A thread over at Baseball Primer that I had dismissed as worthless degenerated into a pissing match that would have stretched the limits of worthlessness even as applied to the internet, where Replacement Level is measured in Godwins, if it weren’t for having inspired the following ramblings. Whether this is positive value or not may be an entirely subjective judgment. At any rate, two longtime denizens of the board were arguing over netiquette, particularly the bizarre netiquette of insults. So, herewith my thoughts and questions.
First of all, we start with the initial offense. The context is a public bulletin board site, with frequent bouts of incivility and so on, and where our two exemplars post with substantial frequency, and where there are half-a-dozen topics known to lead to nasty invective. In a thread on one of those topics, somebody (we’ll call him Saul) posts a note that (quite probably deliberately but at least predictably) infuriates another poster (who we’ll call David). David then responds with fury, implying (but not stating) his contempt for Saul and Saul’s ideas, background and moral character. Saul then types “———— you, David.” David says “———— me? No, ———— you, you ————!” Have we all been witness to such an exchange?
Now, my purpose here is to talk about all of this in a moral sense, and before I begin I will point out that they are both, from a moral point of view, behaving like ————s. But morality, and offensiveness, and insult, and etiquette are not toggle-switch matters. It’s not the case that all polite things are equally polite, nor that all immoral things are equally immoral. There are hierarchies of behaviour here, and it makes sense to talk about it in terms of inequally shared culpability, and also of varying depths of incivility. Although I may not state it below, I am comparing their actions not only to each others’ actions, but to such possible actions as measured speech, remaining quiet, and private communication. The important thing, though, is that David and Saul may each recognize that they are both behaving like ————s, but each may think the other is far worse of a ————. Can they both be right?
Anyway, I think it’s reasonable for individuals to have a hierarchy of insults and of offense, so that it makes some sense to talk about escalation. I think it is worse to escalate the offense than to respond in kind. Going from implicit contempt to explicit profanity is escalation; whether it is a ‘first strike’ or not, it’s clearly a step up from argumentation that doesn’t use it. Then, if calling someone a ———— is ‘worse’ than saying ‘———— you’, then David has not merely responded in kind, but escalated. Whether it is worse depends on that hierarchy of offense. I don’t think it is worse, but Saul does.
You see, each individual has a hierarchy of offense; there are substantial overlaps (for people of substantially the same culture), but also some differences.
I for instance, recognize that it is worse to say “———— me” than “———— you.” I’m more offended at being called a ———— than a ————. Do all my Gentle Readers agree? Perhaps, perhaps not. Some might be called either a ———— or a ———— with such frequency that it washes over them, whereas it is ———— that really crosses the line. Others, however, might find ———— so far over the line that it’s just funny, and can’t really take offense at it. In baseball, I’m told, for decades the one thing you couldn’t say to a catcher with dark skin was ———, but that word applied to a pale-skinned man was only mildly insulting, and certainly not grounds for being tossed. In Bull Durham, the umpire famously tosses Champ for calling him a ———— - ——————, although calling the call a ———— - ——————— call was not grounds for dismissal. That hierarchy makes sense to me under the circumstances, although I have close friends who are actually ———— - ——————s, and I’ve said so in admiring tones on appropriate occasions, although referring to any other task they did as ———— - ——————— work could only be insulting.
Yes, it’s our old friend context. Recently, on another site, I insultingly used the word ‘Gosh’; in context, it was (and was meant to be, though I regret it now) demeaning, and far more so than ———— would have been (although not so much as ————— would have been, I think). In a bulletin board with substantial use of profanity, it’s quite possible Saul thought of his escalation as being minor, simply a move from an implicit to an explicit attack still on basically friendly terms. David, on the other hand, may only be used to being told to ———— himself in extreme anger, and already aggrieved, may see it as going nuclear, where his response is just higher tonnage.
Anyway, all of this is old stuff. What is interesting, here, is that it’s all happening on-line. That strips the conversation (if we can call it that) of a lot of cues that we can use to determine what the other person thinks is the context, and to determine the other person’s hierarchy of civility anyway. A conversation in a Somerville bar, for instance, has different ground rules than one in a library check-out line, and everybody involved knows which one they’re in. Further, you know that a grocery store, for instance, is more like a library than like a bar, and that a ball game is more like a bar than like a library. Those pattern-matching exercises are easy for humans. But does David think a Baseball Primer board is more like a bar or more like a library? Does Saul think it’s more like the bleachers or more like the box seats? Even in the library, Saul’s accent, clothing and speech patterns can give me (possibly misleading) clues as to where in his hierarchy of offense phrases like “———— you” and “you ————” lie. It’s not simply a matter of which emoticon to use; it’s a matter of thousands of hours spent building up a database of patterns to match. And then, of course, the patterns change; internet time is speeded up to the point where social norms are difficult not just to understand (bad enough) but to instill in our pattern-matching behaviour.
So, when Saul and David exchange their profanity, how do we think about their culpability? Particularly when such norms as exist require, it seems to me, defending the intended post, rather than the interpreted post as the ‘real’ one. Is it civil to call David on his rudeness? Is it civil to step in at the point where you feel David has crossed the line, and suggest that the matter be dropped? If you are by now disgusted by the whole thing, is it civil to suggest that others are, too, and that whatever David and Saul feel, it would be best for them to back off, rather than continuing to attack/defend/explain? If somebody suggests that, but you think that David is (more) right and Saul (more) wrong, is it civil to say so?
I think, for me, that the internet is a tremendously defensive medium. Perhaps it’s the solitary nature of typing, or the context-stripping, or perhaps it’s the odd combination of permanence (the post is still there, and can be Fisked) and transience (there’ll be five hundred more posts tomorrow). Or perhaps it’s nothing to do with the internet, and the real defensiveness is coming from our increasingly defensive culture. Or that there’s a feedback issue, with everybody’s view of being under attack is exacerbated by the internet, particularly when they experience (stripped of context) everybody else’s sense of grievance.
Anyway, I think it’s clear that in a discussion of this kind, using words like ———— and ———— or even ———— isn’t offensive, but the blanks are funnier.
————— you,
-Vardibidian.
—– me? —– you! This was a great post, you ——- 🙂
Side note re typography: Did you type this on a Mac? If so, readers who use Windows machines may find it hard to read — the curly quotation mark and em dash characters don’t translate well across platforms. In HTML, you should either use straight up-and-down quotation marks, or (if you want ’em curved) use special entities like ““” and “””. (You can convert from plain to the correct entities using the free online tool Texturize.) Similarly, em dashes should be represented as “—” or “—”. …And while I’m here, I think dashed-out swear words usually use hyphens rather than em dashes, but I could be wrong.
…I was going to say something about the actual content of your entry, but I’m out of time. So I’ll just say good discussion. Oh, and that I think a lot of Internet arguments go a lot smoother if everyone involved assumes the other people had good intentions and tries honestly to figure out what they might have meant. I also find that after I write something, it helps to wait a few hours and then come back and actively look for common inflammatory and sarcastic phrasings and remove them, whether or not I meant them.
No, I typed this on a Windows machine, in Word (which auto-curls my quotes). I am aware that curled quotes and em-dashes can cause trouble, but I’ve never had problems reading them here. That is, I’ve looked through Netscape, IE and most recently Firefox on Windows machines, and (a while ago) in Netscape on the Mac, and the quotes and dashes always look fine. Everybody’s mileage may vary, of course. I know I ought to use the numbers (I could pretty easily replace all before pasting the thing in), but I haven’t bothered. Are any Gentle Readers having trouble with these?
Also, I don’t know what’s usual for dashes; Baseball Primer’s cyber-nanny uses the number sign, so the blocked words come out ####. I was inclined, for a while, to use a single (em) dash, then inclined to use underlining, before settling on this. I kinda like how it looks, in Firefox anyway.
In the future, rest assured, I will call a ———— a ————.
Thanks,
-V.
What I find fascinating is that this kind of escalation doesn’t happen on wikis — what you are calling “the Internet” is really Usenet, and web interfaces organized on Usenet lines.
Where Usenet and usenet-isomorphic BB threads head with Godwinspeed towards asymptotically low signal/noise ratio, wikis tend to converge on coherence. Case in point — though anyone and there brother can edit Wikipedia at the drop of a hat, and Usenet discussions on Israel/Palestine have a mean time-to-Godwin of four posts, the Wikipedia entry on “Palestine” is cogent, balanced, and reasonable — and the debates about its perceived biases are shunted off to a well-organized side page.
This is isomorphic to two other phenomena:
1. Refactoring in software. Unrefactored software trends toward increasing entropy, unwieldiness, and collapse; constantly refactored software trends toward ever cleaner and better architecture. Wikis are self-refactoring usenet threads.
2. Political freedom and rebellion. As Machiavelli wrote, the Prince who wants a peaceful realm must either allow a great degree of liberty or supress all dissent — it’s a partial degree of freedom that gets you in trouble. (ecent research on this noted at:
http://www.boingboing.net/2004/11/11/strange_curve_of_fre.html ) Moderated forums, and forums with magistrates with delete rights and so on, tend to maintain coherence at the cost of repression. Usenet gives everyone the right to speak, but no one the right to revise what has been said. Wikis confer total freedom, and thus, like free societies, undermine the need for extreme measures of dissent.
If someone writes, say, “of course, the Arabs in Samria are better off now than they were in 1948” on a threaded forum, escalation is sure to ensue. To express how they feel about that, your average Palestinian is going to have to resort to pretty strong language.
On a wiki, though, the same Palestinian can edit it to “Some supporters of Israel maintain that the occupants of the West Bank are better off than they were in 1948” and append counterarguments — and feel vindicated, without resorting to strong language, because the offending remark has been edited. And the author of the original sentence is likely to be content, as long as her arguments remain on the page.
flames constantly lick my feet where i walk online, or anywhere. that in mind, i think one can’t talk about online behavior and heat escalation without talking about things like private versus public intervention possibilities, the presence of moderators, and the general interface of the forum itself, particularly in the ability to edit posts or flag them for nastiness. Usenet has no ability for retraction or containment – that has to be a big reason talk’s always been hotter there. it snowballs eagerly.
i’m sure it won’t surprise anybody that i think getting angry online can be a good thing. if you treat online participation as a drive rather than a hobby, an activity into which all participants are putting some real feeling, then perhaps people who get angry online are taking that feeling in one direction, and people who get offended by anger are taking the feeling another direction, but are still enjoying their own personal righteous snit – to which every human being is entitled – and the moderation of snits is really only the business of the individual (as are the consquences of acting immoderately).
also, i’m fairly sure that framing anything differently from how the wider group feels will cast a pall on the forum unless somebody figures out the problem and bridges the gap.
I don’t have much experience with wikis, sadly, but one thing I can tell about wikipedia off the bat is that it does have the kind of context that Baseball Primer is lacking. Everybody contributing to it knows, more or less, what an encyclopedia is like. Saul has the sense that very few encyclopedias (-pediae?) have the phrase “———— you, David” appearing anywhere in them. To use my earlier line, everybody knows it’s less like the bleachers and more like, um, Terminus. I’m curious about wikis for non-encyclopedic fora; do y’all know any good examples?
and david (who, as he knows, isn’t David, nor is David actually David, names have all been changed to entertain YHB), I’m also concerned in my example about myself, neither Saul nor David, who reads the thread and might feel inclined to comment. But yes, I have gotten angry on-line myself. Most often, I’ve regretted it; I feel that my righteous snits tend to be counterproductive and leave me with a kind of queasy feeling. That feeling kept me off-line for years, and still keeps me from reading comments just about everywhere.
Thanks,
-V.
Good point about context and encyclopedias, Vardibidan, but I think the wiki effect is stronger than that accounts for. The very first Wiki, which spawned off the Portlands Pattern Repository, was about arguing about pros and cons of different software development approaches, so its context should be pretty much exactly the same as Usenet’s comp.lang.* heirarchy.
Now consider the difference between this:
Usenet, C# vs Java
and this:
Wiki, C# vs Java
Ben
…and I’ll just sneak in a quick meme-drop here (from a livejournal essay I saw via linkage a while ago):
The problem with lack of physical cues in internet conversation is not that you can’t tell when people are joking or otherwise good-natured, but that you can’t tell when someone’s starting to get angry.
I’d add that in face-to-face conversation, offensive words don’t sit around forever, timelessly present in their offensiveness. Sure, we remember slights, but that’s different from being able to link back to them at any time. Another advantage wikis have to sequential threads: if you regret saying something, you can retract it effectively.
Hmm. That’s an interesting comparison. The wiki thing has come up in a couple of places, recently, and I find it intriguing. It does, on the whole, seem to me to be set up extremely well for a compendium, rather than a conversation, but then I haven’t much experience.
OK, Ten Seconds of Wasting Time turns up FunWiki which is sort of a conversation in a really collegiate way. I may have to actually think about this.
Thanks,
-V.
i started reading blog comments at photo.net, when the comments turned out to have tremendously informative anecdotes. fights often occur because of problems that i feel i need to be aware of, in current form. obviously death threats are not something desirable to read tho.