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"racism is hate. murder is hate. rape is hate. war is hate. self-importance is hate...but dislike or preference is NOT hate."

I succumbed to the social networking site obsession a long time ago. Social Networking websites are a fad as of late especially with the debut of Twitter. But, I'm curious, how do people handle themselves when they can be whoever they want? Secondly, what the fuck is a "hater"?

I have been polling my followers on twitter about people and their social personas on the internet for a few months. This has accomplished quite a bit including making people believe that I'm tweeting about them and ultimately publicly rendering those same self-important tweeters as the clowns they truly are.

This research is a bit rough around the edges...all you see here that I've blogged, is an incorporated piece with the thoughts of all my poll respondents intertwined (and my thoughts of course). I am guilty of this; I have been a part of and a victim of this same culture. I've participated in twitter-rants and facebook revenge...if only to find that social networking and the competition to defend one's internet persona isn't really a means to an end. This is because our internet personas are not REAL.

I really don't "hate on" much, besides rapists and child molesters. I mean if someone wants to air out their dirty laundry in plain view…why should I be mad? If someone is putting something out on their site and they are either a friend of mine, someone I follow and/or their content is for public consumption, then I view myself as totally in the right to have an opinion on it. Should it grace my timeline or my mini-feed...it is subject to my dislike. Remember when your Mom told you that hate was a very strong word and that you should never say it? Right...me either.

Why if I dislike something or openly disapprove of something, am I then hating? This seems to me like a scheme thought up by people who don’t get enough attention. If you comment, you not only give them some validation but it shows them that you are passionate in some way about what they said.

So you let ‘em have it…you in essence let them know you give a shit about something they said or thought. One of my poll respondents made a point to me about this: If anyone is putting content out there in any sort of public light, they are in essence sort of silently requesting that it be commented on. Any comment whether bad or good lends the public content credence but if it’s a bad comment, a person readily presumes that it’s because you are “hating”. I couldn’t agree more.

(Bear in mind that I am talking about the context of "hater" as it is used to slander others on the internet. Hate slander is the streets is an entirely different monster.)

But how does this make any sense? If I don’t like you or what you put on the internet, this does not mean I hate you. Period. It seems that anything ranging from curiosity to jealousy is perceived as hate. However, neither curiosity nor jealousy actually (fully) equate to hate. Let’s just say we didn’t have the internet or social networking sites and we were forced to always talk to one another in person…even when expressing only the thoughts we think are socially acceptable…this would grant us the opportunity to explain and possibly be better understood. If it is not our goal to be understood or to be amicably communicative, we still wouldn’t be able to hide behind the mask of social rejection that is having an adverse comment written about something we’ve said online. We would not be so easily able to play the victim.

No one has said to me that they feel that there aren’t people online who seriously do not like them…of course everywhere one goes, one will have adversity. The question here is…is it really all that far-fetched that one makes a comment because they wholeheartedly disagree, or perhaps they agree and they are simply showing you that they relate with you on something?

I am currently reading a book by my first Pyschology Professor from UVA, Jonathan Haidt. The Happiness Hypothesis theorizes that language came into existence for humans in order to enable gossip! We needed a way to be able to point fingers and tell others who is bad and who is good. Language came about as a replacement to physical presence and touch, due to the rapid expansion of the human network (instead of knowing just the people in our families, our brains are now capable of knowing/recalling several other people outside our familial circles). Now if this is true, social networking allows for the hyperbolic and trite practice of “pointing fingers” and it paints a false picture of many well-intentioned people in the process.

I mentioned this point to a few friends and they agreed with me. Doesn’t it make sense that one of the reasons social networking sites thrive is that this type of connection enables contact between people when physical contact is not possible? Yes. Don’t we live in a world now where physical contact while more possible than in times past, is hard to achieve when our social networks are much more global? Yes. You know why sites like Facebook and Twitter even allow for public profiles?

They do because it’s expected that you’ll “meet” other users through the course of pursuing your passions or expressing your thoughts online. It is assumed that we will agree with some and “befriend” them on that basis and it is also assumed that we will disagree with some and challenge our own minds to come to terms with the types of thinking we don’t usually have access to or not…by dismissing the challenge and just calling our challengers haters. People can exist online only as they’d like to exist and be seen…it takes away the responsibility of being accountable to our true selves and saves us from more public shame or rejection, especially if we like to spontaneously act out of character every once in awhile.

Why should we believe that someone befriends us because they are genuine? We can’t see them and we don’t know them, in the physical sense. On another level, people like it when others stand their ground…it gives us a side to rally for and when it appears someone we know has been challenged we are not slow to tag on the name ‘hater’ and keep it moving. We are too much in love with our rather antiquated system of communicating. We like gossip.

Do people call other haters simply because it’s a way to feel important? Or have the Hater Witch Trials given us yet another way to put down our fellow man simply because we characteristically (as a species) find it hard to trust others?

Now, I can't really say that there is actually such thing as a "hater". Internet personas are not indicative of a real person, although they may be in part...they are only the absolution of all things that a person feels is comfortable/OK/socially acceptable to put on the internet (about themselves). In this case of course, one is never getting the real deal. Let’s face it, the guy you think is cute…well he actually has really bad breath, he’s a white supremacist, and he wears hot pink thongs. These are all things we may never see online, but we’d assume the bad before we had a chance to connect…and this presumption is the problem. Rather than become a gateway to global and spontaneous connections, social networking has become an arena for defensive and fake academy award winning performances for the masses.

*Big thanks to all poll participants, you know who you are.*