The challenge is to find ways to translate this talent for civil
discourse into civil society.
I was a little reassured by http://olduse.net/ to discover that no,
it isn't just that my memories have potemkined up a golden age, but
online discourse (although one can see some early starts to some of
our current endless flamewars) was indeed more civilized 30 years ago.
This is a non-trivial task in this uncivil age we live in.
A question I have: is electronic discourse in this age so uncivil in
general, or is it largely an anglophone occurrence? I can't tell: I
can say that the non-anglophone communities I've interacted with
online have seemed more civil in general, but a confounding factor is
that they've been both few in number and relatively
"closed" (communities in a non-oxymoronic sense); I could easily just
be seeing the toxicity of huge nearly-anonymous open-to-drive-by
"online communities" and ascribing that to anglophony because the
only examples I have of the latter are anglophone. (and, of course
silk fills in yet another quadrant, being anglophone yet civilized)
Or another (possibly less flamebaity?) hypothesis: 30 years ago,
online discourse was (due to both technical and social factors) a
largely literary activity; these days (due to both technical and
social factors) it is (and hence its least civil exemplars are)
overwhelmingly oral?
-Dave
Other tangents:
an early XXI Shirky piece on common patterns in digital incivility
over the ages:
http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enemy.html
and the excellent (ahem) "On Trolling":
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayFulltext?
type=6&fid=10413858&jid=APA&volumeId=2&issueId=02&aid=10413837&bodyId=&m
embershipNumber=&societyETOCSession=&fulltextType=RA&fileId=S20534477160
00099
(which suggests: can we just "flip the sign bit", and say that if we
understand what a troll is, and in what way trolling is accomplished,
then an easy way to promote civil society is to endeavor to undertake
the opposite?)
... ἐν τούτῳ μετὰ τῶν φίλων βούλονται
διάγειν: διόπερ οἳ μὲν συμπίνουσιν,
οἳ δὲ συγκυβεύουσιν, ἄλλοι δὲ
συγγυμνάζονται καὶ συγκυνηγοῦσινἢ
συμφιλοσοφοῦσιν ...
