Re: Toxicity
I recall highly contentious flamewars on Usenet back in the day
Definitely. This was true even pre-Usenet, in the era when listservs stalked the plains of BITNET and the IBM HONE network was larger than the Internet.
It's endemic to the nature of online written communication, which has nearly the immediacy of speech (because it's so easy to dash off a reply, compared to hand-writing a message; and even with email, delivery is much faster than the post or any other print transport), but lacks the additional channels of gesture, facial expression, prosody, etc. And it has the authority and durability of print.
'94 was also the year of the Flame Wars special issue of SCR, edited by Mark Dery, and if memory serves at least a couple of the pieces in that collection touch on the phenomenon too. I imagine Dery himself, a longtime observer of online discourse, could have discussed the question at length even some years before that.
It's not a matter of having "forgotten" how to discuss with respect. It's a frame that's strongly conditioned by the medium. We've known for decades in Composition Studies that media have a powerful influence on rhetoric and discursive pragmatics; methodologically-sound studies drawing on large corpora have shown that consistently. Similarly for work in sociolinguistics and probably in other fields. You can see that as confirming the theories of the Frankfurt School, or Marshall McLuhan, or Hayden White, etc, if you wish. (Personally I like the Frankfurt, find McLuhan rather lacking in rigor, and think White's Content of the Form is interesting but not particularly surprising.)
I touched on this topic in an article I published in Works and Days in 1994, and it was widely recognized then by people using online forums of various sorts.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
