"Approaching the Radical Other"

In the article, “Approaching the Radical Other; The Discursive Culture of Cyberhate” (1997), Susan Zickmund explores the world of online hate and shows how they categorize some groups as an evil “other.” The author begins the article by identifying different hate groups around the world, then goes on to explain their impact on the internet. Zickmund’s purpose is to show the reader how these hate group use the internet as another vehicle for their propaganda that displays certain races and other groups as evil conspirators in order to bring to light how these cyberhaters are a subset of the community of the internet. Zickmund’s audience consists of people who are knowledgeable about the internet, yet may not be the kind who use it to find hate-related material.
Hate is a disease that spreads throughout the world, so it is no surprise that it would overflow onto the internet. In the article, “Dropping the Bomb on Google,” John Brandon documents the case of a Jewish who is outraged when a hate oriented website appears at the top of a list of results when he typed the word “Jew” into the search engine. The article states that “he argued that Google should be able to filter its search results, categorize offensive content and reorder the results accordingly.” Yet this idea would go against the principle of the search engine when its goal is the find the most popular sites visited for a given word. This also brings up the issue of censorship on the web. Should Google, or any other search engine posses the ability to filter out eligible results for a query? Would that mean withholding information?
Zickmund does not question the effort of web providers to extinguish hateful websites. Instead she focuses on the people who believe in the hate. She acknowledges the fact that haters see minorities as’ what she calls’ the “other.” She sees this behavior as something that has been around for ages and will most likely, unfortunately, never go away.