Did social media “turn” on us, or has it always encouraged and rewarded mean-spirited behavior? I think it’s the nature of social media, with its perception (and it is only that) of anonymity and its rewards for negativity and controversy (links, blog traffic, comments). That’s the topic of my August column for Talent Zoo, and the inspiration for My Social Media Love Manifesto.

There’s no way to change human nature. Regulatory boards, terms of service agreements and even peer pressure won’t do it. And who’s to say what’s right for everyone else? I only know what’s right for me, and I’ve decided I am going to be even more careful than I have been to date about weighing the facts in every situation, not attacking anyone individually unless it is absolutely necessary (and who am I to make such a decision?), and generally being as kind and supportive in my online interactions as I try to be offline.

Lee Siegel, a former blogger for the New Republic who got so upset about negative comments on his blog he created a pseudonym and fought back with anonymous comments, wrote in his book, Against the Machine, that the Internet is “the first social environment to serve the needs of the isolated, elevated, asocial individual.” There is some truth to this observation, but perhaps the Internet is “the most efficient and widely available environment in history” to cater to the needs of these people. And we didn’t necessarily need the Internet to see aggressive behavior spring up in social groups, which probably started millions of years ago among the lower primates (and to some degree exists in that form today). Wilfred Ruprecht Bion wrote in his 1961 essay Experience in Groups “the individual is a group animal at war, both with the group and with those aspects of his personality that constitute his ‘groupishness’.”

To define my personal rules, I wrote My Social Media Love Manifesto. It is named very deliberately. I wrote it for me. I would not presume to tell others how to behave. If you find it useful, use it, take it, copy it, reprint it, with or without attribution. I’d love to think I gave one person cause to think about this.

Incidentally, since I made this decision, I have found less to blog about, traffic to my site has dropped, and my blog ranking has dropped along with it. Oh well.

Tags: Lee Siegel, Against the Machine, New Republic, social media love manifesto, Wilfred Ruprecht Bion, Experience in Groups