knowing I made someone mad over the internet."

Hilarious.

I can just picture his delight, as he sits in his mother's basement snickering, his blow-up plastic girlfriend by his side...

The message is that we shouldn't take the comments too seriously. Still, when a Youtuber posts a long, graphically detailed rape fantasy on a video of a feminist slam poet, it's hard to just blow it off.

If he had spoken his fantasy outside of the virtual world, he might have been arrested. There is at times a strong misogynistic, hateful streak on Youtube, which shows how even the best places on the internet can become an outlet for the worst elements of society: the pedophiles, the rapists, the violent racists, the stalkers.

There are also the opinion people.

I found an art site that showcased a series of sculptures/chairs. It was pretty neat and alot of people thought so- except that one guy. He called the chairs wasteful and bad for the environment- even though the energy it took to build & run his computer was probably more than what it took to make the simple chair sculptures.

When I downloaded some free desktop wallpaper from a site, one person asked where he could find some Christian wallpaper. This prompted a nasty remark (hardly legible for all the !!! and CAPITAL LETTERS) from a complete stranger ranting about Bush and conservatism.

By reading a list of historical presidential rankings, I subjected myself to a series of intellectually brilliant (not really) rants about Clinton,who had Vince Foster killed, Kennedy, who had Marilyn Monroe killed and Obama who is going to kill us all, because he' s Hitler, the Antichrist and Godzilla rolled into one (?).

Since it was on MSNBC, the conservatives could not be dissuaded from the belief that Keith Olbermann himself had written the list. The liberals said that Nixon, Reagan and Bush shouldn't even be on the list. Both claimed the list was biased toward the other side.

There's something about asking someone for their opinion that makes them think they should be critical and superior, even when it makes no sense.

I love debating on Youtube. I love being able to tell someone how neat their ideas are. I love the democracy of the internet: anybody, anywhere, at any time can have their voice heard and make their opinions known.It sounds almost utopian, but I kind of miss the days when every new idea, every work of art and every tofu recipe wasn't a tug of war between conservative and liberal, creationist and evolutionist, male and female.

I wish I could just enjoy the world that the internet unrolls before me. There's freedom of speech, but then there is an overall freedom that we have: the freedom to choose our lifestyle, surroundings and the people in our lives.

I wonder if someday those interests will clash, if a person's "right" to spout violence and depravity will conflict with my right to sit back with a Frappuccino at Starbuck's and listen to Paul McCartney sing "Blackbird".