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Irrational web comments damage social harmony
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CORRUPT officials, wrongly executed teenage boys, a married scholar’s rendezvous with his mistress in a hotel room — the scandalous list goes on. The Internet often is where people whistle-blow the scandals, helping enhance public supervision of wrongdoings of all sorts.
But every coin has two sides, and the virtual world is also congested with sensational views or intense criticisms that do not contribute to constructive thinking at all.
Several days ago, on a prominent Chinese web portal, I learned that more than 800 students in a private school in Shanghai’s Jiading District knelt down and kowtowed to their parents in a ceremony to express their love, gratitude and respect as a practice of traditional filial piety. The story got nearly 2,800 comments. According to the latest 100 replies published after the story, perspectives split but most strongly criticized the ceremony and the school authority.
Dirty words were tossed about freely as some netizens expressed doubt about the school’s motive. Some even tagged the kowtow ceremony as the dregs of “feudalism.”
Was the ceremony nothing but a revival of “feudalism?” Of course not, but too many people prefer sensational cries to reasoned meditation. Many netizens in China like to quote out of context to suit their purpose.
A colleague of mine told me that he once posted online a photo of a man sitting on a campstool in a Shanghai Metro Line 2 carriage. My colleague’s Beijing friend commented, “Shanghai’s Metro lines have much more space but many fewer passengers than Beijing’s.”
But the truth is Shanghai’s Metro system served nearly 10 million passengers a day — almost the same as Beijing.
Chairman Mao said that with no investigation, there’s no right to speak. But many online speeches have nothing to do with investigation.
Former Peking University President Xu Zhihong accepted an interview by Shanghai Daily last September on the controversial issue of genetically modified crops and food made from them. Xu, a prestigious biologist, expressed his opinion based on rigorous experiments or scientific facts. The story was later published on Sina.com and some other domestic news web portals.
There were more than 22,000 commenters on Sina.com discussing what Xu said. From the first 2,000 comments I read, most were groundless charges. They charged Xu and scientists who support GM food as collaborators or accused them of “taking bribes” from international agricultural conglomerates and said GM food would destroy our race.
It was obvious that most of them had little knowledge of GM technology, but that didn’t prevent them from wantonly expressing their anger and distrust, which are unnecessary and potentially harmful to public opinion.
There are too many irrational voices on the Internet. Masked in anonymity, most netizens can vent their anger without having to think twice, which is harmful to one’s own feelings as well as the societal mood.
The good news is that, in the near future, netizens may have to use their true identity if they want to speak on the Internet — the latest effort by our government to curb irresponsible remarks in the virtual world. As Ian Buruma, a famous Western thinker, said, free speech is in fact relative.
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