Actually the sad thing is that this online culture is so pervasive that it's going offline. Therefore you have people who are so used to swearing and using derogatory remarks that it becomes the norm for them. I had one friend a while back who was most definitely a nice guy but you couldn't bring him into a polite social setting because he didn't even know when he was swearing. "Dude, shut up!"
The article is dead on though that if people want to change this mentality, it needs to be changed by the people in the community itself. For this to work though, especially in FPS games where it's more prevalent, you need the ability to admin the social space (i.e. game server). If you can't (i.e. no dedicated servers), you're screwed. Even if you take off your headphones, people can still use the text chat to relay derogatory shit.
All said and done, if you want to experience this culture, just play Counter-Strike for a few hours and jump to a few servers. Obviously not all of them are this way, you do find the occasional server that is outside the norm but for the most part, they are pretty rude and crude.