An unkind community

There are a zillion blogs with a zillion opinions, with every single blogger believing that their opinion is the truth.

Rebecca and I were just talking about this the other day. My position is that the civility of discourse on weblogs is absolutely the responsibility of the weblog community -- and that the time to take up that responsibility was 1999. Maybe welcoming every hatemongering propagandist into the community with open arms because, "hey! their site is reverse-chronological!" turns out to be not the best thing for creating a community where people place value on treating each other with respect.

Rebecca's position is that this would have happened anyway, because you can't lock all the jerks out of the Internet. The question of which of these positions represents a more charitable view of humanity is left as an exercise for the reader.

Is this really so different from 'real life'. Obviously the internet offers the protection of anonymity that a lot of people will find useful (I hesitate to call them cowards but you get my point), and so allows more people to be a little more aggressive with their viewpoints than they would be in a real world situation.

And there WILL always be jerks, so I tend to treat them the same way I do if I bump into one on the street. I walk away ignoring him/her.

Now when the abuse becomes personal, and the person turns up at my door (or emails me directly) then I start to bite back, a man's castle and all that...

I think we need to remember that whilst it CAN offer protection, the internet wasn't called a "highway" (in the days of yore) for nothing.

Even before there was the web you saw this in usenet. Flame wars damaged many newsgroups usefulness long before spam became a problem. Before I quit reading newsgroups my kill filter became so heavily laden that I eventually switched to whitelisting people and deleted everything by the people not in the list. Which meant I'd miss any worthwhile new posters.

There will always be weblog flame wars. Myself I tend to confine my commenting on others weblogs to entries that evoke my sympathy and empathy. I like to be able to share a story of an experience similar to the writers. I don't enjoy controversy, even the infotainment kind offered by TV shows like Crossfire and do my best to keep away from it.

Not that I'd suggest anyone else adopt such an essentially passive mode. But it does work for me.

I agree with Richard- it seems like there's something in human nature at work here. Positive comments and discourse simply doesn't seem to energize the mob in the same was that negative discourse does. It may not be a different in quantity of response, but rather in the focus of the energy. That is, positive discourse generally leads to diffuse good feedback- the responses go off on tangents and spread out. Negative discourse energizes the mob to focus its energy directly on one victim (or a few victims), and a good old lynching begins.

I think changing this requires action on two levels: the personal, where we all try to keep things positive (it can be very, very hard sometimes, at least for me), and the social, where as a community we try to create a standard of behavior. For the latter, we need some kind of statement of conduct that sites can adhere to- we tried to come up with something for Gothamist, but it's just a start, and deals only with comments, not acceptable behavior in general:

http://www.gothamist.com/commentpolicy.php

I'd be curious to see someone write like a "Charter for Good Behavior on the Internet" that all the prominent sites could sign on to. Any diplomats out there?

Could it be that what we're seeing is people having to relearn the art of discussion? Much of the media development of the latter half of the 20th Century was in passive entertainment and communication forms. The developements of the very late 90s and early 21st Century have opened up interative communication methods to two generations who have been accustomed to sitting, watching the TV.

Our grandparents were used to arguments and discussions in various social venues, and we're having to relearn those skills in a whole new venue, one where the lack of face-to-face contact makes hostility so much easier.

There are some tactics you can take to avoid pile-on flameage.

Avoiding areas where people slur each other is one tack. (Hailey originally posted to democrats.com, where this type of verbal attack is often used against other parties.)

If you can help it, then avoiding being the reference for someone already in the hot seat can help too. (Hailey received further pre-furor promotion from Mary Mapes, who was at the heart of this attempt to sway the election.)

Another big technique is to avoid "in your face" kinds of conversations. Here, Rather started a "partyA is lying" discussion... he received plenty of "partyB is lying" in return... when someone comees in and says "partyC is lying" then they'd often find themselves in a "partyD is lying" situation the next day. Looking for commonality rather than confrontation can help a lot.

I don't think this is a problem unique to online communities, but a place where online communities highlight changes that are happening in the rest of the world, or at least the US part of it. It seems to me that we as a society are becoming more rude, and tolerating behavior that a few years ago would have been shocking.

One of the easiest places to see it is while driving - people run red lights more commonly, are aggressive towards each other, and more likely to push limits to get ahead. Driving provides a good analogy for online behavior because it’s another forum where it is easy to be anonymous and easy to not connect to others as people and members of a community. I’m not sure that we’ve become more aggressive – I think maybe it has more to do with being more disconnected from one another, and so it is easier to treat other people as unimportant, less than worthy of respect and consideration.

I agree mostly with what Adam and Jake said above – we need to find a way to teach people what is acceptable as a member of the community - not "Terms of Service" but "Terms of Community Membership." Your "plan for...positive action" linked to above gets the essential point right - that when we remember the people involved, and connect to what their lives are like (even just at work, or just in their blog), we can approach them in a way that they will understand, and respond to our humanity. That sounds super-idealistic in the “can’t-we-all-just-get-along” kind of way, which isn’t what I mean. Any community will have disagreements, but we need to create and communicate norms about how those disagreements are expressed and (sometimes) resolved.

"so many blog communities that are so unkind."
*sigh*

Anonymity ... the impunity of things "cyber" ... and no immediately obvious down-side to joining in on the cruelty.

But, more deeply, the by-product of passivity and quiessence, apathy at least ... cynical pessimism at worst.

But say: don't you think it gives us a precious view-port into the social dynamics of our IRL world?

stay well