Jason describes the blog commentor’s gaze, a rumination on how people who act unreasonably on the web fit some parts of the scientific definition of a psychopath.

For what it’s worth, I was mostly just venting (posts that I write on weekends are almost always lunacy, generally speaking) but Jason aptly describes my true feelings on the subject:

I don’t think most of the people that demonstrate antisocial behavior in comment threads are actually psychopaths or sociopaths (there is a difference) in real life. Rather, interacting via text strips out so much social context and “incidental information” that causes some people to display psychopathic behavior online and fail to develop an online moral sense.

The question now, of course, is how we can give people more social cues when they’re interacting online. A few of the comments on my post, from Don Park and Ben Benner, do a good job of addressing this issue to some degree, as well.