Porn VS. Hate

Life is a risk.

Even joining a mailing list comes with some risks, as harmless as getting unwanted emails. Harmless or not, will be decided case by case I guess.

The other day someone forwarded a link that contains lots of hate messages (which I think was not exactly a creative thumb sucking conspiracy theory written by someone who has a lot of time in his/her hands), which pretty soon ignited debate among some of the members. A couple of days after that another member forwarded an email that contained pornographic pictures (which I don’t think I need to be graphic here). Interesting enough this didn’t raise anything until a female member sent a complaint.

It’s a bit tricky to make the comparison.
porn vs. hate message
pic vs. text

Each combination has different impact on each person, but I would argue that pictures at a certain level are more damaging. Pictures are quicker to absorb, and stay longer in our memory. This is where pictures are more effective, where people don’t get any warning of what is about to be presented, they lost control of what they’re about to view. Upon viewing unwanted pics, some people would complain, yet ironically the head doesn’t easily undo nor erase what they have just viewed.

Texts need longer to absorb (and some people are either don’t have time to read them or too lazy to read the complete article would just ignore it), yet when it has internalized it would create a potentially bigger damage.

So I guess the best way to deal with this is to carefully set aside what is damaging and what is not. When you think a message or some pics are not worth reading or even damaging, you might as well stop it there and stop yourself from hitting the “forward” button. If you’re about to warn or edify others, it would be fair that you notify the content in your subject.

As to avoid the risk of receiving unwanted emails, one could just unsubscribe from any mailing list, of course with the consequence of missing information that could actually be useful.

Ok, that’s it. Enough with netiquette :p