The Internet is a wonderful thing. Most college students these days can’t function without e-mail, Facebook, instant messenger, Google and Wikipedia.

But despite all the blessings that come with Al Gore’s gift to humanity, we often forget the dark side of the Internet: flame wars.For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, flame wars are the online version of school yard taunting. A good example at N.C. State is thewolfweb.com – if you wait long enough, threads tend to turn into online shouting matches

And much like school yard taunts, flame wars should stay in the playground where we go to forget about school for a while and turn everything into a game.

Basically, flame wars are the product of someone taking all the “I know you are, but what am I” stuff from the elementary school days, mixing in a bit of “that’s what sahe said” and adding hyperlinks to Wikipedia articles and Lolcatz pictures to cap it all off.

The only difference between real-life insults and the online “e-variants” is that the insults on the Internet are about a million times more vicious.

There’s a number of theories as to why this is the case. One idea is that the anonymity of the Internet lets people say things they normally wouldn’t say, much like the insults a person would only say when the person being insulted isn’t around. Another theory says that people who are online frequently might lack the social graces to determine when they are insulting others, resulting in flame wars. And yet another hypothesis proposes that some people throw around insults just because they like being able to make someone overreact.

I think I’ll pick door number three – most of the time, people say the darndest things online just to see how high someone will jump.

Inevitably (or so it seems), these flame wars gravitate towards opinion pieces, including some in this very newspaper. And always the story is the same – one or more people attack the piece as a shoddy bit of writing and question what inspired the author to write it or the editor to publish it.

This is what I can’t stand. I confess that even I love saying incendiary things online just to get someone to insult me and hurl four-letter words my way. But I only insulted people on places like forums for computer games – the Internet’s playground.

Insulting an opinion and the person responsible for it is a pointless, unproductive way of expressing dissent. Calling a writer an idiot and declaring his or her opinion stupid in an online forum doesn’t really do much. If you really want to prove someone wrong, get out there, dig up the evidence and get it printed in a newspaper, with your name attached – it’s a lot better than simply typing “you are dumb” in a comment.

So please, let’s keep flame wars where they belong: ridiculing someone for not knowing the difference between Star Wars and Star Trek.

E-mail your thoughts about internet flame wars to [email protected].