If you send me a text message, I will probably not text you back. If I do, it will most likely be hours after you texted me, because I am really not on my phone enough to see your text. Lately, I have been trying to avoid using texting as my primary means of communication.

This is because there just seems to be a disconnect between virtual presence and the actual presence of the people we text, and in addition, there is a disconnect between the way we portray ourselves and how we really are — the latter being more dangerous. For me, I tend to be bolder when I don’t have to take immediate responsibility for my words. The distance technology allows two people to have between them cushions us from the instantaneous repercussions of our words.

For example, you can’t get slapped through the phone after firing off an insult or get a black eye from the little fist emoji your brother sent when you forgot to pick him up from karate practice. While I am sure we are all glad to postpone any and all condemnation, I am worried this might be promoting a significant lack of personal responsibility and accountability in the way we communicate with each other. When we can shirk all responsibility simply by pressing the off button on our phones, we tend to say things we probably would not be as quick to say in person.

This can become a potentially life-threatening practice when applied to the alarmingly vague Internet. If we look back about two weeks, we see a horribly real example of this with the mass shooting in Oregon.

A shooter walked onto the campus of Umpqua Community College and massacred 9 students, all of whom were Christians — a group he spewed hate toward online just beforehand. In response to this, Dale Eisinger of the Daily Beast published an article titled “Lone Wolves in the Age of the Internet.” In his article, Eisinger tells us this is, “a pattern becoming tragically more common: a mass shooting takes place and we later discover how blatantly the perpetrators expressed hate for their victims online.”

He substantiates this observation with results from a study conducted by Jason Chan, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan, who explains there is “a positive relationship between broadband Internet access and incidence of hate crimes.” Going further, Chan says “between 2001 and 2008, access to just one broadband ISP showed a 20 percent rise in hate crimes, particularly in areas of high racial tension.”

Since the domestication of the Internet began to pick up speed in the early 2000s, we have been progressively becoming more and more exposed to Internet-induced hate and its wrath. We have fallen victim to the lack of accountability technology encourages because it puts a screen between our person and the rest of the world. Now we are suffering the consequences of its many responsibility-reducing mediums of communication.

Therefore, now that we can throw stones and point fingers at those on the opposite side of the world from us, people are becoming increasingly loose with their speech. Behind a blue screen, we say things we would not say in person.

Arthur Santana, a communications professor at the University of Houston, conducted an extensive study on how the Internet’s anonymity affects the content of comments in response to online news articles. The results were reported by the New Yorker’s Maria Konnikova, who says Santana found “a full 53 percent of anonymous commenters were uncivil, as opposed to 29 percent of registered, non-anonymous commenters. Anonymity, Santana concluded, encourage(s) incivility.”

On the other hand, if someone were to even mention the word “bomb” in an airport, they would be pulled aside and fully screened. This is because we cannot only see, but also fully identify the person who might have just issued a very serious threat. Whereas, a bomb threat on the Internet is usually immensely anonymous, leaving us essentially afraid of a ghost. The Internet lacks the immediacy of the real world and therefore allows for terrorizing comments to be made, and there is little we can do about it.

The most upsetting thing is many Americans want to do something about it. We do not want our safety to be so greatly at risk. In a Gallup article by Frank Newport titled, “American Views of TSA More Positive Than Negative,” it is reported that “despite negative press, a majority of Americans, 54 percent, think the U.S Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is doing either an excellent or a good job of handling security screening at airports.”

So even though we have to hunt down mini shampoo bottles and completely remove our shoes only to put them back on five seconds later, Americans are still pleased with the TSA. This is probably because its hyper-vigilance most always successfully protects us, which is all we want at the end of the day.

If that is the case, we need to stop not allowing the dangerous anonymity that modern technology has fostered. Even if we are not the ones creating a threatening online environment, we have a responsibility to serve as watchdogs, protecting each other from faceless, nameless threats. This is not a limit on freedom of speech, but a security measure that will help make our schools, movie theaters and churches safer from those who abuse their right to unrestricted rhetoric.

At the end of the day, we are accountable for every word we speak, write, text or post, and unfortunately we might just be responsible for the words of others too. It is time we started acting accordingly because, as we saw in Oregon, our ability to take responsibility could be taken away at anytime.