Dearest TINKEBELL, 2009
book (i.c.w TINKEBELL), 1000 copies
Hate mail is something that I saw mentioned in
newspaper articles a lot, and I always wondered;
what kind of people are hate mail senders? When
TINKEBELL approached me with a collection of
thousand hate mails she received, I had this curiosity
again; what kind of people are wishing her dead?
It was relatively easy to find out through their mail
addresses, which they often also used to create a
social network page, like MySpace. I spend months
on the internet to search these people and see every-
thing about their private life. In the end 75 percent
seemed to be teenager and they reminded me a bit
how I was when I was a teenager. I also got furious
when, for example, someone didn’t throw paper in
the paper bin, or when they were trimming trees in
the local forest etc. Luckily I was only bothering
people in the local area with this, because there
was no internet.
Jan Willem van Prooijen, social psychologist and
researcher at the Vrije Universiteit said about this
conclusion: “We know from research there are
factors that causes people to express more hate.
Some of these factors is reflected in this project:
the thought of being anonymous, creates a lower
threshold for responding in anger. The fact that the
hate mail senders are mainly teenagers isn’t surpri-
sing me. Teenagers generally think more in black
and white and have a lower impulse control.”..
.”Easily expressing hate is also caused by more
circumstances and situational factors, like social
isolation and a certain form of narcissism, those
people are for example also more likely to put a
lot of information about themselves on the internet”.. |
Open Folders below
2009
