This phenomenon has been prevalent for a while now but we thought it was about time we said something about a certain species known as Anonymous Online Haters (AOH). I'm sure you've encountered these creatures, who it seems must be breeding judging by the steady increase in their presence online.
An AOH can pop up anywhere on the internet where a comment box is provided. Youtube is a favourite hangout, but by far the most interesting / pathetic variation is the AOH that emerges whenever a music festival line up is announced. For evidence of this all you need to do is log onto pretty much any ITM forum and read some of the comments of haters that bitch about line ups as if they're being forced at gunpoint to attend the party.
Recently we had a classic AOH grace us with their presence on this very blog. We did a profile of an extremely talented young artist called Pogo (see post
here) which got some really positive feedback. It also got this response from someone called 'Mike':
"This music is completely and utterly queer and whoever listens to it has dangerously high levels of estrogen and needs a testosterone boost. There is nothing professional about his camera work or his music - you're all just freaks of nature who need to be shot."
Now we don't know Mike but we imagine he looks a little something like this.
To be fair we actually found Mike's comment pretty funny so we can't pretend to be too concerned about the whole thing and we're sure Pogo would be equally indifferent. But it does raise the question what do these AOHs hope to achieve by sitting at home hiding behind their curtin of anonymity trying to bring other people down for no apparent reason?
While we can't give you any answers - we can take one for the team. We'd like to invite all the AOHs out there to unleash all your pent-up digital fury on us. Don't hold back...get it all out of your system with whatever you can come up with (but don't bother telling us we need to be shot, someone's already beat you to it).
Hopefully after all the hate has been vented you can go about your business treating people online like you would treat people in the real world. Either that or you'll just continue to the next blog to hate a little more, but we hope it's the former.
EC - Style is a Language
