Who pays these people?
Ten or twelve years ago, I used to hang with Yahoo because I liked the interface. Today, I'm thinking of leaving because I don't care for the company I have to keep.
Most thoughtful people would agree that the vision of the the Internet's founders, of a forum for the thoughtful exchange of well-considered ideas, has fallen hilariously short of expectations. Anonymity has not enhanced the calibre of discourse: it has lowered it. Those newspapers which have given up anonymity on their online pages seem to have discovered that they have retained the volume of feedback but increased the quality.
Yahoo hasn't had this satori. It may also be cursed by the law of unintended consequences. The name may or may not hark back to Gulliver's Travels, but Yahoo outdoes itself in attracting yahoos of the Gulliverian stripe. In doing so, it illustrates another weakness of anonymous discourse.
It isn't just that anonymity brings out the worst in people. It is also that Internet anonymity enables the worst people to control any debate they enter. Despite the best efforts of portals to limit the number of user names a person may have, it isn't difficult for one person to have dozens, perhaps hundreds, of handles in use on a given portal's comment pages.
When this kind of fun is just verbal masturbation by trolls, it's bad enough. Gresham's law applies just as well to online discourse as to money. But the trolls open the way to people with political agendas, who get to use loudmouthed boorishness to drive dissenting opinion away from any topic and give the impression that they represent majority opinion. Those fond of defending Internet trolls with the First Amendment might pause to reflect that the outcome is exactly the opposite of free speech. When one person can masquerade as a hundred, drowning out dissenting voices and, on occasion, threatening people naive enough to speak under their own user names, we have a definition of the First Amendment as perverted as many definitions applied to the Second Amendment.
It is no accident that defenders of Second Amendment rights have lately been hyperactive little trolls. Yesterday, I left a social media arm of Gabby Gifford and Mark Kelly's Americans for Responsible Solutions. This good idea had been swamped by Second Amendment pros, Second Amendment antis and generic trolls, to the point where one genuinely responsible statement would be drowned by fifty rants. This is a Web site, however, not a portal. There is nothing but convention to prevent commentary from being responsibly moderated.
It is said, and truly enough, that the United States is a young country. More to the point, it is an immature country. Its immaturity is so pronounced that it may pass from national childhood to national senility without a pause in the middle for national maturity.
Most thoughtful people would agree that the vision of the the Internet's founders, of a forum for the thoughtful exchange of well-considered ideas, has fallen hilariously short of expectations. Anonymity has not enhanced the calibre of discourse: it has lowered it. Those newspapers which have given up anonymity on their online pages seem to have discovered that they have retained the volume of feedback but increased the quality.
Yahoo hasn't had this satori. It may also be cursed by the law of unintended consequences. The name may or may not hark back to Gulliver's Travels, but Yahoo outdoes itself in attracting yahoos of the Gulliverian stripe. In doing so, it illustrates another weakness of anonymous discourse.
It isn't just that anonymity brings out the worst in people. It is also that Internet anonymity enables the worst people to control any debate they enter. Despite the best efforts of portals to limit the number of user names a person may have, it isn't difficult for one person to have dozens, perhaps hundreds, of handles in use on a given portal's comment pages.
When this kind of fun is just verbal masturbation by trolls, it's bad enough. Gresham's law applies just as well to online discourse as to money. But the trolls open the way to people with political agendas, who get to use loudmouthed boorishness to drive dissenting opinion away from any topic and give the impression that they represent majority opinion. Those fond of defending Internet trolls with the First Amendment might pause to reflect that the outcome is exactly the opposite of free speech. When one person can masquerade as a hundred, drowning out dissenting voices and, on occasion, threatening people naive enough to speak under their own user names, we have a definition of the First Amendment as perverted as many definitions applied to the Second Amendment.
It is no accident that defenders of Second Amendment rights have lately been hyperactive little trolls. Yesterday, I left a social media arm of Gabby Gifford and Mark Kelly's Americans for Responsible Solutions. This good idea had been swamped by Second Amendment pros, Second Amendment antis and generic trolls, to the point where one genuinely responsible statement would be drowned by fifty rants. This is a Web site, however, not a portal. There is nothing but convention to prevent commentary from being responsibly moderated.
It is said, and truly enough, that the United States is a young country. More to the point, it is an immature country. Its immaturity is so pronounced that it may pass from national childhood to national senility without a pause in the middle for national maturity.
Labels: Internet comments
posted by Uncle | 01:44
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