Digital Revenge
I’ve started thinking about all the ways that the internet is changing our public/private interactions with one another, and how funny it is that we are the first generation really to be discovering these things.
Think of all the things that all of a sudden have a new spin on them; dating someone always manifests itself somehow, but you used to declare your relationship by giving a girl your pin to wear, or having the conversation about officially calling eachother ‘boyfriend’ and ‘girlfriend,’ announcing it to your friends … add the internet, and now we also have to have discussions about when we are going to change our status on linkup from ‘single’ to ‘in a relationship.’ We used to have best friend necklaces, but now the Myspace Top 8 makes you define who your best friends are to the world. It used to be possible to just snub people by not talking to them, but now you can not add their link to your blog as a public statement! It’s all the same stuff every generation has dealt with, but we just get an internet spin on it.
One of my favorite things that the internet has also opened up is a whole new sort of revenge. I found a random blog one day called “too much awesome” and since I felt an obvious “awesome” connection (The author co-writes her own blog entitled: The New Awesome) to this stranger in chicago, I began reading his blog and found a great post where he talks about some guy in highschool that didn’t invite him to his graduation party five years ago, and how pissed he still is about that. He started off his rant by just calling this party-invite-perpetrator “Mitchell”, but by the end of the post he had worked himself into such a angry state that he decided to use “Mitchell’s” full name. This is what toomuchawesome.blogspot says:
“Also, the reason I wrote this post is because I’m going to use Mitchell’s full name. I have no way of contacting him and yelling at him drunkenly over the phone (nor would I have the balls to). However, I am extremely passive-aggressive and writing this blog is doing just the trick. One day, I hope that MITCHELL AUSTIN will Google his name and find this, just so he realizes that he is a huge douchebag. That’s right: Mitchell Austin is a douchebag.”
This is my new favorite form of revenge. Dropping a googlebomb on someone! Internet slander. This is the equivalent of writing mean things on the bathroom walls about your nemesis in elementary school, but now the whole world can read it.
You heard it here – Mitchell Austin is a douchebag.
– Rebecca Gholdston
