The World Wide Web has made critics of us. But with commentators able to hide under the cloak of anonymity, have the blog and chat forums for hate and bile

Was aired for a while after his first TV series in 2009, comedian Stewart Lee in the habit of collecting and filing was some of the comments that people made about him on web sites and social media sites. He has a 10-minute trawl Google on most days for about six months and the resulting observations collected soon ran dozens of pages. If you read these comments now as a cumulative narrative, you begin to fear for Stewart Lee. A good third of the contributions is fantasizing about violence done to the comic, most of the rest barely contain the extent of their disgust.

This is a small, representative selection:

"I hate with a passion Stewart Lee. It 's like Ian Huntley for me." Wharto15, Twitter
"I saw him at a gig once, and even behind the stage, he was an aura of creepy molesty complacency. \ Exudes" Yukio Mishima, dontstartmeoff.com
"A man would hit me like a shit-covered cricket bats." Joycey, readytogo.net
"He 's got one of those faces, I want to burn it." Coxy, dontstartmeoff.com
"I hope that Stewart Lee dies." Idries, Youtube
"What the hell! If I ever, lee, I promise I will, I will kick the shit out of you." Carcrazychica, YouTube
"Stewart Lee is a cynical man who has the ability to build a whole carrer [sic] from his own complacency. I hope the damn synchronous disease kills [sic] him." Maninabananasuit, Guardian.co.uk
"I spent the whole time thinking about how much I want to punch in the face of Stewart Lee instead of laughing. He has an incredibly punchable face doesn 't it? (I could just close my eyes, but fantasizing about , punching Stewart Lee is even more fun than sitting in complete, deafening silence.) "Pudabaya, beexcellenttoeachother.com

Lee, a comedian who is not afraid, the more grotesque aspects of human behavior, or always resist dishing out some of his own bile, do not think of herself as naive. But the sheer volume of vitriol, his apparent absence of irony, set him back. Knowing for a few months, probably the worst thing was that people thought of him a sort of strange compulsion, although he distanced himself slightly with the belief that he did, his obsessive collecting "character". "Collecting all these up isn 't something I would do," he said to me. "It is something that would do out-up comedian Stewart Lee, but I have to do it for him because he me ..."

Distanced or not, Lee couldn't help but be somewhat unsettled by the rage he seemed to provoke by telling stories and jokes: "When I first realised the extent of this stuff I was shocked," he says. "Then it appeared to me that a lot of the things I was hated for were things I was actually trying to do; a lot of what people considered failings were to me successes. I sort of wrote a lot of series two of Stewart Lee 's Comedy Vehicle with these comments in mind, try more of what people liked hadn 't. "

The "40,000 words of hatred" have been "\ anthropologically amusing" to him, he insists. "You can see, many of them seem to be the same people posting the same material under different names in different places, and it's strange people you have known personally, where you thought you had to see was fine with the time , you are abusing under pseudonyms hardly effective. "

He 's stopped looking in these days, and never really tried to identify or to confront his critics. "I am a little concerned that some of them might be mad and a bit of hope that I made haven 't me or my family a target."

Lee is obviously not the only ones who directed this anonymous violent hatred against him. To become parts of the Internet is quite common parlance. Do a quick trawl on the blog sites and comment sections on most celebrities and entertainers - not mention the politicians - and you'll quickly find similar virtual rage and fantasized violence. Comedians seem to come more than most when it was taboo if taken as read, or the mood of the toughest club audience was barking into a kind of universal rhetoric. It 's not quite the heckling, though, right? A heckle requires a little courage and risk seeing the audience can know who is doing the shouting. Lee 's opponents were all anonymous. How should we understand it then: harmless banter? Robust criticism? Vicious bullying?

Psychologists call this "deindividuation". It 's what happens when social norms are withdrawn because identities are hidden from happening. The Halloween classic deindividuation experiment affected American children. Trick-or-treaters are invited to candy in the hall of a house on a table on which it links and an amount of money. When children come alone, and not wearing masks, stole only 8% of them a part of the money. If they were in larger groups with their identities hidden from fancy dress, that number rose to 80%. The combination of a faceless mass and personal anonymity provokes individuals to break into rules that would have to "normal" you may not be kept.

Deindividuation is what happens when we moved behind the wheel of a car and feel to abuse at the woman who scream slowly turning right. It is our motivation is a responsible father in a football crowd, screaming for crude sexual hatred in the opposition or the referee. And it 's why, under the guise of an alias or avatar on a website or blog - surrounded by virtual strangers - conventional conservative people move could be interpreted to be a comedian suffered all kinds of violent torture, because they don 't like his jokes, or his face. Digital media allow almost unlimited possibilities for deliberate de-individualization. They require almost. The effects of these freedoms, the ubiquity of anonymity, and the language of the crowd, are just beginning to feel.

You can immediately return this impact on the emergence of social media to track to California's pioneering utopias, and her case. The earliest network groups had cast a kind of paradise. A representative group was CommuniTree that were like an open-access forum on a number of modem-linked computers in the 1970s, when computers were just sums put into life. For a while the group of like-minded enthusiasts ran perfectly harmonious lines, to respect others, with positive and informed discussion on issues of mutual relevance. At some point, but armed retrieve some high-school teenagers with modems, the open-access space and uses it in the trash and the abuse of free speech under CommuniTree uninhibited extremes that never wanted to be the pioneers. The pioneers were horrified accordingly. And finally, after deciding that they can not control the students by the censorship, nor tolerate them in the room with them, they shut down CommuniTree.

This story is almost folkloric in new media prophet, a sort of foundation myth. It was one of the first moments in which corrupt the possibilities of the new collective potential by anonymous lowest common denominator of humanity, a pattern that was pretty much all followed in such virtual communication has been repeated. Barbarians, or "trolls" as she was known, had entered the church without the rules, screaming, violence to spoil it for everyone. After that, who have a website or a forum with high or medium to high ideals were founded, had to decide how such destructive anonymous posters, those who saw in the way of constructive debate.

Tom Postmes, professor of social and organizational psychology at the Universities of Exeter and Groningen in his native Holland, and author of Individuality and the group , has been researching these issues for 20 years. "In the early years," he says, "this online behaviour was called flaming. And then that became institutionalised. Among friends, the people who engaged in this activity were actually quite jocular in intent but they were accountable to standards and norms that are radically different to those of most of their audience. Trolls aspire to violence, to the level of trouble they can cause in an environment. They want it to kick off. They want to promote antipathetic emotions of disgust and outrage, which morbidly gives them a sense of pleasure."

Postmes compares online aliases to the tags of graffiti artists: "trolls want people to recognize their style, to recognize them, or at least their online identity, but they will only be successful in this, if doesn an authority 't put a stop advancing. they. This anonymity helps. It' s basically no risk. "

There is no particular type of person drawn to this kind of covert bullying, suggests he: "As the football hooligans, they have a family and live at home, but when they go to a game, the joy comes from finding a context in which you let go, or to use the familiar expression 'a moral holiday ". Doing this online has a similar characteristic. One would expect, it is quite normal people, you know the bloke at the corner shop or a woman from the office. They are the people usually do this ... "

Some trolls have become almost as famous as the blogs to which they attach themselves, in a strange, parasitic type of relationship. Jeffrey Wells, author of Hollywood Elsewhere , Is a former columnist for the LA Times Anyone who has been blogging about movies in stories for 15 years. "The rudeness, the self-pity: moved in the last few years, its gossip and comment by the insult of a character named LEXG, whose 200-odd self-hatred and wildly negative posts recently Wells to speak to him directly was grim and occasionally catches the eye and cruel dismissiveness must be rejected. Way down. arguments and genuine contempt for certain debaters can be fun, will try not mind. I 'm, Ms Manners. But it has finally become a main focus on the perception and the love and passion and the glory of good writing. It has an emphasis on charter in the light, rather than damning the darkness of the trolls and vomiting on the floor and joined this or that Hollywood Elsewhere Contributors in the balls ... "

When I talked to Wells about LEXG he was philosophical. "Everyone writes on the website anonymously, but me," he says. "If they didn 't I think it would dry them. This place is like a soap bubble in which you can explode the inner lava. And, boy, there's a lot of lava."

He has resisted the fact that people write under their own names, because that would kill the comments immediately. "Why would you take that one in 100 chance that your mother or a prospective employer will read if you have \ didn 't? \ What did you think late at night in front of a dozen years," thinks for haters, Wells , anonymity makes for livelier writing. "It 'sa trick, really -.. The less you feel are identified, the more unrestrained in his best LEXG you can really know how to write well and hold a thought and keep it going, he is relatively healthy, but not sure. a happy guy he 's do it a few years ago and he really become a presence;. he does it on all sites Hollywood "

Have they ever met?

"Just once," says Wells. Want to "I have asked him to write a column on its own, give him a corner of the page, bring it into the open." LEXG didn 't, he seemed appalled at the prospect. "He just wanted to comment on my stuff," says Wells. "He is a counter-puncher, I guess. The rules simply stay on my side, however. No rancid nasty personal comments directed at me. And no tea party bullshit."

The big problem is he runs the blog is that its anonymous commentators get a kind of herd mentality. And what has become a quick note from abuse. As a writer, Wells feels he needs a range of emotions: .. "I also make a personal commitment, or I can really enthusiastic about something, but the comments tend to color one, and that is monotonous It 's harder, I think, to be inspired, to be honest really explained why something means something to you. It may take twice as long. I can run with contempt and malice for a while, but you don 't always want the guy a shoe on his beat to the table. How LEXG. I mean, it' s not healthy for the start ... "

Wells has his own yard in the debate, something like the bartender a Western saloon. Other sites - including our own Comment is free - employ moderators try to keep trolls on line, and move on the debate. A young journalist named Sarah Bee was the moderator for three years on seminal techie news and chat forum to register. She began as an editor, but increasingly devoted her time to the "very stormy" on the chat site. She has no doubt that "Anonymity makes people brave and Arsey, of course. Tut and it was a politically libertarian crowd, so you get the people to express things very loudly, people would not agree and it would often be a lot of real meanness. "She was very liberal, went as far as moderation, she thinks, with no real hard and fast rules, except perhaps for" a ban on prison rape jokes, which were very often '.

Every once in a while, but the mood would \ get "very ugly" and they would try to calm things and remonstrated with people. "I would occasionally e-mail them - their e-mail addresses had to register for the site - to say, 'Even if you can not writing under your real name, people hear it, \.' "In those cases, oddly, she suggests that most people were incredibly contrite when contacted. It was like they had forgotten who they were. "They would send back messages to say," Oh, I 'm sorry', not even under the pretext of having a bad day or something. There is so much to do with the anonymity ... "

Bee was known as the Moderatrix - "All moderators have an implicit sub-dom relationship to their location" - even though they just about the only person in the comments that her own name was used. "There was a lot of misogyny and casual sexism, some pretty off-color stuff. Do I want to call to get some terrible e-mails me a cunt or whatever," she says, "but this does 't bother me as much as the day to day stuff, really. "

The day to day stuff, but it was "as in another world. It was really tiring. I would go home sometimes and just sigh and wonder about everything."

She is very keen to say that the register itself, they thought a great thing, and loved the idea of ??working there, but since Moderatrix finally got her to the ground. "A hive mind in sentences," she suggests. "Just would occasionally enforce good sense, but then there's the fact that the arguments over the internet literally never ends. You moderate a few hundred comments per day, and then come back the next morning and there are a few hundred longer you wait. It 's Sisyphus. "

In the end they needed a change. It 's in another "Community Management" job to do now by Facebook, which is a relief, because "it from anonymity, so people are \ much more polite." When she retired she Moderatrix goodbye and got 250 comments wish her all the best. It doesn 't miss it, though. "But sometimes I would leave a power of the offensive things through, just so people know how they saw things in the world ... People would be realized for a bit. But then the old ways were once in. what each presenter will tell you is that every day a new day and everything repeats itself every day. It's not about continuity and progress ... "

There are many places, of course, the Internet, where a utopian ideal of "Here Comes Everybody 'prevails, where the hive mind is anonymous fantastic curious and productive. Some time ago I spoke with Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, some of these and asked him who was his perfect contributors. "The ideal Wikipedian in my head, someone who is really smart and really nice," he said without irony. "These are the people who are drawn in the middle of the group. If the people power to get into these communities, it is not by shouting the loudest it through diplomacy and conflict resolution."

Within this "wikitopia" There was also, although much Lord of the Flies Moments. Vandals who set out to insert into the pages of nonsense and slander - The benevolent Wiki community is plagued with "Wikitrolls". A police system has up to root grown from troll elements, there are well over 1,000 official volunteers "admin", is working around the clock, they are in this work from the eyes and ears of the moral majority of the "virtuous support "Wikipedians.

"If we think about difficult users, there are two types" Wales said, with the same kind of fatigue Moderatrix. "The easy way is someone who comes in, calls all the Nazis, began wrecking the product is easy to master. Do not block them, and everyone moves on the hard are people doing their job in some respects but are. really tough characters, and they annoy other people, so we end up with this long intractable cases where a municipality 't come to a decision. But I think that's probably true of any human community. "

Wales, who conducted perhaps the most promising experiment in human collective knowledge of all times, it seems no doubt that the libertarian goals of the Internet would benefit from a similar voluntary interim authority. It was the case of the blogger Kathy Sierra, and others suggest that Wales in 2007, an unofficial code of conduct for blog sites are causing a portion of which would outlaw anonymity. Kathy Sierra is a programming instructor based in California, according to an online spat on a tech site they aimed apparently at random by an anonymous mass, which posted pictures of her as sexually mutilated body at various sites and gave death threats. She wrote on her blog: "... I 'm at home, locked the doors, scared I'm scared to leave my garden, I'll never feel the same I'll never be the same"

Under Wales 's proposals in response to these and other similar horror stories of virtual bullying was that bloggers ban anonymous comments to be considered as a whole, and that they will be able to post comments whatsoever to be abusive, without looking at accusations of censorship. Wales 's proposals were quickly killed by the libertarians, and the traffic-hungry, as impractical and against the prevailing spirit of free speech.

Other innovative idealists of virtual reality have come lately, some of these norms in question, though. Jaron Lanier is credited with the inventor of virtual worlds. He was the first company to virtual reality gloves and goggles for sale. He was a key adviser to the creation of Avatar universe Second Life. His most recent book, You are not a gadget Is, in this sense a bit of a mea culpa, an argument for the sanctity of human respiratory individual against the increasingly anonymous virtual ground. "Trolling is not a series of isolated incidents," Lanier argues, "but the status quo in the online world." He suggested "drive-by anonymity", in which posters you create a pseudonym to promote a particularly strong view of human communication in general threatens to undermine it. "To a significant share, you need to be fully present. Therefore, before one 's accuser is a fundamental right of the accused."

We listen to right too much of the potential of social media and Web sites on individual freedom, while the Arab spring and proven elsewhere. Less to pack their capacity identities and the government is to strengthen the mob, though clearly that even a written part of this potential.

Social psychologist Tom Postmes has been by the coarsening of the debate on issues such as racial integration in his native Netherlands, a polarization, which he suggests directly from the modern political incorrectness of certain websites, where anonymity is guaranteed to have been disturbed grown. "There is some evidence that the mainstream conservative media even cuts politically correct or moderate contributions of websites for the Extreme," he says. "The tone of public debate over immigration has decreased in these forums."

One effect of the "deindividuation" is a polarization within the groups where like-minded people usually end up in extreme positions, because they gain credibility by exaggerating loosely held prejudices. You can try the Blogger surpass each other with pejorative about Stewart Lee see. This has the effect of shifting standards: extremism is unacceptable. As Lanier says: "? I'm growing worries about the next generation of young people around the world with Internet-based technologies, the amount of aggregation points ... they tend to succumb to grab momentum when they grown up" The utopian tendency to believe that social media and pluralism diversified opinion, most evidence suggests that it is probably just as if it combined with the anonymity in order to enhance group thinking and extremism.

A lot of them it depends on the policy of anonymity, an issue likely to greatly exercise the minds of the legislators is as our media increasingly digitized, and we rely more and more often inexplicable and easily manipulated sources - TripAdvisor Twitter feed gossip blog - for our information.

A simple remedy for this seems to rest in the very old-fashioned idea of ??standing by your good name. Adopt a pseudonym and you're not a large proportion of himself on the line. Put your name on something, and your words are laden with responsibility. Arthur Schoepenhauer also wrote about the subject 160 years ago: "Anonymity is the refuge for all the literary and journalistic rascality," he suggested. "It is a practice that completely stopping Any article in a newspaper, should be accompanied by the name of the author;. And the editor should be strictly liable for the accuracy of the signature of the freedom of the press should be restricted as much. , so that when a man publicly announced by the far-sounding trumpet of the newspaper, he is responsible for any event in his honor if he has any, and if he has not had neutralize its name, the effect of his words. And because even the most unassuming man in his own district is known, is the result of such a measure would put an end to two-thirds of the newspaper is made and the boldness of many retain a poisonous tongue. "

The Internet is increasingly Schopenhauer 's trumpet many times. Although it repressive regimes, where anonymity is a condition of freedom and opportunity in democracies, where anonymity must be safeguarded, it is clear, if these reserves could be used. But should generally afraid to stand up and put their names, their words? And why should you listen when they don 't?