Joanne Harris, author of Chocolat, has a sobering piece in today's Daily Mail entitled 'Why I'm Ditching The Internet', in which she argues that social networking and blogging have encouraged an unhealthy 'Me me me!' culture which has not only polluted the virtual world - 'The internet is a fertile ground for attention-seekers and fantasists', she says, and 'the blog is the new confessional' - but is encroaching on the real one, with people so used to self-serving, often anonymous online hit-and-run rudeness, without the normal social consequences, that they feel entitled to behave offline in the same way.
I'm with her one hundred percent on the effects of gratuitous and cowardly comments left by the web's most prolific user, 'Anonymous' (a mild and fairly amusing example in my own case was the comment on this blog by Anonymous that it might be best to let the dog write the blog), but I haven't personally seen the spill over into the real world. Food for thought though.
