Who hasn't been the victim of a flame war online? The first time I was a victim of an attack was in the early 1990s on a Usenet discussion board on The X-Files (yes, I was a real geek). Then, as now, I used my own name online. Someone using an anonymous handle started attacking me mercilessly for some trivial thing; I think he had a different theory on who the "smoking man" was. Another Usenet veteran, Mike Godwin, had a law named after him (among cybergeeks anyway) that says as a flame war goes on the probablility of someone being called a Nazi approaches one. So this isn't new.

But in this era of e-mail, listservs and blogs, it seems the flames are hotter than ever. Why? I've never been called a Nazi to my face, no matter how heated a discussion got, and in the world of think tanks, discussions can get very heated indeed. The New York Times has an answer:

Daniel Goleman, author of "Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships," cites scientific theory behind flaming:

Flaming has a technical name, the “online disinhibition effect,” which psychologists apply to the many ways people behave with less restraint in cyberspace.

In a 2004 article in the journal CyberPsychology & Behavior, John Suler, a psychologist at Rider University in Lawrenceville, N.J., suggested that several psychological factors lead to online disinhibition: the anonymity of a Web pseudonym; invisibility to others; the time lag between sending an e-mail message and getting feedback; the exaggerated sense of self from being alone; and the lack of any online authority figure. Dr. Suler notes that disinhibition can be either benign — when a shy person feels free to open up online — or toxic, as in flaming.

Empathy, he writes, is found in our orbitofrontal cortex. The cortex uses input such as a change in facial expressisons or vocal tone to react accordingly, but none of that is present online:

And if we are typing while agitated, the absence of information on how the other person is responding makes the prefrontal circuitry for discretion more likely to fail. Our emotional impulses disinhibited, we type some infelicitous message and hit “send” before a more sober second thought leads us to hit “discard.” We flame.

There's more:

Flaming can be induced in some people with alarming ease. Consider an experiment, reported in 2002 in The Journal of Language and Social Psychology, in which pairs of college students — strangers — were put in separate booths to get to know each other better by exchanging messages in a simulated online chat room.

While coming and going into the lab, the students were well behaved. But the experimenter was stunned to see the messages many of the students sent. About 20 percent of the e-mail conversations immediately became outrageously lewd or simply rude.

And now, the online equivalent of road rage has joined the list of Internet dangers. Last October, in what The Times of London described as “Britain’s first ‘Web rage’ attack,” a 47-year-old Londoner was convicted of assault on a man with whom he had traded insults in a chat room. He and a friend tracked down the man and attacked him with a pickax handle and a knife.

I'm assuming some of those anonymous folks who love to rip me a new one online aren't homicidal maniacs, but rather Internet junkies with too much time on their hands and not enough people in their lives with which to have interpersonal intellectual discourse. Not sure why they use pseudonymns -- actually knowing who the people are not only would make it easier to be assured they weren't an axe murderer but also might provide some insight on their thinking and thus lead to more informed debate -- but I long ago accepted that some people simply prefer to be someone else when they're online. (That's a warning I've given my daughter many times as she starts dipping her toe online.)

One thing I wish was discussed in this essay is how the victim of flaming tends to feel. I'm not going to say I've never flamed but I've certainly received more than I've given. And while I've spent years toughening myself, it still hurts to be insulted even when I know I should give it no credence. I could of course just walk away, but I enjoy intellectual debate too much, and not everyone online moves so quickly to Godwin's Law; others resist it long enough to provide interesting and engaging discourse.

Last April I went on the record with a 10-point manifesto in which I promised to be civil and responsible online. I'm sure my critics could find incidents where I've failed in all 10; I'll confess I am human. But I still believe they are goals to which I should strive every day. I invite others to adapt them as well. We may when online be lacking stimuli that will help trigger our empathy center, but ultimately we are thinking creatures, masters of our brain wiring, not victims of it. We can make ourselves apply the same civil rules of engagement online that we do in person. Our debate would benefit as a result, as would our personal well-being.