A culture of cowards
Natalee Roan
August 3rd, 2008Alyssa Royse, entrepreneur and business blogger for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, one of Seattle’s daily newspapers, recently wrote an admittedly frivolous post comparing the movie Batman the Dark Knight to risks in a business venture. In mere hours, fans of the movie cyber-attacked her for the “negative review”, one with such aggressive hate as to wish her gang-raped and shot. In an email to me, she wrote that she was “stunned” by the response. Sadly, I am not.
We have created a culture of cowards, those who hide behind the anonymous comment. The media used to castigate such cyber-bullying behavior - until its publishers also got seduced by the web traffic such comments help generate. So now they participate instead, leaving outrageous comments up to attract others in a one-up-man-ship that’s hard to believe, or ignore. You can now actually anonymously threaten murder – and website publishers, even those associated with serious news outlets, just check Google Analytics. How pathetic.
In fact, kids as young as 9 years old have committed suicide because of cyber-bullying, and most were horrified when a mother so terrorized a 13-year old girl on My*Space that the teen committed suicide. But a brief look at comments on a number of popular news and blog sites shows you the lesson the pre-teen tormentors learn: When you get older you get to threaten people’s lives, or at the very least rip their reputations to shreds, in ever-larger cyber-playgrounds! Just wait until you grow up - then you can trash an entrepreneur’s reputation on John Cook’s Venture Blog, or stick it to a venture capitalist who didn’t believe in your company on www.thefunded.com! You can deride a fellow trader on www.Dealbreaker.com or bask in your hope that someone get’s gang-raped and shot for what wasn’t even a real movie review on the Seattle PI - and no one will ever have to know that it’s you - How cool is that?
Royse, founder of Just Cause It, made the personal decision to leave the comments on her blog post to showcase the level of sexism and cyber-bullying that she has experienced. Given her business is about promoting causes that are attempting to solve the world's problems, the "hits" from these angry cyber-cowards are ironically about as far from her target market as she can get. Yet her innocent business blog post yielded comments on popping out babies and going back to the kitchen. I mean, her blog isn't exactly BitchPhD.
In reading through the comments on Royse’s blog for a second time, I believe 80% of the comments are likely posted by teenagers and college students - even the comments from some claiming to be women strike me as written by men posing as women because they think it will give their ridiculous comments more credibility. But you have to wonder about the nuts out there... If you do wonder, here are some things you can do to protect yourself:
1) Stop using your home address indiscriminately. Get a PO Box from your post office or UPS store, or an Earth Class Mailbox (an online PO Box) if you prefer - and use that address as your main snail mail address for anyone you don’t know. Once you switch over your credit card statements, you will have the ability to use your new address on any e-commerce website. (Your credit card billing address has to match the address you give to an e-commerce site – this is the main way they check for credit card fraud, so you do need to change your address with your credit card company.) Then, all you need do is give the ecommerce sites a separate shipping address so your goods still go to your home, but shipping addresses aren’t nearly as easy to get at as the address you record on your bills.
2) Check out various yellow page and white page online directories to see if your home address is listed. www.whitepages.com is a good place to start. Most have the ability to sign in and edit your address away from your home address. At the very least, put your business address in there or for fun, how about your neighborhood police department.
3) See if the blogging company you’ve signed up with captures IP addresses. While not ideal because IP addresses don’t always stay static, if you do experience any real-world trouble it could potentially narrow down where your troublemaker is coming from.
4) If you own any domain names and haven't specifically selected privacy protection, your address and phone # could be plastered all over the web. Do a domain name lookup in the whoIs database and see if your personal information shows up. If it does, go to your domain registrar and buy privacy protection - it's really cheap - usually only $6 to $8 per year per domain. (Thank you Michelle Calloway)
It’s a shame that this is what we’ve come to, folks. If you have some other safety tips, let us know and I’ll update this post.
very good
very good
Yep, I think its good
Yep, I think its good
Extended families are common
Extended families are common and provide family members with social support and financial security. Tradition favours frequent visits to an ill person by friends and members of the extended family to offer support. Therefore, the physician may encounter more visitors at the patient's bedside than he or she is accustomed to. Elderly members of the extended family provide advice, help with child care and are accorded respect. The family spokesperson, with whom issues of consent will usually have to be negotiated, is usually the most financially established senior person in the family; however, if there is a language barrier, a younger member of the family may fulfill the communication role for the family.
If the patient and physician do not speak the same language, every effort should be made to find a trained and impartial interpreter who is familiar with the patient's traditions and culture. It is particularly important in issues of consent to ensure that information given to or received from the patient is not being censored or altered by the interpreter. Because of their deep sense of modesty and of purity, Hindu and Sikh women may not feel comfortable with male physicians or interpreters. Family members such as a teenaged daughter may function well as an interpreter for minor problems; however, an older, trained Hindu or Sikh woman who understands medical terminology and is not a family member will make the best interpreter, especially in urological and gynecological matters. In some circumstances a female relative or the patient's husband may have to serve as an interpreter, but, in view of the importance of preserving the confidentiality of the physician–patient relationship, using an interpreter who knows the patient personally is not the preferred approach.
The physician may need to alter his or her usual communication style in caring for Hindu and Sikh patients. By planning for a longer interview and adopting an indirect conversational approach, the physician is likely to learn more. It also helps to be alert to untranslatable Hindi or Punjabi words commonly used to express psychosomatic symptoms; for example, the phrase dil (heart) kirda (fragmenting) dubda (sinking), which an interpreter or the patient may express in English as "a sinking heart," implies tremendous anxiety that may result from a headache, nausea, stomach pain (especially epigastric) or generalized malaise. The physician should rule out organic disease before adopting a psychosomatic interpretation. He or she should also be alert for the term nazar ("evil eye") accompanied by a black mark behind the ear or a black thread around the wrist to protect the patient against the malevolent wishes of another. In many Hindu and Sikh households there is an attachment to traditional medicines (e.g., Ayurveda and Siddha), which may be used together with modern medicine.7 Cultural beliefs about health, disease and treatment often differ significantly from standard Western medical practice, and there are likely to be differing dietary practices as well, ranging from veganism (no meat, fish, eggs or dairy products) to a rejection of beef but acceptance of chicken or fish.
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Greatly written indeed… I
Greatly written indeed… I really enjoyed your article and found it to be very informative, keep up the good work, I’ll be coming back to read any of your future articles..
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Good work! Your post/article is an excellent example of why I keep comming back to read your excellent quality content that is forever updated. Thank you!
domain name privacy
If you own any domain names and haven't specifically selected privacy protection, your address and phone # could be plastered all over the web. Do a domain name lookup in the whoIs database and see if your personal information shows up. If it does, go to your domain registrar and buy privacy protection - it's really cheap - usually only $6 to $8 per year per domain.
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