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Is a humane online politics possible?
The Internet and real life are different.
More specifically: political discussions, or for that matter discussions about any contestable topic, differ greatly in their online and offline dynamics.
Here’s an example. Say you’re talking with some friends at a café. One of your friends overhears a conversation at another table, gets offended, and starts arguing with the folks at that table. So far, not an impossible thing in real life. I imagine we’ve all overheard things in public places that got our blood boiling, and perhaps even regretted that we didn’t confront the racists in the corner booth, or whatever.
But it doesn’t end there. The conversation at your table starts to shift course, so that now you’re talking about the people at that other table, whether they’re right or wrong, and your friend that started the cross-tabular conversation is now standing near their table, arguing. He beckons to you to come over and join him. If you’re reluctant, he comes back to your table and quotes inflammatory material said at the offending table, and points your way over there.
At this point, you’ll pretty much have decided, if you’re like me, that your friend is an asshole.
Of course, maybe café tables aren’t the best metaphor for blogs. After all, most blogs at least theoretically welcome newcomers, while café tables are often inhabited by people who just really want to talk among themselves. Maybe the better metaphor is a set of bars with closed-circuit televisions, and exhortations to go to the place across the street and join the barfight already in progress. Or an Episcopalian congregation leading an insurgent raid on the Latter-Day Saints Temple. I’m sure there’s something better.
The point is, what would be looked at as an act of aggression in real life is taken as standard operating procedure in the blog world.
It’s not even necessarily seen, or intended, as a hostile act, this rousing of people to go over and join in a conversation somewhere else. I know I’ve done so with nothing but sterling and benevolent intent in the past, aiming various firehoses of traffic at threads whose owners weren’t expecting so many guests. That practice has a name: “linklove.” It’s the strength of the web, after all, the core of the whole concept, this linking.
And I’m certainly not for a second suggesting that linking to good things ought to be seen as destructive. That’d be silly. How much have I learned from other people’s links? Reading people like Kevin, like Dave, like Lauren and Jennifer?
But there’s something about the widespread practice of negative linking that seems inevitably to lead to dog-piling. It makes sense. People are much more likely to take the trouble to write something when they’re upset. How often do you see letters to the editor praising the paper for their coverage of an issue? Factor in the relative ease and speed with which links propagate throughout the web, and you have the Atrocity Of The Week phenomenon.
And sometimes, you know, the AOTW really is atrocious. Sometimes the negative links direct attention to things that need to be addressed, to offenses that would have flown under the collective radar in offline life, and sometimes the mass uproar that follows educates people who would not have been reached by position papers. As a glorified phone tree to alert people to actions that need to be taken to combat short-term horribles, the net is a wonderful thing.
It’s just that it seems to me that there’s a threshold of linkage beyond which political discussions, as opposed to political alerts, become less than useful over time. I’m not suggesting any hard and fast metrics, but I do know that some of the most useful, challenging, rewarding and worthwhile conversations I’ve read online have taken place among regular readers of the blog in question, and I know that I’ve seen outside linkage derail more useful and enlightening conversations than I can count.
All this said, it’s not really the links that constitute the problem. They just facilitate it. The problem is the kind of behavior that is, advertently or in-, rewarded in the blog world, and the people that exhibit it, myself included on an embarrassingly frequent basis. With enough links to form a critical mass, a discussion becomes a target for the drive-by bombthrowers, the narcissist derailers, the wounded arrogant martyrs and their sycophants, the one-liner snarksters, the social-climbing blog-pimps. Not a single online demographic fails to possess most of these types, from racist reactionaries to radical women of color to shallow A-List mainstreamers and their toadies to misanthropic dog-and-desert nature poetry bloggers.
These people exist in real life too, and chances are that the net factor merely exacerbates an existing condition. I know I’ve been the annoying joke guy in real-life situations far too often, for instance, and I only pick that trait because I don’t really want to think about how many times I’ve also been a narcissist derailer.
But here’s the thing I’m thinking, and tell me if you think this seems too far off: in real life, such behavior is tolerated.
Online, it’s rewarded.
It’s rewarded, and combined with the dogpile dynamic, it creates conditions in which no forward motion is possible. A discussion of the Atrocity Of The Month becomes an argument, and not an argument among two or three discrete positions, but an argument in which hundreds of distinct positions are grouped into two or three rough tendencies, with each of the arguments in a tendency undercut by its putative allies. Anyone wanting only to win an argument rather than to engage need only pick out the most extreme statement on another side — and there will always be one — and either cast it as a ridiculous statement that represents the entire spectrum of the arguer’s opponents, or as the only real question being discussed.
Which means the people who stomp around doing actual harm, who commit actual lies and theft of words and ideas, actually enriching their status at the cost of making their prey’s lives smaller, get to excuse their actions by pointing to the misstatements of a few overzealous people on the other side.
Nuance is lost in the shouting. The crucial subtleties that characterize actual politics in the real world are ignored, when they are not actively dismissed with the call of “which side are you on?” Broad statements are set in opposition to one another, and the notion that both could be true — to take a recent example, the notion that the statements “Islam as often practiced is a reactionary ideology responsible for the brutal mistreatment of Muslim women” and “Anti-Islam sentiment in the US is usually odiously racist in nature” might both be equally valid — that kind of complicated thinking is dismissed with a wave and a snarky comment.
And so I wonder. Is a humane online politics possible, where reasonable differences of opinion are respected, where the goal is to exchange viewpoints and learn from one another and move forward? If so, is it necessarily restricted to venues where the traffic firehoses don’t reach? Is a humane online politics the stereotyped Mesozoic mammal always hiding in the underbrush while the Snarkosaurs and Sitemetrodons rampage out in the sunlight? I’m willing to be persuaded otherwise by any optimists among CRN regulars.
Posted by: Chris Clarke
Note: A database glitch in 2008 ate a bunch of archived comments. Don't be offended if yours isn't here, or confused if the conversation seems disjointed. Thanks!
“Online, it’s rewarded.”
I’ve been thinking about this for the past year or so. It’s so aggravating. I’m not above it, perhaps that’s why I’ve kept my trap shut about it, that and the fact no one pays attention to me, lol.
I think humane online politics are possible, if you have the proper firemen to hose off the burning houses. However, some would rather stand in the flames and burn, the heat feels so good to them.
I’m a bit tired of snark subbing for discourse, too. The behavior some of us decry among the TV punditry class gets rewarded en masse in the blogosphere. People often make comments and exhibit behaviors they might not in real life because of the thumbs up they get from the readers.
I would chat more, but I have to go pick up the family . . .
By: By Mark on 2008 04 24
Glad to see you here again, Mark!
By: By Chris Clarke on 2008 04 24
and now you see why nez remains uninvolved in most of these fights, and when he does get involved, its to write a lengthy post at his own joint where he can take as long as he wants to lay out his own thoughts and the nuance he sees in each situation. and i think he’s stuck in the third person now, dammit.
By: By nezua on 2008 04 25
oh and i dont hesitate to moderate comments or edit or ban if necessary. why? cuz i’ve dealt with the trolls and haters and derailers and attackers from day one…so to me that is S.O.P.
By: By nezua on 2008 04 25
There do seem to be some medium-profile, un-moderated blogs which are relatively troll-free and humane in tone. What makes them so will require more thought, but I guess it’s some complicated combination of the host’s demeanour and the development of the commenting population over time. Do I get my MBO now?
By: By Rob G on 2008 04 25
Maybe a blogger can operate a humane online politics cafe even though from time to time there’s an influx of noisy drunks. Even conversations which are eventually overcome by the noise have not necessarily been rendered useless.
It can be frustrating trying to carry on a conversation amidst the noise, but if it’s a conversation people might not have participated in or been exposed to otherwise, it may still be useful. Even through the noise, people may hear things they would not otherwise have heard, that stay with them, and continue to inform their understanding of other conversations and situations, as John Powers describes with the Ally 101 thread.
I don’t think the internet is really evoking noise that wasn’t already cluttering up the world. Noisemakers make as much noise about themselves as possible; I think it just gets distributed differently. The net gives a lot of people access to a greater number and diversity of conversations, for good and ill. Everything has the defects of its virtues.
I’m beginning to sound awfully always-a-bright-side here, peculiarly, as that is not my usual line, but given that a lot of us are guilty at some point of getting caught up in the meaningless roar, having it happen online may serve a purpose. Because conversations do get picked up again, and I’ve seen instances of people saying I was in the it’s all ‘A’ how could anyone think otherwise shouting section when this came up elsewhere, but now that it’s come around for the third time, I’m starting to see what all those people yelling ‘B’ were talking about. Catching a glimpse of yourself holding a pitchfork among the mob can be educational.
By: By Maud on 2008 04 25
getting someone to snap a pic of you holding that pitchfork for your christmas cards? priceless.
By: By nezua on 2008 04 25
I think any unmoderated space will go back, inevitably. When I first started blogging, I used to feel that I needed to host anybody who came along. Now I delete comments mercilessly without a second thought, if they’re both hostile and stupid. I love to be disagreed with—it happens far too seldom—but that’s another thing. There’s plenty of places where people can unload their canned rants and mindless venom; I don’t have to provide another.
I don’t believe in unmoderated internet spaces any more. I’ve seen too many go up in flames.
By: By dale on 2008 04 25
oops. that was “go bad”, not “go back”
By: By dale on 2008 04 25
and i think he’s stuck in the third person now, dammit.
getting someone to snap a pic of you holding that pitchfork for your christmas cards? priceless.
Damn it Nez, I’m trying to THINK, not laugh. : )
By: By Theriomorph on 2008 04 25
John and Maud, thanks for pointing out that the good stuff is all still there, too. It’s easy for me to lose track of that because I felt like something really useful to a lot of people who had never participated in a discussion like that was happening, and it got torpedoed for malice in a way people couldn’t really understand. My hope is that people new to engaging didn’t just withdraw as a result.
One thing I’ve been thinking about is how even my own behavior online is affected by lack of investment, in a way - here’s what I mean: in a 3D community (workplace, neighborhood, whatever), there’s no escape from this stuff, so you have to work it through to keep your community functioning. But when I see repeated malice, stupidity, and dishonesty from a blogger or commenter, I can much more easily not only blow them off and avoid their hangouts, but pick up a pitchfork and wave it at them.
It’s not who or how I want to be, but I’ve done it in the recent blowups over co-option of RWOC’s work, etc.. For me, that particular situation (P’gon, Seal Press, etc. ad infinitum) has just become so deeply symbolic of what’s wrong with us online, and as a species, that I react to the symbols with rage - and the online context makes it a lot easier to lose sight of the scale and the individual humanity both. Also, I’m just legitimately pissed. But yeah, Christmas cards with pitchforks.
The clique and link stuff is Byzantine, too. Recently I read a post from an outsider to one of the close-knit groups online and ended up feeling like a complete asshole for not seeing some very real dynamics of exclusion which I suddenly realized I had at least inadvertently supported. By not challenging some of what I read. By keeping silent or avoiding what seemed an an insurmountable culture of group-think.
Frequently, I feel like the very real silencing of youth activists in the 3D world is completely inverted online, so that the general culture of the blogosphere is created by people at a very early stage of dealing with social justice issues. Sometimes, this is good. Often, it’s not. There’s a lack of balance, and that is never a good thing.
In a way, and I SO do not mean this in a PollyAnna tone, I think all of this really comes down to continual lessons in listening, listening more, listening better. Opportunities to learn.
But it really is buffeting, this blogosphere.
Trying to have a humane online politics is roughly like trying to start a non-violent resistance movement at a dogfight. Worth trying? Yes. Likely? Not very. Necessary? I believe so.
Anyway, those are my thoughts for now. Good thread so far, thanks everyone.
By: By Theriomorph on 2008 04 25
That Nez, he is a Christmas card.
Dale: agreed. And yet I think this issue transcends moderation. Some of the worst, most destructive politics I’ve seen online has taken place on blogs that are aggressively moderated.
Most moderated blogs are moderated with regard to criteria other than simple collegiality. There are political positions I’d exclude from publication here no matter how “civilly” they’re phrased. Many develop a much more strictly defined set of allowable beliefs among regulars, and some add sycophancy to the mix.
Which is harmonious, if stultifying, within those blogs themselves. But when groups of regulars of different blogs clash, the moderation of each blog kinda becomes moot.
John: thanks for the kind words. I persist in thinking that ally thread was a stunning piece of work, though I have learned ways in which I could have done better. And the answer to your question about “time to post”: methamphetamine.
Good point, Maud, about the different distribution of nastiness in online versus offline life.
By: By Chris Clarke on 2008 04 25
It’s ever so much safer to bully and harass online, where the risk of being physically responded to (i.e., a punch in the nose) is virtually zero.
Yes, very true, and complicated by anonymity.
And if not a punch in the nose, at least consequences of some kind; the loss of a job for being a bully, the loss of friends and loved ones, whatever.
‘Course, online as in real life, the bully’s best defense is claiming they’re being bullied.
Sigh.
By: By Theriomorph on 2008 04 25
A clarification I have come to realize is necessary here:
I’m not talking about trolls, and moderation.
I’m talking about what is to my mind a far more pernicious thing: a climate, and a set of mechanisms, by which people who are NOT self-hating trolls can engage in thuglike, sociopathic behavior online and think of it as activism, discourse, freedom-fighting, ally work, dissent, free expression, or pick your positive buzz phrase.
It’s not an individual problem. It’s a systemic problem. It’s not that there are jerks online who gain cover from the anonymity of the net, though, as Warren points out and as Zeke’s fans will recall from a couple years back, that is a huge problem.
The issue I’m talking about is the one Tmorph describes above: a bloodthirsty culture in which sociopathic behavior is rewarded. That culture has brought out the worst in me on frequent occasions, and these days on the rare days when I go read P*gon, I shudder to think what I might have become had I stayed and let that culture suffuse me entirely.
Trolls can be banned. But when the person causing the problem is a blog owner who creates a culture of cross-blog insurgency, or who cultivates loyal sycophants ready to avenge any perceived slight, or when the problem is someone with impeccable politics and wit who can engage only in attack mode, or when the problem is a “gotcha” culture in which statements like this are taken as actual substantive argument, then it’s not just a few isolated bad-faith individuals, and we all need to punch ourselves in the nose.
By: By Chris Clarke on 2008 04 25
Ow!
By: By Chris Clarke on 2008 04 25
Only skimming, at this point. Gonna come back to this thread later. But this clanged me upside the head:
Frequently, I feel like the very real silencing of youth activists in the 3D world is completely inverted online, so that the general culture of the blogosphere is created by people at a very early stage of dealing with social justice issues. Sometimes, this is good. Often, it’s not. There’s a lack of balance, and that is never a good thing.
I’ve been reading Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody recently—- on how the internet is changing the nature of mass action and collaboration—- and I keep coming back again and again to one idea: The internet makes a kind of community possible in the world at large that used to only be found on the college campus.
There’s a lot more to say about that, and I don’t mean to hijack the thread, but the more I dig the more I see parallels (for good and ill) between the ways people connect with each other online and the ways they were able to connect to each other a generation or two ago in dorms and quads and student conferences.
So maybe it’s not just that youth activists are given a new soapbox online (though they are), but also that “youth activism,” defined non-chronologically as the kind of activism that youth usually get involved with, is facilitated and enabled.
Chew. Chew. Chew.
By: By Brooklynite on 2008 04 25
“The moderation task probably does mean that the best discussions are going to be at smaller to medium sized blogs.”
I think this is very true, at least from where I sit. It seems to me that there comes a point in the growth of a blog when it goes from being something intimate—where everyone kind of knows what to expect and how things go and so even when the blog writer isn’t present, it’s as if the host at a house you were visiting got up to take care of something in the kitchen or to tend to another guest. People in general carry on as they have been carrying on and they have a sense of the host as a person, with failings, and the other people “present” as being real people, with failings, and allowances are made. (Um, I’m just about to commit the longest-run on sentence, complete, somehow with periods inside it, ever seen on the planet, but please bear with me.)—to being something more like a mess centered around a few personalities, where the personalities are mostly removed from the discussion.
I think, once a blogger stops actively engaging what’s going on in the comments of her site (and not just chiming in every once in a while), some kind of shift occurs. Something less genuine (and, to me, less interesting) starts to happen.
I’m kind of rambling, but, yeah, the longer I do this, the longer I see that linking to people is not always a kindness. It’s easy to see how negative linking is bad, but I also sometimes think that opening any flood gate on a space can be wrong. I don’t know how to talk about it exactly, but I feel it.
I guess it just has to do with how things feel. When I read Nezua, I feel like I’m a little stoned, sitting in someone’s living room listening to him put things that have been fuzzy to me into focus. I don’t comment because I feel like it would be rude to run around his blog saying “Oh, yeah, right!” over and over. But that’s what I’m thinking.
I read you, Chris, and it feels to me like standing in a rocky place with someone, both of you watching the clouds, trying to guess if it’s just going to get cold or if we might see snow. That takes a while. It takes letting silences grow and then fill up.
And it’s hard for me to say what makes certain blogs places where I, as a reader, feel like it’s worth sticking around, that I’m learning. But I aspire to do that.
I believe that blogging has changed my life for the better. No, I know it has.
And I had a point… But, yeah, chew chew chew.
Oh, yes, I think the thing is that things work best when the people in the community are trying to do something other than “winning” in whatever form that takes for them.
By: By Aunt B. on 2008 04 25
Nezua -
Can I use that Christmas card idea if I promise to credit you?
By: By Maud on 2008 04 25
Chris, this is probably off topic, but thanks for linking that thread at IBTP.
Of course, in a meta discussion like this, it might well be argued that virtually anything on the internet is on topi—-
(Sock stuffed in it)
By: By Tom on 2008 04 25
(Hey, Chris and everybody, sorry to suddenly gum up such an intelligent discussion with that silly troll-like comment. I don’t know why I do that. :(
)
By: By Tom on 2008 04 25
I’m not exactly sure how that was troll-like, Tom, and I’m glad you’re here, and I would be interested to hear your further thoughts on the issue, which I know you’ve considered.
By: By Chris Clarke on 2008 04 25
Chris, I’m very glad it didn’t come across that way.
Yeah, I sure have spent a lot of time thinking about it. I feel like I’m nodding along with the comments so far, and I support the notion that the 101 thread was a positive thing.
I think it really helps that so many people around here just make humane interactions a high priority.
By: By Tom on 2008 04 25
Is a humane online politics possible, where reasonable differences of opinion are respected, where the goal is to exchange viewpoints and learn from one another and move forward?
I’m soooo tempted to be snarky and point out that that is already happening, has happened, I dun seened it with my own two eyes! But it’s never going to be the norm, sturgeon’s law is always going to be the king of this chess game, which is actually the red queen’s race of course (it’s ninja chess! In which the game of chess isn’t actually a game of chess).
The other big problem is that the snarky, sarcastic, cruel comment is a more effective way to establish a voice out here than a calm, thoughtful essay.
Well Bfp’s blogged about this and I’ve mentioned it in the distant past - the intelligent, deep or meaningful posts don’t get the comments, the shouty ones do, the snarky ones do, and then you have the bloggers’ own insecurity system saying to them; “no one cares about that, they care about this, no one is listening to that, they’re listening to this, if you want to say that, you’ve got to moderate it with this.”
A message some people say out loud to other people I’ve noticed (snark goes here), or shout from the roof tops on FOX or in the New York papers, some people who are rarely what you’d call “good people” or all that sane really - consumed by the voices in their own heads until the damn things escape and roam free eating urban foxes in a non-sustainable manner.
But that’s because it becomes very hard not to listen to that voice, very easy to let the passing crazy people on the bus distract you and give that voice in your head support. And if you let them distract you and the voices loose for even a second, you end up like so many english lit professors; waking up in a pool of your own vomit, the testicles of your enemies stapled to your ear lobes, wondering how the hell a discussion about the relative merits of building a complex narrative around the third person perspective all got so out of hand…
Personally when I briefly moved blog back at the start of the year I eventually turned comments off on the principle that you can’t get distracted by the comments if you don’t have any at all (”...crazy like a fox!”), and that if anyone really does want to say stuff about what I’ve written they can post it on their own blog, which means you immediately wean out all those “me too!” commenters, and I can then respond to the thoughtful ones on mine… and a side effect would maybe be that the entire conversation would be not only far more decentralized than such things currently are, but the linkcountage that substitutes penis length on the internet would increase for those who engaged in that sort of behavior more so even than for the shouty bastards. Thus providing positive feedback for it.
Of course then I realised that as hardly any one was reading me before the move, and as no one was reading me after the move, the distinction between “blogging” and “talking to myself” was kinda thin so I stopped that and moved back with comments on. Because I’m a whore or something.
But the principle hasn’t been disproven through experiment yet! It might work! It might not work! It is a wild hyppopothamus, galloping freely across the svelte and bush around Africa and Asia’s damp-parts!
However your sturgeon ratio is pretty good Chris (as is everyone else commenting on this apart from myself), and if you turned off the comments we would miss out on all the gross punnage everyone around here comes up with. The ideal blogs to try this out on would be say feministe or pandagon - the comments generally descend into being complete cesspools of pointlessness, and they’re also major hubs so linkthrough is garunteed.
Of course they’re also the blogs who would never go for that sort of thing…
My $5 worth.
By: By R. Mildred on 2008 04 26
A question I’ve been asking myself, too, is whether wanting to be big or influential is the right goal for me as a person, even if it would seem to be the right goal for me as a blogger.
It seems to me that what’s going on right now in a very broad sense in the feminist blogosphere is that we’ve replicated structures that hurt us and are surprised to find that those structures are hurtful.
I could be wrong. I’m not an internet historian. But it seems to me that the model was already for there to be a few locatable, popular, powerful, influential sites to which anyone who wanted to know the general mood on anything could go.
We kind of didn’t do things that way. I’m always struck by how, if you go back to read a lot of feminist bloggers’ first posts (if they’re still available) how tentative they sound at first, how unsure we are of even our own right to speak, and then how you can watch a writer grow into herself and gain confidence and surity.
And it seemed to me that, as long as there was a kind of general visceral sense of wonder and uncertainty and the wanting to be thoughtful, even if certain blogs were popular, it didn’t mean they were Important.
But once folks started asking “Where are all the women at?” and we were like “We’re right here,” the strategy seemed to be “Let’s make ourselves into something like them so that we can be visible to them.”
And that, frankly, I think is a huge problem. I keep watching folks repeatedly trying to solve problems by saying “I will link more, I will make space” blah, blah, blah. But who are we to think that we have space to give? Who are we to think that our links matter? Why are we talking about sharing the wealth if the fact that we have the wealth in the first place is a problem?
And yet… clearly having folks with influence who can speak and get heard is important, if it means real change, right? And clearly acknowledging the work other people are doing is crucial.
So, I don’t know. This is just my long way of saying that I think we continue to see these same kinds of conversations because we keep setting up spaces in which those types of conversations are likely to happen.
R. Mildred is right that turning off comments is one way to dismantle that, but, when you can have long thoughtful conversations like this, when they happen, it seems a shame to loose the opportunity to have them.
By: By Aunt B. on 2008 04 26
Sturgeon’s Law may be king, but the queen has to be The Misanthropic Principle.
I think, therefore I am wet.
By: By Rob G on 2008 04 26
In terms of the Ally 101 thread, from the perspective of somebody who’s reading it for the first time as I’m working on a post for Angry Black Woman’s Carnival of Allies, I just want to highlight what an incredibly valuable resource it is—despite its, um, imperfections. And of course there’s also the learning from it ... leading to this equally-excellent discussion.
“Web 2.0 technologies provide all of the accelerants of mob behavior but very few of its inhibitors. . . . Individuals who feel anonymous do and say things online that they would never seriously entertain doing and saying offline because they sense that their conduct will have no consequences. A site operator’s decision to keep up damaging posts encourages destructive group behavior. Online mobs also have little reason to fear that their victims will retaliate against them.”
> Is a humane online politics possible, where reasonable differences of opinion are respected, where the goal is to exchange viewpoints and learn from one another and move forward?
Yes. There are many examples of this here and on other blogs that I’ve seen many of the same people at.
> If so, is it necessarily restricted to venues where the traffic firehoses don’t reach?
the $64,000 question.
I believe it’s possible to create an affiliation of venues in which positive (rather than destructive) behavior is rewarded, that’s strong enough to withstand both the haters and the much larger number of not-yet-as-aware-as-they-should-be people who come as part of the firehoses.
To get there, I think there will need to be discussions about more positive standards for behavior—and what linking, quoting, attribution, moderation, and organizational strategies can help achieve them. [An example of an organizational strategy: view the system as an ecology, with symbiotic roles for various specialties: the bloggers who do want to be biiig as well as the ones who like Aunt B (and me) aren’t sure that’s what they want; the ones where the bloggers are involved in the comments and the ones where the blogger sets the subject and people talk among themselves; and so on.]
Of course this happens naturally to some extent, but the standards are rarely explicit, and I’m not sure how intentionally people are thinking about the linking and organization mechanisms. Also, there’s some missing technology that would help make this easier, for example the ability for a pool of trusted people to be “emergency backup moderators” for when sites become a Firehose focus; or a good multi-site reputation/community moderation system a la Slashdot. These all seem like solvable problems, though.
Much to think about ...
jon
* Frank Pasquale’s Disparate Impact in the Blogosphere has some excerpts as well as context.
By: By jon on 2008 04 26
This is a great post, Chris. I’ve been thinking about this sort of thing off and on lately, as I watch the various dogpiles reverberating through the web, remembering when I was one of those people who was eager to go and be part of the excitement.
These days, not so much. I’m not inclined to go follow up all the related posts and links anymore, and one of the most valuable things I’ve learned in all my years of blog commenting is that sometimes it’s not necessary for me to fling my two cents in.
This isn’t to say that I’m now lofting along in this holier-than-thou sort of way - just this evening, for example, I rather gleefully got involved in a grand bit of “roust the troll.” I can’t say that I’m necessarily proud of my behavior, but there is something satisfying about identifying a genuine ill-faith attack on one’s blog community and joining together to drive it off through the power of witty and somewhat juvenile taunts.
Taking that dynamic to someone else’s blog, where one is at best a guest, on the other hand… I’m just not interested in doing that. For one, it requires a sort of righteous self-confidence that I don’t have anymore, at least not when I’m not on what I consider home ground and am among friends who I know will haul me back from being unfair and obnoxious, who will keep me from doing something I’d regret in the morning.
The other thing is that I don’t like being that sort of person; it’s not like I don’t already have a fair amount of character flaws - such as perhaps too much pride in my own smarts and ability to write penetrating or witty blog comments (wry grin) - so I don’t need to add mob behavior (or what I sometimes call “posse-ing” - as when any criticism, however legitimate, of a popular blogger provokes in a vicious rending of the critic by a crowd of yes-people) to my list of bad internet behaviors.
I think the responsibility for a humane, thoughtful internet lies somewhere between those who blog and those who comment - the responsibility of the blogger is to think about what sort of community he or she wants centered on his or her blog, while that of the commenter is to be aware that different blogs have different cultures, and to tailor one’s behavior accordingly.
Personally, I like a broad range of blogging and commenting styles, from snarky one-liners to informal musings to carefully laid out scholarly essays - what becomes problematic is when styles collide - like when someone makes silly comments at a thoughtful blog, or when someone acts in a way that comes off as pompous because they’re brandishing their education at a blog with a more informal style. (The tolerance for vulgarity is another aspect of this.)
I don’t know what the answer is to your initial question, Chris, but that’s because I think it’s part of a larger question: are humane interactions between people or groups of people possible? I think there are.
Yes, the internet encourages or facilitates certain sorts of behaviors, but it’s not like the attitudes underlying those behaviors is absent in ordinary life - it’s just harder to see.
I don’t know what the answer is, but I think it has to start with individuals realizing that they don’t want to be rude jerks, and others refusing to tolerate such behavior when they have the ability to challenge it.
For me, that means comments moderation, careful thinking about how one’s blog fits into the larger blogosphere, and cultivating self-policing communities when one can.
By: By Rachel Shaw on 2008 04 26
I think the responsibility for a humane, thoughtful internet lies somewhere between those who blog and those who comment -
For me, that means comments moderation, careful thinking about how one’s blog fits into the larger blogosphere, and cultivating self-policing communities when one can.
Yeah, this is really well-said, Rana - and what I’m thinking about right now is that this *works* if the people at the table are acting in good will. If one person comes in and starts something in a stable blog-particular culture of this kind of respect, they don’t get much tread.
But if the larger blogosphere culture is fueled by a willingness to dogpile, to posse, for whatever complicated but perhaps well-intentioned reasons of personal loyalty - or malice, or habit of bloodlust or genuine disinterest in any conversation that is not a brawl and willingness to turn every conversation into one for entertainment and self-righteous glee - ?
That’s where I crash back into the larger ethos of the blogosphere and feel like the lack of real relationship, of personal accountability *to* real relationship, sets up a toxic dynamic.
I find it helps to keep a small, low profile blog. But avoiding writing about the things I care about (ie: the ‘I just won’t write about politics or racism or sexism’ solution) to avoid this kind of dynamic hasn’t felt like a reasonable choice for me.
I absolutely get why some people choose not to engage *on the web* about these things (because it *is* a sick culture, and the discussions often are *not* useful). But I remain stuck on the notion that the web has profound potential as a unique and useful tool for social justice dialogue. Or mostly I do, anyway.
Obviously, still thinking about it.
By: By Theriomorph on 2008 04 27
Theriomorph writes:
If one person comes in and starts something in a stable blog-particular culture of this kind of respect, they don’t get much tread.
Part of that—- not all of it, but part of it—- is just a matter of scale.
I went to see Clay Shirky speak a couple of weeks ago. There were about a hundred people in the room. During Q&A;I asked him something, and got an engaged, interesting response. But that was all the interaction that venue could sustain.
Because I’d asked the question, though, and because of the nature of his response, I approached him afterwards. We were still in public—- there were three or four other people around, and we all wound up conversing with each other—- but it was a deeper, less formal exchange.
Something similar goes on with blogs. When I posted my comment about the statement “white people can’t be trusted” over at Feministe a few days ago it got a couple of comments in response, but the real discussion didn’t start until I reposted the comment on my own blog. Some folks drifted over from Feministe, others from my friendslist, and we did what Shirky and I did after his speech. We chatted.
One cool thing about the net is that you can do all this stuff at once. You can participate in a big public talk, three small-group conversations, and seven one-on-one dialogues about the same subject simultaneously.
I’m fascinated by this—- by the way the net facilitates multiple simultaneous conversations among overlapping groups of people, and by how that shapes the way people interact.
By: By Brooklynite on 2008 04 27
One cool thing about the net is that you can do all this stuff at once. You can participate in a big public talk, three small-group conversations, and seven one-on-one dialogues about the same subject simultaneously.
Which I think is fine, if there is some transparency about the whole thing.
But the same structure that allows simultaneous conversations also allows destructive backchanneling, on scales from individual friends emailing each other to say “OMG did you read this tripe? Go say something!” on up to TownHall style secret mailing lists whose express function is to talk in private to attempt to shape online discourse, set talking points, and determine which other bloggers get positive or negative attention, and which languish in obscurity.
Those backchannels aren’t always destructive, of course. Sometimes they’re just groups of pals that arise from and within an online venue, which is in fact how Brooklynite and I first met.
But in the context of difficult online discourse, I have to say that I quite often find them frustratingly dishonest, especially when combined with clique dynamics. And I say that, again, having myself partook of that very dishonesty.
By: By Chris Clarke on 2008 04 27
I hear you, Chris, and I find the cliquishness both incredibly frustrating and incredibly difficult to avoid becoming enmeshed in.
Having said that, I guess I’m most intrigued by the interplay between the larger and the more intimate public spaces online. When I talked with Clay Shirky after his speech, only the few of us who were standing there were privy to what we said, but if that conversation had taken place in an equivalent online forum, I’d be able to link back to it and demonstrate, rather than merely describing, the ways in which it differed from the formal talk.
The blurring of the line between public and private online makes a lot of people nervous. It makes me nervous, too, sometimes. But I also find it exciting. I’d much rather be having this conversation with you here, for instance, than on a private listserv—- and as the folks we used to share a listserv with have found their way to LiveJournal, that listserv has declined in importance in their lives. My hunch is that that’s not anomalous—- that as people become more comfortable inhabiting intimate public spaces, some of the backchannel stuff we’re both kind of creeped out by is going to wither away.
To paraphrase a friend and colleague: “My name is Angus, and I like the internet.”
By: By Brooklynite on 2008 04 27
This continues to be a great discussion. I’m not sure how many people hear have read Shirky’s essay A group is its own worst enemy. It gives a lot of historical perspective on issues like this.
By: By jon on 2008 04 27
Chris,
I don’t think anyone in that thread took your example at #17 to be anything but the standard handwringing that goes with the claim that since everyone does it there really isn’t anything to be done about it so lets go ahead and all do it and stop talking about how it isn’t very nice to do it.
Or perhaps you meant something else and I misunderstood you.
By: By thebewilderness on 2008 04 27
Hmm….is a humane online politics possible?
One drawback is the nature of print communication—-in “real life”, we have other sensory cues to go by. Communication by print alone is difficult—-for me, anyway. It’s hard to find a way to insert that crucial head-nod, those critical hand/arm gestures, the right eye-cut, lip-point, etc. Fingers running through the hair (or over the scalp, for the bald folks!), the shrug. Not to mention the vocal modulation, the timbre, the pitch.
So….inevitably there are going to be miscues and misunderstandings, that wouldn’t necessarily take place in “real life”.
So, when online discourse attracts a larger and more diverse (in every way) audience, and miscues are bound to happen—-unmoderated by the sensory cues of real life. No wonder posting can feel like racing down a winding highway at midnight with no lights and no brakes!
I prefer reading smaller blogs. No drama, just good reading, learning, and interesting conversation. The best blogs don’t let troll-y comments through. Who said a blog had to be a “free-speech” zone? To extend the cafe analogy—-you wouldn’t invite an obnoxious person to sit at your table and disrupt the previously enjoyable conversation, so why do it on your blog?
By: By La Lubu on 2008 04 28
“Anyone wanting only to win an argument rather than to engage need only pick out the most extreme statement on another side — and there will always be one — and either cast it as a ridiculous statement that represents the entire spectrum of the arguer’s opponents, or as the only real question being discussed.”
I’ve been impressed with the way internet culture has developed methods of dealing with dishonest verbal tactics. Godwin’s law is one of them. I can’t find it now, but I love the way somebody used the “Oprah rule” to smack down Mitch-whosit over at Feministe.
We will develop strategies to deal with unproductive behavior on the internet. We’ll have tools to deal with “the drive-by bombthrowers, the narcissist derailers, the wounded arrogant martyrs and their sycophants, the one-liner snarksters, the social-climbing blog-pimps.”
We may not have them now, but we are growing and learning and developing tools.
Brooklynite wrote: “The internet makes a kind of community possible in the world at large that used to only be found on the college campus.”
As a member of the Vietnam generation, I have to say this is crucial. Back then, it took weeks to find out about a national initiative to protest the war. It took painstaking efforts by individuals working alone in their communities. It took cutting stencils for mimeograph machines to literally roll out one newsletter after another.
It took nearly 15 years of hard activist work to get to the place where the majority of U.S. citizens opposed the war in Vietnam. We’ve done it in less than half as many years this time around. It’s not enough. But it is something.
By: By Ravenmn on 2008 04 28
Brooklynite wrote: “The internet makes a kind of community possible in the world at large that used to only be found on the college campus.”
And do you know why? Time. The time crunch. I can read online in the late evening, after work, after I cook dinner and help my daughter with her homework, after a union meeting, after a workout or karate class or cutting the grass, or any of the other various things I need to do to keep my life running. The college campus was the place to find that community before because it was (forgive me, people) a kind of hothouse of young people with time on their hands. As a single parent, that online time is valuable to me, because “Drinking Liberally” or “Drinking Coffee Liberally”, or other local meet-up groups are unavailable to me. Even if they were held in the earlier evening, and even if kids were allowed. The internet provides information and access to communication that I would otherwise not have. For all the talk about “blogging isn’t activism”, I’ve found that over the years, I’m more stimulated and more inspired by having the internet as a tool than I would otherwise be. I’ve been more, not less, politically active since getting online in the late nineties.
And what Ravenmn said—-I was a child, but I’m still old enough to remember what the mimeograph machine smelled like. If the internet has one great use, it’s making communications and connections a helluva lot easier. It’s getting news to people outside the major metropolitan centers who otherwise would be limited to hearing whatever the local newspaper and radio stations (now owned by conglomerates. Thanks, deregulation! Thanks for canned news and shitty programming!), or….waiting for subscriptions to more progressive magazines or letters from friends to come in the mail. Believe it or not, there are people in flyover country, people who aren’t conservative, Republican, pro-war, etc., who hunger for real news that isn’t coming from anywhere else but the ‘net (or like I said, those subscriptions. Even the local college station doesn’t play most of the programming available on NPR—-mostly the boring shit like Garrison Keillor, or the car show…they sure as hell don’t play Farai Chideya!).
I do wish there was more use of the delete button by moderators on some blogs though—-why even give the trolls a venue? There’s a residual reluctance to do that because of a loyalty to “free speech”(and perhaps, because attorneys and law students are overrepresented in the lefty blogosphere. again, forgive me—-most of those people I really, truly dig, but I just don’t dig their propensity to give assholes a forum)—-but hey, blogging is free. If the “free speech” troll wants to exercize hir fingers, sie should start a damn blog and leave the grown folks alone to talk.
And maybe one of the strategies that needs to be developed is a “listen first, talk later” etiquette—-which is why I tend to prefer smaller blogs. There’s a contingent of “regulars”, people whose writing ‘voice’ you get a chance to recognize and understand. Fewer miscues, more chance to suss out any misunderstandings.
By: By La Lubu on 2008 04 29
Time is a big part of it, Lubu, but another element in the internet’s campus-ization of the world is something you mentioned lower in your comment—- the ease of communication and connection that it facilitates.
On a college campus, you may run into people from any of your social, academic, or professional circles at any time. You can wander by a friend’s dorm room without notice. You can bump into an acquaintance in the union and chat while you’re waiting for a bus. Casual connections get made and reinforced virtually effortlessly.
And one-to-many communication is easy, too. You can poster, you can leaflet, you can put up notices on the chalkboards in big lecture halls. You can pass out announcements for folks to read at dorm meetings, and club meetings.
All of this made the social networks of a college campus dense and intertwined, even half a century ago. (Maybe especially half a century ago, because students were more likely to be full-timers living on campus back then than they are now.)
We talk a lot about how the internet lets someone in New York connect up with someone in Kansas, or someone in Australia, but it also lets someone on 89th street connect up with someone on 37th street. It also lets two people who work together but live a few blocks away stay in closer touch with each other.
I can’t remember whether I mentioned it in this thread, but I attended a mass pillow fight in Union Square a couple of months ago, and I was struck at the time that it was exactly the kind of thing that would have happened on a college campus twenty or forty or eighty years ago. Someone would have had the idea, and they would have put up posters or passed the idea along by word of mouth. Once it started, people would have seen it happening and run back to to their dorms to get pillows so they could join in.
Today, because of the internet, New York City is a campus. Union Square is the quad. And one of the most important things I’ve learned as a historian of American students is that any social structure that can be deployed in the service of frivolity can also—- inevitably will also, sooner or later—- be deployed in the service of activism.
By: By Brooklynite on 2008 04 29
I’ve been impressed with the way internet culture has developed methods of dealing with dishonest verbal tactics. Godwin’s law is one of them. I can’t find it now, but I love the way somebody used the “Oprah rule” to smack down Mitch-whosit over at Feministe.
The old bromide goes that you should never utilize a weapon, a tactic or a strategem you don’t want to be used against you at some point.
Godwin’s law, and presumably <strike>Brannagan’s Law</strike> Oprah’s Rule as well, work by automatically putting certain out of bounds for discussion, which itself leads to them being used dihonestly and disengenuously to shut down discussion if the local commentariat or host wants to shut discussions down.
Of course the reason why they can be used like that is because the techniques are inherently intellectually dishonest.
You can shut down trollification if you really want to without resorting to such ugly, low signal/noise ratio, tactics, but it’s a bit more involved and requires the righteous use of the delete/ban-stamp one-two combo - which itself has problems.
Most don’t though, or some find the use of Godwin’s style intellectually dishonest techniques distasteful but then make some bizarre logical leap that you have to allow trollification to allow freedom of speech. Which as ideas goes, is both factually untrue and itself as harmful in practice, and harmful in the same ways, the Godwin style techniques were, except you also have all the added problems caused by a huge troll infestation.
HOWEVER, what I get the impression Chris is more specifically talking about is inter-blog dynamics where discussions are made up of nothing but those sorts of fugly techniques, being traded back and forth ad nauseum in a game of blog-pong between two sets of antagonists, because the meaniingful discussion was all used up 10 posts ago and nothing new has been added into the mix since.
Today, because of the internet, New York City is a campus. Union Square is the quad.
So does that make manhatten a series fraternities/sororities of some kind? And where does the high incidence of college rape fit into this analogy (or does it…)?
By: By R. Mildred on 2008 04 29
Godwin’s law, and presumably Oprah’s Rule as well, work by automatically putting certain out of bounds for discussion, which itself leads to them being used dihonestly and disengenuously to shut down discussion if the local commentariat or host wants to shut discussions down.
While I agree that it’s sometimes used dishonestly to shut conversations down, Godwin’s Law does not put topics out of bounds. It’s simply an observation of the properties of discussions, a “natural law” of discourse on Usenet that generalizes to other online forums. The Wikipedia page points out a way that it can be used to help achieve more humane discourse: “as a caution against the use of inflammatory rhetoric or exaggerated comparisons.”
Where things get complicated is that “there is a tradition in many groups that, once this occurs, that thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress.” Here’s where it can be come a club to shut things down—or a gambit, to try to “win” by getting your component to invoke the forbidden topic.
Hypothetical example, and tying it back to the cross-blog discussion: I’m new here, and suppose I was used to a much less civil environment and thought it was just fine to criticize one of the previous posters comments and describe it in passing as “Hitleresque”. Invoking Godwin’s Law (perhaps with a little smiley after it) is a very quick and easy way way of pointing out that since nobody in this thread is advocating genocide, the comparison is kind of extreme. If somebody does so, this doesn’t mean I “lose” (or that the rest of my comment is without merit). In terms of the discourse, it puts the ball in my court to either choose another analogy, at which point the discussion can continue.
Or at least that’s how it should work. I agree that it often doesn’t happen that way. Also, things have changed a lot since 1991; these days, it doesn’t make as much sense to particularize Nazis and Hitler as the primary kinds of inflammatory rhetoric and overblown comparisons. Maybe it’s time for a “Godwin’s Law 2.0.”
By: By jon on 2008 04 29
“leads to them being used dihonestly and disengenuously to shut down discussion if the local commentariat or host wants to shut discussions down.”
Well, sure, but then we weren’t expecting to have a decent discussion on a blog with that kind of host, right?
HOWEVER, what I get the impression Chris is more specifically talking about is inter-blog dynamics where discussions are made up of nothing but those sorts of fugly techniques,
It has been my experience that we can develop ways to discourage such posting.
When BlackAmazon had a thread sidetracked by Seal Press, it would be great to immediately suggest Seal Press take their discussion elsewhere: either a separate thread on BAs blog if BA had been there at the time. Or we as a community could develop blogs to specifically handle thread derailers.
I’ve often thought that white allies could create a blog to handle well-meaning white people who comment on POC blogs asking ignorant questions.
By: By Ravenmn on 2008 04 29
AllyWork is one; though it’s been quiet over there for a while, there’s some good stuff. And that was the express goal of the 101 thread. What I wonder, though, is if the commitment is there for it to work in an ongoing way, or if the common goal/phenom of brawling for entertainment and hits as people have discussed here supersedes it, or if the constant rollover of people guarantees a certain amount of re-inventing the wheel - a thing I have found more easily addressed in real time.
any social structure that can be deployed in the service of frivolity can also—- inevitably will also, sooner or later—- be deployed in the service of activism.
KEEPER of a quote, Brooklynite.
By: By Theriomorph on 2008 04 30
I’m working on a post called Allies in the Blogosphere that builds (I hope) on what was discussed in this thread. The core of it is a dozen suggestions for how we can behave differently as individuals that I think would go a long way towards helping create a more humane environment. There’s also a ton of references.
Feedback greatly appreciated!
By: By jon on 2008 05 05
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