“….but it’s more important to be nice.”
That was just one of the many pearls of motherly wisdom imparted to me in childhood. And to my mother’s great credit, I have found it to be almost universally true. As time went on, however, I learned that the primary exception to the rule was a space that didn’t exist in my childhood: the cybersphere.
A recent study conducted by the Pew Research Center has sought to quantify the overall lack of online manners. Pew found that 41% of survey respondents reported that they had at one time been the subject of online harassment. Some of the alleged offensives ranged from relatively minor: offensive name-calling (27%), or purposeful embarrassment (22%). Others were considerably more concerning: physical threats (10%), sustained harassment (7%), stalking (7%), and sexual harassment (6%).