Internet School: John Gabriel’s Greater Internet *Douchebag* Theory

Respectfully stolen from Penny-Arcade.Com

That was me toning it down; the actual expletive used is in much less of a gray area when it comes to “Hey, can he say that?”

So. What is John Gabriel’s Greater Internet *Douchebag* Theory? It was first proposed by webcomic-artist/internetologist Mike Krahulik through his internet personae, John Gabriel. The theory is thus:

NP (normal person) + ? (anonymity)+ NPx (audience) = TDb (Total Douchebag)

And we’ve seen this for years, centuries even, before the internet (or the use of electricity, or soap) was even theorized: if you take a normal person and remove the constraints of having to be held accountable for what you say, we turn into total jerks. Here’s a prime example: hecklers.

Put a comedian on stage, or musician, or whatever, they can’t really see who’s in the audience because the lights are shining on them. There’s going to be one guy AT LEAST who, safe in his seat and with too much to drink, is going to give the person on stage as much trouble as he possibly can. Or anonymous letters: people writing in to, say, a newspaper, without any markings as to where the letter came from. These people say things they would NEVER say face to face. If it was something they had the guts to do, they’d do it.

Now take that situation and extrapolate it into a scenario where anonymity is guaranteed: the Internet. That extrapolation corresponds to the amount of “jerk” present almost perfectly.

Not everyone succumbs to this temptation. A lot of people do. I know that I have.

Yes. My name is Tony MacKenzie… and I’m a recovering douchebag.

The event that prompted this post, and the creation of a new category for me to blog about (“Internet School”: we’ll come back to it later), was a poster on the “Live chat” box on the Advocate Blog Site coming in and being kind of a jerk. The ratio of Jerks/Normal People is like 1/10, but I really expected better of my home town. I don’t think it should surprise me: the Theory has universal ramifications, because, as they drilled into us at an early age, none of us are really that different.

And sometimes, that’s a shame. But, it gave me something to write about, so thanks, guy.