01 210 8127 or 086 868 45 06
+44 (0) 20 8133 8127
Is there something rotten in the state of the internet?
Like it? Tell your friends!
Image courtesy of UltraBobban
According to Richard Dawkins, there is. Following a series of fairly hateful posts on a forum on his site, he withdrew the discussion board and posted on his blog that he felt there was “something rotten in the internet culture”. Given that one commenter said he wanted to ram a fistful of nails down his throat, you can see where he’s coming from. So does Dawkins have a point? Is there something inherently rotten in our internet culture? There are a few interesting points from this discussion that are worth looking at further.
One of the clear things that Dawkins takes issue with, and I have to side with him here, is the reference to language. He questions why there is the need for such over the top language and in a tone that he describes as sometimes ‘hysterical’. Anyone who has read the comments for pretty much any youtube video, can’t help but agree with him here. But youtube aside, which seems to have spawned it’s own subculture of inane, irrational and spiteful comments, he does also have a point when it comes to the language that’s used online. I’ve been on the receiving end of some pretty hurtful stuff myself and I’ve seen others go through worse. Sure, you eventually learn to accept it, you become almost desensitised. The thing is that this can sometimes come from people you know ‘offline’ and the tone and language used for some of their online communication can often seem like it’s coming from a different person altogether.
Hiding behind the wall
The anonymity factor is clearly at play here, to an extent. Sure, when no-one can trace you, you can voice your inner most thoughts and angers, no matter how hateful they may be. But anonymity in itself is not sufficient enough an explanation. You can often see people who are in no way trying to hide who they are, acting in a completely different way and sometimes in a more unpleasant way than how they normally would. Or how you could conceive anyone acting towards someone else, especially people they don’t know. I want it to be clear that I’m not talking trolls here, but rather the more general way in which we conduct ourselves and communicate online.
Whether you’re being transparent or not, there is a clear comfort in the ‘wall’ between you and the internet. No matter how much you try to be yourself online, there is always that level of knowledge that you have time to write out what you want to say, that you can self-correct, self-censor. That you can say what you want without the risk of an immediate response or a need to make eye contact. You can turn the screen off and ignore it, if you so wish. Or you can compose yourself for the next comment. Lately I have found myself thinking more than I usually would before sending a tweet or writing something on Facebook. I’ve found myself going to say things that I would normally never say to someone, and I have always tried to be the same person offline as I am online. I’m finding myself getting increasingly drawn into this habit of mouthing off about individuals or companies and using language I never normally would. And I check myself before I do it, because being that way just isn’t me. So what is this strange thing that happens online, that allows you to become almost a different person, at times unrecognisable to the people that know you?
Is it really as bad as Dawkins suggests? Is it something rotten with the internet that encourages us to be like this? I wouldn’t go so far as to describe it in the way that he has, but you can’t ignore the fact that online, people can become quite nasty. This isn’t to say that it’s the internet that’s making people act this way, that it is in some way responsible as a medium (you won’t find me burning copies of Child’s Play here) but it is a fascinating insight into human behaviour, in that it’s allowing us to access a whole new level of communication and act in a different way. We’ve always had written communication, but never with the immediacy of the internet or social media. The fact that it can bring out such different sides of people , both good and bad is affecting not only how we communicate, but is spreading out into entire industries.
To come back to Dawkins’ post, there is something else interesting in what he says. Not the fact that the internet can bring out this ‘hysterical’ behaviour that he discusses, but the act that brought this about. The issue in question was that Dawkins was making changes to the existing forum on his website. Something that, I think, he unfortunately plays down too much. The difference was in changing it from being an open forum, to one that would be moderated. To the extent that starting a new discussion would require approval. Even though I don’t agree with the treatment Dawkins received online, it is understandable why some would have reacted badly to this. Even though he claims it is his right as the owner and editor of the site to extend this editorial control. This is not, however, the function of a forum. It is a discussion. One that should be open and free from control (libel etc.. notwithstanding).
But further still the problem is not so much the editorial control Dawkins was inflicting, but the fact that he was making changes to an already thriving community forum. I feel it is expertly summed up in this post, in a thread unfortunately titled ‘Richard Dawkins is a dick‘
“It may sound ridiculous to those not involved with online communities, but I feel hurt and displaced. It was like coming home to find the locks have been changed.”
Even for those not involved in online communities, it is a pretty compelling and understandable argument. This guardian article also provides further interesting insight into how the old forum moderators were treated. Not all that nicely.
So here we have two incredibly interesting insights into the way we function both as individuals online and how we act within our wider communities. It is evident that Richard Dawkins was in the wrong. Not for wanting to exert editorial control on his own site, but for thinking he could do that and in any way still call it a forum. Our online communities and behaviours are something that we hold quite close to us. Just wait for Facebook to make a change to their site and see the ensuing ‘petition’ to change it back. This is not wholly unreasonable and is a reflection of how we function online. In many cases we conduct a large portion of our lives through an environment that someone else ‘owns’. We have no control over it, it is physically intangible so changes like the one that Dawkins made shouldn’t be overlooked. Bearing this in mind also provides an insight into the language and general tone with which we carry out our online communication. Online our words are all we have. There’s no subtle body language, no hints and no real tone of voice. But inn lieu of these subtleties do we resort to nasty, intimidating language to get our point across?
When all you have is words, every one counts.
Possibly Related Posts:
- Are we learning faster, or just not there yet?
- Don’t be the first, be the best
- More information, just less of it please
- Are You Losing Out By Chasing Your Goals?
- Why aren’t we celebrating the wins?
“Following a series of fairly hateful posts on a forum on his site,”
You know that claim is an out and out lie, right?
Hi Simon, I’m not really sure what you mean. It was my interpretation of the replies on the forum?
Lauren, please go read Richard’s apology that is now up on the site. And yes, many in the press have made reporting errors, such as you have above.
Hi Quine, I think that you (and others @Simon Gardner) are right about bringing up the point of my wording of ‘hateful posts’. I will go in and edit that as I don’t think it introduces my post in the right way. Upon reading it again (and again!) it introduces it as if I am siding with Dawkins. That wasn’t my intention. My post was a more general look at the language and behaviour we use online, rather than about the specifics of the comments on Dawkins’ (and other) forums.
The posts were hateful, they were in a series, and they were on Dawkins’ site. Simon, I think she’s spot-on.
This has been Dawkins’ (and the consequent press) consistent lie. Dawkins has now retracted. I don’t wish to bore on at great length about the minutiae of all this as plenty have already done so.
But simply (1) there were no “hateful” posts on the Dawkins forum. (Such things were always against the severely enforced forum rules anyway.) (2) There was a fairly calm discussion thread which Dawkins’ staff bizarrely deleted and then lied about but which (3) has been partially recovered by outside techs. See for yourself much of this “notorious” and (they thought) deleted thread at http://thinking-aloud.co.uk/temp/rdf.html.
The notorious comments which Dawkins was originally quoting (he has now apologised) and which were bandied about in the press happened long AFTER the forum site was actually shut down – on ANOTHER PLACE ENTIRELY – and thus cannot conceivably have been (and weren’t) the cause of the shut-down.
The RD.net forum was the most tightly regulated and policed forum I have ever come across and even calling a fellow member (like eg Dawkins) “a liar” would have earned you an instant sanction by the large international team of forum moderators. The words used in the press would have meant a suspension and probably a ban.
Leaving aside Dawkin’s issues with his own site for the moment I think there is something happening here. For example, Engadget had to turn off their comments for a while to let everyone cool down. Digg comments moved to be more like a children’s playground some time ago, and Facebook fan pages for the recently murdered children in Australia have been overrun with spam, porn and generally nasty comments. ‘Net trolling and hiding behind ‘anonymous’ is nothing new, but it does seem to be ramping up. I suspect the fact that the current net generations came along after any sense of original netiquette got lost in time means they have a very different frame of reference than us ‘respectful’ oldies *cough*.
Hi Paul. I wanted this post to be a wider discussion about behaviour online, so thanks for your comment here. It’s clearly going to spark divisive opinion, but it is certainly interesting. Like I said, I didn’t want to suggest that the internet was making us all ‘nasty’ , but that it it has having an effect on the way we communicate. I’d like to think it is a reflection of changing behaviour, rather than anything bad. There are certainly some bad cases like the one you’ve highlighted, but it’s now the case that these are generally more visible than they’ve ever been before. I think the internet has brought about a change in communication, rather than a fundamental change in human behaviour.
Just to clarify. As a regular on RDF for a few years, I can say that there was an extraordinary amount of abusive and nasty comments on the forum. “regulars”, alongside some moderators, would commonly gang up on anyone with a contrary viewpoint and shower them with abusive comments and ad hominem remarks. It was a deeply unpleasant place at times and I can understand why Richard and his webteam were desperately trying to change it.
Simon Gardener is not correct in his assertion that there was no nasty or abusive comments on the forum when the changes to the site were announced. Perhaps one becomes immune to it from spending too much time on the forum. It maybe more correct to say that Simon Gardner didn’t find the nasty posts and comments qualified as ‘abusive’ or ‘offensive’.
And therein lies the problem. Nastiness and abuse became so commonplace, forum members look at a nasty remark and say “it’s not THAT bad” or “I’ve seen worse”.
As for the bigger picture, I am aghast that a man who has contributed so much to humanity and the sciences should have to put up with such abuse. One only has to glance at rationalia.com (where most forum ‘regulars’ migrated last week) to see the sort of vicious personal and slanderous attacks on Richard Dawkins that are continuing…long after Richard has apologised and long after everyone found out that Richard was actually on a book tour on the other side of the planet and wasn’t aware of what was going on.
Incidentally, the Richard Dawkins forum was NOT an Atheist forum. It was a forum for so called fans of Richard dawkins and I met atheists, christians, creationists, jews, secularlists, humanists and theists of all denominations on there.
In other words, most fair minded atheists are aghast that people are referring to it as the “largest online atheist community”.
peace.
CG
Reminds a little of a recent a ustream event(web design podcast) and the interaction with the chatroom. Paul boag posted his response.
http://paul.boagworld.com/criticise-work-not-people
@Cristian Popa | March 2, 2010 at 1:43 am
“The posts were hateful, they were in a series, and they were on Dawkins’ site.”
{sjgh} Can you point to or quote ANY of these gems – because they never existed on the forum? http://thinking-aloud.co.uk/temp/rdf.html
It was (and is) a flat lie. Thty never existed.
I just wish to back up Simon’s point about the press having LIED about those comments appearing on Dawkin’s own site, as I beleive his apology confirms.
The vast majority of us acted with restraint, even after our posts started to be deleted and it was made impossible for us to access our archived content on the forum.
The Press has been well and truly caught lying on this one. That is what happens when you misrepresent Rationalists and Free-Thinkers.
There’s certainly something rotten in the state of journalism that the fallacies about the Richard Dawkins forum shut down are repeated so easily. Please read: http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2010/02/26/telegraph-invents-comparative-degrees-of-atheism-dawkins-athiest/
@cursuswalker
two quick points. The press didn’t LIE about those comments, they may have incorrectly attributed comments made elsewhere to the nasty comments made on Richards forum but they didn’t LIE. There has been nothing rational about the vicious and slanderous comments made about Richard Dawkins, a man who has contributed so much to humanity and the sciences.
“My post was a more general look at the language and behaviour we use online…”
Traducing 80,000+ people perhaps not the best way of going about that…
@CG, what “vicious and slanderous comments made about Richard Dawkins”?
I moderate at a well established blog in a completely different arena (sports, associated with a magazine). The community associated with the blog couldn’t function without firm but sensitive moderation. There are well established Site Rules, and newcomers to the blog are guided there early. On some days, we get over 2000 comments; the vast majority are benign, but some are vicious and abusive, or use foul language.
There’s definitely something to web anonymity – a bit like the road rage phenomenon.
And we do go through changes at the site, sometimes technology driven, sometimes because the site’s owner wants to make a change. People do get very attached to the way things are, or were. But I don’t think you can ever stay still, particularly in a fast developing (or even emerging) area like online communities. And at the end of the day, in the case you cite, it is one person’s name at the head. Primus inter pares, perhaps.
The analogy with ‘road rage’ is interesting and certainly there’s a feeling of safety and anonymity behind a wheel of a car. Some of the events after any significant event (Katrina, Haiti, Chile etc) show how thin the veneer of common decency is in any society ..
To get back to the point of the original post (and chuckling at the irony of the comment postings) which is online behaviour. It’s something we look at in our research every day.
I think this in large part has to do with us “Discovering our Human Voice” and right now I’d say we’re somewhat at the 2 yr old child phase – for the most part we’re screaming, ranting, yelling and wailing. Because we can. For the first time in the history of humanity, we can express ourselves in a way never before possible.
At some point that will evolve. We’re learning new behaviours and how to counter them. In real-life, when someone says something nasty in a group, the others stand up and shut them down. This kind of instant social correction is not possible on the Web unless the gatekeeper of the channel shuts it down, but then everyone suffers, not just the person with improper behaviour.
Just my thoughts, sorry I didn’t jump in on the lie/not lie side of things. I get the point of the post and it is a good question.
Giles, thanks for your comments. You’ve brought up a lot of interesting points that has got my cogs whirling for another post. I think I’ll leave the Dawkins issue out of that one
What is particularly interesting is this idea of age and that communicating online is still so new, when considered in the entire history of human communication. It will be very interesting to look at how online behaviour is changing as the years progress. Particularly as language becomes the only thing we have control over online, body language, dress etc.. goes out the window and our words embody our personality on a completely new level.
[...] online – understatement of 2010. A tweet from a smart communicator, Lauren, lead me to a post about Richard Dawkins feeling slighted over improper behaviour on his forums. The irony of the [...]
The only thing you should wonder about it if the horrible things these morons tend to say are what they really feel in their hearts.
Are they being a pain because they want to vent, because they feel powerless and the internet makes them feel powerful or…are they the closet nutjobs that will end up losing it out on the streets and at work one day?
I think we are seeing a combination of factors at work here, I’m a mod on a reasonably well known discussion site here in Ireland which is home on occasion to comments people wouldn’t think of saying in public in a million years and have also encountered the ranting and ravings side on things when blogging too.
(a) There exists a very lazy understanding of the notion of free speech. Free speech is meant to mean (in my view, and this is by and large the legal situation) that you are free to speak and that others can’t prevent you from speaking out but that doesn’t mean speech is somehow going to be without cost to you or others. Nor that you can say whatever comes into your head, whether true or not. Bizarrely in the face of a general decline in religious belief there is a tremendous upsurge on-line of belief posting where people post what they have no actual proof of but which they sincerely and genuinely believe to be true (this might be even named Corrism) whether it is that politician X beats their spouse, banker Y is criminal, actor Z is gay, the world is run by lizard people. Just because someone believes something doesn’t in itself make it true yet that doesn’t stop them posting and getting very upset if their post is challenged.
(b) the tendency for people to deliberately go for the controversy angle (Guido Fawkes talked this up as a means to generate traffic when he spoke to some folks here in 2006 about political blogging and boy does it seem like some people took him up on it!) This is then coupled with the ready willingness of those reading to take their lead from whoever is perceived to be the most outspoken or outrageous. It’s a bit like posting while channelling the gamer style of ‘run and gun’ whereby you run into a new place and shoot first and take stock later, in writing like this you post in the most aggressive manner possible, load up on traffic and comments and if anyone does pause to ask questions about the substance they are subject to the pantomime boo-hiss of the chorus. All this frenetic activity is a handy replacement for accuracy or thoughtfulness, better to be first and wrong than late but right.
Regardless of the specifics of the Richard Dawkins story, there is and always has been an issue of the way people behave differently online. I wrote a somewhat similar article just after the “balloon boy” event, after seeing some really callous remarks online. I think one issue is that people fail to make the distinction to what they say to their close friends over a pint/coffee/dinner and what they say to the world online where there is often no personal history or context against which to guage the true meaning of the remark.
The traffic on the replacement “not the Richard Dawkins forum” http://www.rationalskepticism.org has now overtaken the remnant “official” Dawkins site and has so far passed 1000 members.
[...] was a comment left on a post I wrote a while ago, that I just haven’t been able to shake.Where I discussed the effects [...]