The other day, I was looking at obituaries and tributes for Maurice Sendak. Sendak’s death – seemingly untimely, even at the age of 83 – sent shockwaves rolling around the world. He was still writing, he was still working, and while he seldom did interviews, the ones he did seemingly went viral. He resonated with my own childhood in that he wrote books which frightened me but which I loved. Analogously, our family holidays meld into a pleasant haze but I can still recall with vivid clarity the nightmare I had at the age of eleven that gave me, seemingly overnight, a phobia of tarantulas that I carry with me to this day. You always remember the scary stuff.

I’ve already done my own little nod to Sendak on one of my other blogs, so we won’t get into that here, but what I wanted to talk about today was a particular form of inappropriate online behaviour that is prevalent particularly when someone dies. Typically there are plenty of tribute pages: the national news will run an official obituary and then a side column which is open for commenting, usually asking broad questions about how the death of X affected you, or whether you met them. Most people haven’t. And for most people this is a good excuse to twist catchphrases or lyrics into tributes or wry commentary (which is why, when Charlton Heston went, there were a lot of ‘cold, dead hands’ jokes). Elsewhere there is much wailing and sadness. It’s easy to be sceptical about public outpourings of grief for people you don’t know, so perhaps ‘grief’ is the wrong word. Perhaps a better term is ‘melancholy gratitude’, as mentioned in an interesting article Tom Chivers wrote for the Telegraph this week.

But never mind that now. Have a look at this page. This is the BBC’s tribute. And they clearly aren’t moderating their user-generated content at the moment, at least not beyond the minimum. You can tell this because of comments 5, 33, 46, 64 and 68, which may be conveniently displayed in a group by clicking on ‘All Comments’ and then ‘Lowest Rated’. Read them. You’ll see what I mean. Do it now, and then come back. I’m going to get a coffee.

Back now? Great. Now, I’m not anti-censorship, or anti-first amendment. I respect the right of people to say whatever they want, up to a reasonable point. My beef here is that they’re simply being stupid and officious. I mean, come on. Seriously. What on earth is the point of visiting a web tribute for someone you don’t know and make a point of saying that you don’t know them? It would be unfair to single out the Beeb for this, because it’s the sort of thing I see all over the place, but more so on their pages than anywhere else. Perhaps it’s their position as a publicly funded body, which seemingly gives people more of an axe to grind about what they see as a waste of their money – a spectacularly dismal argument that completely fails to take into account the fact that this is a fucking democracy.

When I mentioned all this to Emily, she said “I suppose it’s the sort of thing you’d say if someone came up to you in the street and told you about it,” she said. “You’d just say ‘Well, I’ve never heard of them’.”
“That’s true,” I admitted. “But I think it’s a different kettle of fish. This isn’t like someone who’s being spammed. This is someone who has purposely clicked on a headline and read – or at least skimmed – through an article in order to say at the bottom that they weren’t interested in the content. Why would you bother doing that?”
“It’s an encroachment on your own personal surfing time,” she said, with a satirical gleam in her eye. “It’s like this ridiculous assumption that everything on the web should be tailored to you.”
“I see that so often. Why do people insist on going on about it? What do they think it does? Don’t they see it just makes them look stupid?”
“When some people are connected,” Emily replied, “I think their thought process gets messed up. There’s this assumption that everything in your head has to come out on the screen.”

She’s basically right: it would explain ninety-five per cent of what I see on Facebook. Perhaps the only thing you could say to stuff like this is “What were you thinking?”, which is an empty and pointless question because the logical answer is “Well, I wasn’t”.

They say that everyone has one great novel in them. I have three or four substandard ones. A while back I had the idea for the fourth, and it is this: a massive electrical jolt, surge, nanovirus, some sort of anomaly passes through the internet’s fibre optic cables one night, with the net result that everyone in the world who is online at the time suddenly starts to behave as if they’re always online, even when they’re not. The simplest analogy to this would be the ‘Facebook in the real world’ videos that are quite popular (look them up). So in a nutshell:

• People interrupt funerals to shout “This is stupid! Why are you remembering this dead person? I’m not interested”
• You’ll open your front door and find a Nigerian offering you money in exchange fpr your bank details
• People stand outside cinemas before the premieres of new films shouting “This film is rubbish! I’ve not seen it but it must be!”
• Semi-naked photos pasted on front doors
• You get housecalls from old school friends you’ve not seen for years, and who never liked you anyway
• People walk out of shops carrying DVDs and CDs, saying “Why should I pay for them, when the record company bastards make so much?”
• Conversations in pubs are interrupted by complete strangers offering cheap medication or links to porn
• People pay people to back them up in arguments, or rubbish them badly so they’ll be defended
• As above, only with literal sock puppets
• Old men dress up as teenage girls and hang around outside pubs
• Someone will tell you a joke and you’ll roll around on the floor, laughing hysterically, until their backside literally drops off
• Speed dating: fat, balding men sit down in front of young blondes and say “Yes, I’m twenty-six and I’m a model…”
• Leaving speeches would be peppered with inaccuracies
• There would be thousands of ‘crazies’ standing on street corners rambling about their lives
• A whole bunch of people buying farms
• You’ll be in a library when someone shouts “THIS BOOK IS RUBBISH! NO ONE SHOULD READ IT!”
• People will come up to you in the street and say “I’ve just had a fried egg”
• You’ll buy something in a shop and then have to go home for three days until it’s delivered

Toss in a world leader who had been afflicted by this phenomenon and who began acting irrationally, and add an ambiguous conspiracy theory, and you’ve got yourself a bestseller. The point, of course, is that behaviour that is seen as acceptable (or at least par for the course) online would never pass for normal in the real world. There are plenty of rambling crazies in Philadelphia, and I know of at least several dozen old men dressed up as teenage girls in the South Oxfordshire district, but these are anomalies. For the most part, the real world isn’t like this, and more to the point the people who behave like this online are perfectly normal, sensible people if you meet them on the street. You probably know a few yourself. I know I do.

The simple fact is that there’s all this talk about a digital age, and we’d like to view ourselves as connected and part of a group, but the relative lack of online accountability means that people will behave exactly how they really want to behave, simply because they can. You’d be surprised at the behaviour of the average human being if lawlessness suddenly prevails – last summer’s riots are surely proof of that – and while a free and open and self-policing web community is essential in order to avoid the mass corporate sanitisation and censorship of the online world that we all dread, the price we pay is general anarchy, or at best ordered chaos. There are bigger problems in the world, but we are not the sophisticated, forward thinking people we’d like to believe we are, at least not online, because we online we don’t need to be – and as long as this remains the case, the internet will never really be a community, no matter how much we tell ourselves that it is.