Letters to the Editor
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Brave new world
Politeness isn't going to dominate human behavior any time soon, so instead let's think about technique.
1. Filtration I. Regristrants/Subscribers only.
2. Filtration II. A moderator or spam filter.
3. Filtration III. Let the user designate a no-see list. And a favorites list.
These seem to me sufficient.
Let's face it: one of the best things about Salon is the letters. There's often better stuff in them than in the articles; the short form encourages sharpness. There's silliness, too, but it's a minor and even pleasurable irritant to sift for the best. (The star system is hopelessly unreliable.) Compare the WaPo, which allows you to whack away at every article, with the stuffy old NYT, which still largely protects its writers from the proddings of the public.
The improvement in the quality & interest of journalism has been massive. Let's celebrate it, flying spittle and all.
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Shunning
I think as time goes on, the 'ignore' feature will become more and more popular with online discussion groups. It lets the group be self-policing--trolls learn that the more they act out anti-socially the smaller their audience becomes, and civil members can go entire days without online abuse.
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Well said
Lovely flower, petals cast into a torrent.
I do so once in a while in the local online forums I frequent. I'm told to stop being holier than thou. I'm asked how dare I presume to tell others what not to say. I'm told, in short, to go fuck myself.
I'm capable of some green nasty venom. But I do apologize. And I do listen to others and try to put myself in their place. I try to understand.
I think manners are a natural artifact of mindful behavior. I don't believe such things can manifest in a vacuum, just as one can't give a child "self esteem" by chanting that everyone should have "self esteem," no matter how rotten.
But there is a place for the occasional call for civility, and it is this place, in this time, on this rainy Tuesday and thank you for it.
Let others argue facts and opinion. They can jab each other with ritual umbrellas. They will leave atomic towers, burned, skeletal and dead, wherever they opine.
Some of us will gentlemanly ignore eccentricities and get to the idea-meat. We may even find some truth. But if we don't, maybe we'll find some peace.
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Pshaw...my stars and garters!
Yes it is nice to be polite. But there are times when foul language is helpful for emphasis. And there are some families, in fact, many academic families, where emphatic language is regularly used. So it depends. There really should not be hard and fast rules about this. WTF? And yes, it's always good to stick to the point of the article but at times, the emphatic digressions are amusing..even enlightening.
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Homework good
Your grasp of social, cultural, and technological history leaves much to be desired. Just because we are no longer serfs does not mean that ours is an “egalitarian, largely classless and ritualless society.”
And “the fact is that online communication is artificial, and so requires artificial behavior”? All communication is part of a symbolic system, and therefore constructed, and therefore artificial. There is no difference in the level of artificiality of online communication; the differences are in modality: in other (what some communication scholars call richer forms of communication, although I would debate that), we stabilize tone and meaning through extra-linguistic cues like facial expressions. You write, “Online speech is inherently ambiguous.” All communication, written, spoken, online or off, is inherently ambiguous. As Saussure explained almost 100 years ago, the relationship between the signified (the object) and signifier (the word) is unmotivated and ambiguous. Ambiguity is at the heart of language; otherwise, we would have no puns, no poetry, no connotation.
But the real problem here is not necessarily your lack of basic communication theory, but rather your lack of historiography. The Internet as a site of communication has always been vexed the problems you speak of, and it is not necessarily getting ‘worse’ in terms of civility. The current GUI browser system and web marketplace was brought up on bulletin boards and their resultant flame-wars as well as shopping cart technology perfected on online porn sites. The Internet has never been a ‘chess game played at a high level’ as you suggest (except maybe the Well). It has, and will continue to be, if we’re lucky, a mass(ive) communication medium with a one-to-mass-audience structure. This is at the heart of both the potential and the problems of the medium, but your call for good manners is, ultimately, an elitist call and argument against the inherent nature of the Internet. I’m not necessarily defending mean-spirited postings, and I do make a distinction between rudeness or flaming and harassment or threats, but manners have always been a method of drawing class distinctions.
“But the fact remains that good manners are more important in nurturing a civilized, dynamic, sophisticated discussion than knowledge or brains.”
So is doing your homework and knowing what you are speaking of.
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Civil moderation makes for civil discourse
I've posted on boards where people were uniformly civil, and I've posted in cesspits. The difference is always moderation.
Salon still has a handful of posters who are here for no other reason than to inflict suffering on others. These aren't folks who are unaware that they're talking to real live human beings; these are folks who know that, and get a huge kick out of pissing people off. Everyone reading this, including the trolls, knows who Salon's trolls are.
Kick them out. Problem solved. Don't listen to them whine about freedom of speech; they don't contribute anything useful anyway. Two-thirds of all hatefulness on Salon stopped when a single poster, Ben Dover, fell off the face of the earth. That's a lot of civility for a very small cost.
Then clamp down on ad hominem attacks. Don't be stupid about this; when trolls are allowed to run rampant, civilized people will tend to make ad hominem attacks against the trolls, by way of vigilante justice. Punish the trolls, not the vigilantes, and have the grace to be a little ashamed of yourselves for letting matters get to that point.
Salon is an ONLINE news source. Functional, responsible moderation should be taken for granted.