The first one I got was a .exe file called "getosama". I downloaded it and played. Little cartoonish Osama bin Ladens ran across my screen. When they passed in my sights I could fire. Hatchets, cruise missiles and bullets were the weapons at my disposal. I blew up the bin Ladens, one by one, but they just kept coming.
The game would have been funny, if it wasn't in such bad taste. Since the attacks on America on September 11th, my e-mail inbox has been jam-packed daily with new and often distasteful deliveries. While the Osama game may appeal to US patriotism, most of the Twin Towers bulk mail in circulation displays a warped relish in the mass murder in New York, often from an anti-US point of view.
Take, for example, the disturbing photo-montage image of bin Laden having sex with an unwilling George W Bush, or the child's drawing in crayon of a missile blowing up a tank, with the caption scribbled underneath, "Bush's plan of attack". Both are clearly anti-US in sentiment. Then there's the photo-montage images sent as attachments with the subject line: "If Taliban wins". The first shows the Statue of Liberty, head covered, wearing an Islamic woman's burqa. In the second, George W has acquired a Taliban style beard and headgear. The third is an image of New York with a massive Mosque with towering minarets in the place where the Twin Towers once stood.
These images are not only distasteful in that they diminish what happened in New York to trivial crass entertainment, but also in that they misrepresent what happened as being an Islamic war against the US.
If you think anti-US feeling on the Web tells you something about the character of your average Internet user, then it's worth considering, before drawing too many conclusions, examples from the pro-US camp that have also been doing the rounds.
The first I saw was "The Twin Towers are rebuilt". Here the image was of a single tall tower built with smaller and smaller towers built on either side of it. The caption under the image read "Up yours bin Laden" - the towers having the appearance of a hand with the middle finger raised. Another was called "Lake America". Here, a map of Asia showed a huge lake above the Pakistani border. Over the lake was written, "Lake America (formerly Afghanistan)". Whoever designed it was engaging in macho posturing in favour of revenge.
What distinguishes these political, topical, mass web-cartoons is that they are created anonymously and reach a massively bigger audience than their great-grandfather, the newspaper political cartoon, ever did. Where newspaper cartoonists have editors that mediate on behalf of good taste and ethics (you would hope), e-cartoons, if you'll allow me that shorthand, do not. What e-cartoons have in their favour is the democratic access that they allow to a mass audience. The rudimentary knowledge of using a scanner, a graphics package and the Internet is all that is needed. However, their anonymous aspect encourages excess and irresponsibility. Like terrorists their perpetrators are faceless, they publish grossly offensive material and remain unaccountable, unlike normal political commentators. And much of what is doing the rounds has little to do with politics, and more to do with sick humour: take the mock airline ad that shows a plane striking the Twin Towers, with a caption beneath: "We'll deliver you from the airport straight to your office".
What September 11th has again shown is that the anonymous character of the Web continues to attract the worst elements. It also, however, offers a valuable forum to say what cannot be said elsewhere with the kind of mass access that is usually reserved for media moguls.