On the Internet, Everyone Knows You’re a Jerk

For most people applying to law school, the applying part is a huge deal. I would say that even more so than for undergraduate or graduate school, where you go matters. A lot. Maybe it’s elitism, or maybe it’s just the reality of how many lawyers and how many law schools there are in this country. But especially if you don’t necessarily want to work in the same area where you go to school, the farther down the rankings you go, the more geographically limited your job choices become.

There are, therefore, tons of books dedicated to how to get into the best law schools (though my advice is, unless you’ve done something extraordinary with your life already, save your money on the books and buy LSAT prep guides instead). There are also tons of websites dedicated to would-be law students tracking their admissions/rejections/etc. Because the worst part is the waiting game, and it suddenly becomes a numbers game to try to predict your odds based on what’s happening with everyone else.

I remember visiting AutoAdmit.com during that time in my own waiting phase, though I never posted there and rarely visited because to be honest, it was full of jerks. Now, I’m used to an Internet full of jerks. You know what they say: On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. Nobody knows anything about you unless you want them to, which means that you can be as much of a jerk as you want, and somehow it doesn’t matter. I actually have to agree with this Penny Arcade cartoon when it comes to theories of anonymity (pardon the profanity, but it really is quite accurate when it comes to many people). In any case, the people posting on this forum, who were supposedly the “best and the brightest” given that they all thought (or pretended to think) that they were getting into top-ranked law schools, made me wonder just how much I wanted to go to those schools, if it was going to be filled with people like that (a common refrain was that would-be law students should just commit suicide if they only got into a school ranked, say, 15, instead of 10… out of hundreds). But I think that the Penny Arcade equation works backwards as well–once you take away someone’s anonymity they turn right back into a normal person. Because being a jerk in the real world has consequences.

That said, it turns out that there may be consequences for the anonymous as well. I will be completely honest with you: I’m torn on this issue. I’m torn because I’m a firm believer in free speech, especially on the Internet, and I’ve never liked the idea of “outing” people’s real identities when they choose to use pseudonyms. (There has been a recent kerfuffle about this in fandom concerning the Fan History Wiki and use of pseudonymous fans’ real names–that is the sort of thing that I am very much against.) However, the last thing we want to do is cultivate a culture of cyberbullying.

In some ways, it seems like justice, what is potentially happening to these posters, at least in terms of “reap what you sow.” I actually had an experience several years ago where someone used my full name on the Internet in an unflattering way, and the page showed up in Google results for my name. That sort of thing can do serious damage if you are, for example, a young law student looking for a job (again, why law professors always tell you to take down your Facebook page). So I understand the grievances of the two women in this story. But the damage done to them is nothing compared to the damage that will be done to the offending posters. After all, Anthony Ciolli already lost a job over it, and he wasn’t even the one who wrote anything inflammatory. If these anonymous posters are listed in court documents by their real names, they can pretty much kiss their desired legal careers goodbye. These are guys that might just have graduated in May from Harvard or Stanford (or maybe not–it could be that the biggest jerks are the ones who feel inferior).

This is all such a huge mess that it’s honestly hard to make heads or tails of it. The bottom line is: I just wish everyone would stop being such jerks. Because on the Internet, that might be all anyone sees.

Apples to Oranges… or Apple Pies to Orgies

In my latest post for JETLaw Blog, I wrote about some recent cases involving community standards for obscenity. I’ve never been a big fan of the Miller test being applied to the Internet because of relevance/jurisdictional issues. But the core issue to me is: which community, the Internet one or the geographic one? I first started thinking about this during the first Livejournal censorship fiasco. Because whereas I kept having to gently remind people that it’s not a first amendment problem if a private company tells you what kind of material you can or cannot post in the community that they own, once Livejournal started citing obscenity laws (and Miller in particular) as the reason for the sudden policy change… that’s when I saw a potential problem. After all, the community of people who use Livejournal will be exactly the same whether the servers are located in San Fransisco or Salt Lake City.

So all that said, I found the case of the lawyer using Google trends as “proof” of community standards to be pretty interesting. According to him, the fact that more people run searches about orgies than apple pie means that the residents of Pensacola, Florida may not know as much about their neighbors’ “standards” as they think. So as a little experiment I decided to find out some more about the standards of my current community. Here is a representation of how often Tennessee residents run searches about “porn” compared to “football”:

Hmmm. Well, I’m not sure what this tells us about obscenity standards, but it does show that my friends and neighbors are less interested in pornography during football season. Good to know.