Digital Citizenship and Flaming

Before reading this article, I didn't quite understand what "flaming" was. In my own words, flaming is when you get mad for some reason and you just type a message and send it without thinking anything about it. Some factors of flaming are the anonymity of a Web pseudonym, the time lag between messages sent and received, and the lack of any online authority figure. I agree with these reasons because there are things you can say as an anonymous person that you can't say to a friend. I think this has crippled people because I feel more comfortable talking to someone over text about feelings than face-to-face. You also can not mention things in person that you have privately disclosed online because those things may be rude or embarrassing. Jett Lucas says it very well when he says, "thoughts expressed while sitting alone at the keyboard would be put more diplomatically – or go unmentioned – face to face. Flaming has been given a more scientific name, which is online disinhibition effect. This is described as the many ways people behave with less restraint in cyberspace. I think this name is applicable for flaming because it says people are inhibited while they are online. This happens because if we are typing while agitated, the absence of information on how the other person is responding makes the prefrontal circuitry for discretion more likely to fail.We try to use emoticons to try to get our attitude across, but most of the time, the emoticons aren't clear enough and so the person we are talking to might get the wrong idea about the message you are sending.