Count Yorck's speech to the East Prussian states on February 5th, 1813 in Koenigsberg", Otto Brausewetter, 1888
Last week Shaun Usher, custodian of the excellent website “Letters of Note” announced that he would close the comments section on all posts. He writes:
All complaints should be directed towards a section of society to whom the concept of even vaguely civil discussion means nothing. …I simply cannot afford to continue mopping up after the trolls who crawl among us, itching to bring down the tone at every available opportunity.
Usher does not mince words when describing said trolls and their methodology, but I’ll let you read the best parts of the announcement for yourself.
I understand Usher’s frustration very well. Prior to writing this blog I was, for years, a moderator on a website devoted to open philosophical discussion. This was before the days of the “new media”. There were no philosophical blogs to speak of in those days, so if you wanted to talk philosophy on the internet sites like ours were where you would go. The founder of the site and I, and the other moderators as well, worked hard to create a website that where those who knew a little something about philosophy could interact with those who were new to it, sojourning, or simply curious. We had a great time before the site caught on. Then the membership exploded, swollen by trolls, spammers, crackpots, political cross-posters, and bots of every description. It became impossible to have a threaded discussion a significant portion of which wasn’t overgrown with inanity, spam, and digital graffiti (of the bathroom wall variety, not the amazing mural variety). Those with a serious interest in the conversation petitioned and complained, and we tried harder to moderate the site. In the end, however, it was futile. Nothing we did could simultaneously (a) protect the discussion from its many and varied saboteurs while (b) maintaining the quality of discussion that would make a site like ours worth visiting and (c ) upholding our original vision that philosophy is neat and even non-specialists will find that out if they have a chance to discuss it in a forum with a critical mass of members who know what they’re talking about. Eventually the site crashed under the weight of the flotsam and jetsam that has generally made open-membership sites for threaded discussion like ours obsolete. We rebuilt it twice before most of the moderators got tired of it and threw in the towel. In the course of the years that it was truly functional, however, I learned a lot and made some friends with whom I still keep in touch. It wasn’t a bad experience by any means, but it is one that has given me a lot of food for thought. One of the things I’ve thought about quite a bit as a result of my moderating days is how our experiences online shape our perception of the public at large, and how that perception conditions and shapes (or doesn’t) our conception of democracy.
Political theorists have been debating the merits of and conditions for democracy since time immemorial, but there are a couple points on which there is a modicum of general agreement:
1. Democracy involves participation by the demos.
2. Members of the demos participate in their own rule by contributing to some sort of deliberative decision-making, to the outcomes of which they collectively and individually (more-or-less) agree to be bound.
Of course the devil is in the details here, but I am focusing on those components about which I think there’s general agreement. Now, it’s nothing new to worry about the possibility of an ignorant demos. That’s been a staple concern since the very first democracies. Very often that concern has been tied up with concerns about having a sufficient stake (read, “economic interest”) in the success of the city or the state, the result being a predictable restriction of the franchise to adult, property-owning males in most cases. Of course we’re well beyond those days, right? Right? Er… Anyway, recently a different worry about democracy has been turning around in the back of my mind for a while. It’s certainly true that an ignorant demos is a bad thing (let us also agree that property qualifications do not track one’s cognitive abilities). Another, to my mind potentially worse problem is a demos that communicates incompetently. This worry is magnified by what I’ve seen of much interaction online.
To be clear, I’m not here suggesting that the internet is inherently bad or conduces to poor behavior. I don’t believe that. I wouldn’t bother having a blog if I did, and there are innumerable counter-examples anyway. I do think, however, that the combination of a largely salacious media culture, faltering educational institutions (at all levels) and attempts to right those institutions with top-down governmental fixes that largely have more to do with economic interests than learning, and the vertigo-inspiring, ground-ward trajectory of popular entertainment make a perfect storm that, on the internet, finds plenty of ships to sink. In a nutshell, the problem is that we don’t teach people how to communicate well with one another and there are no models for it available. The closest we get these days are journalistic (cough) “analysis” programs on Sunday morning that are little more than venues for those in power to repeat whatever soundbites they’ve been pushing for the week before while trying to look relatively thoughtful (instead of just casually tossing comments to reporters in a hallway or on the way to their cars). Challenges on these programs are seldom more than theatrical gambits meant to enhance the perceived “reasonability” of the people talking–and that includes the journalist who, like the politician, lives and dies by his “ratings” (a parallel we would do well to attend to more closely, I think).
So, take a bunch of people with slipshod educations that serve them poorly in almost every area, including training in communication and argumentation, insure that they have no idea what reasonable differences of opinion even look like by stripping it from the content of the television programs available to the vast majority of them, give them entertainment largely geared to a 13 year old demographic in which ignorant and half-mumbled incoherences are the only conversational segues between dull, repetitive, derivative attempts at music or attention-dominating scenes of sex and/or violence–and give it to them 24 hours a day, non-stop. Now put them on the internet and expect them to have a reasonable conversation about, well…anything. (If you’re the sort that prefers hard evidence for such grim visions simply visit YouTube or perhaps read the comments underneath the articles in your local paper.)
So how is this a problem for democracy? In short form: A demos that cannot deliberate cannot rule itself. Equally so a demos that will not deliberate.
This is the other half of the problem, and it implicates Usher and myself in my former life as a moderator as well. It is easy and understandable for those who aren’t ignorant and who can communicate and argue to get fed up with the trolls, partisan clowning, and spam that shackles communication both online and in our “analog” lives. The latter are short and there are things aplenty that demand our attention. Some of these are things that bring us peace and happiness–enjoying our significant others, children, art, etc. No one should ever have to apologize for wanting more of such things in their life. Still, to the degree that we value democracy we once in a while have a duty to wade back into the swamp and try to make ourselves heard, if for no other reason than that it sets a good example and it gives aid and comfort to others doing the same thing. It lets them know that they’re not alone. That matters. A lot. There’s a wonderful example from William James’s The Will to Believe that illustrates this point nicely:
A social organism of any sort whatever, large or small, is what it is because each member proceeds to his own duty with a trust that the other members will simultaneously do theirs. Wherever a desired result is achieved by the co-operation of many independent persons, its existence as a fact is a pure consequence of the precursive faith in one another of those immediately concerned. A government, an army, a commercial system, a ship, a college, an athletic team, all exist on this condition, without which not only is nothing achieved, but nothing is even attempted. A whole train of passengers (individually brave enough) will be looted by a few highwaymen, simply because the latter can count on one another, while each passenger fears that if he makes a movement of resistance, he will be shot before any one else backs him up. If we believed that the whole car-full would rise at once with us, we should each severally rise, and train-robbing would never even be attempted.
What James puts his finger on here, and what I think is relevant to the point I’m trying to make is that reasoned communication requires the same sort of faith that James attributes here to ships and sports teams. As I sit typing this in Warsaw, where the Solidarity movement is so much a part of recent history it seems to me that such faith is the lifeblood of democratic deliberation, perhaps even democracy itself. If we do not trust each other to listen, there will be no conversation. The trust we need to deliberate is undermined by an online culture so much of which is characterized by the kinds of things that killed the comments section on “Letters of Note”. If we don’t want to see the whole of the commons meet the same fate then I think we have to attend seriously to the hard, normative questions that only humanities can really tackle effectively: What kind of media culture do we want to have? What kind of journalistic system do we need to support our democracy and how do we get there from where we are now? Importantly, we have to get serious about teaching effective communication and argumentation, and we have to get serious about modeling it in our interactions with others. Given that the internet is where so much communication happens now, we have to model it there too.
I don’t fault Usher for closing comments on his blog. I would have done the same thing and his blog already contributes to modeling good reason through its content. He doesn’t owe anyone anything. That said, I do think that the fact that reasonable people, confronted with the staggering inability of so many to understand what a conversation is, can feel compelled to do such a thing is a symptom of far deeper problems that we won’t fix by walking away.
RAIL 
Thank you, Steve, for addressing this yet-to-be-resolved issue! Some years ago I experienced tumult of the worst sort on a closed (!) social discussion forum where the members had a very low threshold for disagreeing with each other. This was at Mensa Finland, which I chaired at that time. We decided to appoint several moderators so that pretty much all the hours of the day were covered. We wrote a nice netiquette. We made it possible for the members themselves to flag problematic messages. But it all got worse and worse. People started flagging each others messages just because of personal dislikes, several moderators were harassed, people got angry and the tone got harsher and harsher until several members unregistered from the service and I personally, in the end, left the whole organisation.
This would never have happened in real life. So I do think that it is specifically the Internet that is to be blamed! Or, perhaps better, our inability to understand and adopt to a new mode of communication.
Clearly it is not enough that everybody knows each other (as we did in Mensa), but there needs to exist a mutual understanding regarding civil behaviour. This is impossible to achieve in a very diverse hord of people from very various backgrounds and with different needs, antipathies etc.
The problem would be nice to solve for a number of reasons. One exciting reason relates to the possibilities of political deliberation for serious purposes of a city, a state or even a country. I don’t believe in the so-called direct democracy model (at least not yet), but in the future the Internet will certainly be used for voting and other kinds of political participation. But for serious discussion for large groups of diverse people? Not yet.
Hi Mika,
Thanks for the comment. That’s quite the experience you had–and with Mensa no less! Interesting.
I found in my moderating days that one of the chief causes of trouble was that the communication was largely conversational in tone, but that the lack of non-verbal cues led to frequent misunderstandings. As in your case this affected conduct even where the parties knew each other. Someone would make a joke, say, that someone else would read literally and subsequently take offense. I think that to some degree this is a problem for the printed word in general, which is why I would say that it’s not unique to the internet. The issue dates back to Plato’s Seventh Letter, yes?
I’ve no idea if there is anything to this but I speculate that typing figures into it too, somehow. One could draw non-verbal cues of a limited sort from handwriting. For instance it is possible in some cases to tell the writer’s mood from the stroke of the pen. (Some of the entries on Letters of Note demonstrate this quite clearly.) As you no doubt know there was a whole art to writing a letter by hand that packed it with many such non-verbal elements of communication. There was still the fundamental risk of misunderstanding, of course, but people worked out little conventions that hedged their bets in small ways–wax seals, styles of writing an address or salutation, perfume for love letters, etc..–there was more of a sense that the letter represented not just what you wished to say, but who one was, in an important sense. In modern typing we have what…emoticons, I suppose? Clearly we’re still learning these modes of communication, as you say.
Still, it never fails to fascinate me, the degree to which we sacrifice in terms of the quality of our normal, daily interactions as we gain in terms of quantity. There’s far more to it than electronic media. It’s a cultural, perhaps even an institutional shift. And it’s global in scope. Where it will take us in political terms I cannot say, but it’s clear that we are in a very different era than the one in which I grew up.
Steve, I think you touch on the key here when you write, “If we do not trust each other to listen, there will be no conversation.”
Listening is an art form we simply don’t teach or promote in our society – for many of the same reasons you cite as obstacles to democracy. (For more on listening as a rhetorical strategy in itself, check out Krista Ratcliffe’s book, _Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness._)
Listening also goes hand-in-hand with the decline in active literacy – not the ability to read so much as the willingness to read thoroughly. In fact, I heard in an NPR interview that there are fewer and fewer readers but more and more writers. In larger part, I would argue that this trend is precisely because of Internet access and telecomm technologies available. Although such tech provides access to more information and thus would seem to encourage reading, most people are too busy projecting their own ideas and identities out into the world to stop and consider those of others.
Blogs and comments (or faceless forums) are perfect examples of this kind of solipsistic misuse of online communication because it seems to be more about offering your own – often half-thought-out opinion – than really considering what the other person has presented and deliberating on the same topic. I do find Mika’s situation with Mensa Finland particularly intriguing in light of this, because one would assume that highly intelligent, deliberate thinkers would be careful about attending to one another’s ideas. Yet in the casual and faceless online environment as you describe, perhaps it is only too easy to overlook what someone else has to say and fall into the trap of simply reacting rather than deliberating. Also, when we add ideological conflict or affective investments, listening becomes even more difficult. Yet if we don’t listen, we can’t truly deliberate. And, as you say, if we can’t deliberate we cannot practice true democracy.
Unfortunately, then, we cannot simply conclude that comments are killing the commons and shut them down in order to preserve order. Instead, these comments make us more aware that the commons is an uncomfortably chaotic space — “the scramble of the barnyard,” as Kenneth Burke put it. I see the reaction to walk away, to close off comments, as an effort to preserve the IDEAL of the commons, which is much easier to accept and work into our communicative strategies than a commons that is riddled with trolls, spam, and other noise. Such a move won’t make the commons any more conscientious of other voices or more deliberate in its communication. Instead, I’d predict that Usher will lose some hits on his blog now because people will feel like he’s not willing to listen either and thus denying them a conversation.
All that said, I’m now worried that this comment is less deliberation than pontification, so I’ll end here. 🙂
[…] Patterson over at RAIL recently wrote a typically fine piece on How Comments are Killing the Commons. Coming at the subject as a student of public discourse, I find myself a little more tolerant of […]