legalskier
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With all the interest about what is/is not acceptable online behavior, perhaps it's a good time to start a thread like this. A blogger summed it up well: "The topic of civility on the internet has gotten a lot of ink recently. People flame each other online in ways they would never do in a public meeting. And this tendency is most extreme in anonymous postings on blogs and web sites. What is it about anonymity that sometimes brings out the worst in people? Fundamentally it is the separation between speech and accountability that sometimes poisons anonymous speech. Plato speculated about the Ring of Gyges in the Republic: how would people behave if their actions were entirely untraceable?.... And, by the evidence, there are a fair number of people who will take the cloak of anonymity as permission to express outrageous, harmful, and fundamentally disrespectful things to and about others."
She notes that this is nothing new; e.g. in the 1700s the Black Act banned "going about in a mask and conveying anonymous, often threatening, letters," usually as a tool of coercion. On the other hand, anonymous communications have been used as "a way for powerless people and groups to express and advocate their claims without repression...constraining the power and behavior of the high and mighty." Jurgen Habermas' ideas about the public sphere as a place for open and civil debate encourages publicity as "an essential component of a democratic polity: people engage with each other in a public space, and they embody an ethic of mutual respect that permits profound disagreements to occur without the collapse of civility." (http://changingsocietyblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/anonymity-and-civility.html)
Except that civility sometimes breaks down. That's where this thread comes in. Do you think the current system of free-wheeling anonymous forums is acceptable? Should there be any constraints on it? Do you prefer the anything goes TGR model or the self-policing AZ model? Do you know of any examples of bad, or good, cyber-behavior elsewhere than AZ? How anonymous should posters be? Instead of touching on the subject in the context of other snowsports threads, this thread can focus on it exclusively.
She notes that this is nothing new; e.g. in the 1700s the Black Act banned "going about in a mask and conveying anonymous, often threatening, letters," usually as a tool of coercion. On the other hand, anonymous communications have been used as "a way for powerless people and groups to express and advocate their claims without repression...constraining the power and behavior of the high and mighty." Jurgen Habermas' ideas about the public sphere as a place for open and civil debate encourages publicity as "an essential component of a democratic polity: people engage with each other in a public space, and they embody an ethic of mutual respect that permits profound disagreements to occur without the collapse of civility." (http://changingsocietyblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/anonymity-and-civility.html)
Except that civility sometimes breaks down. That's where this thread comes in. Do you think the current system of free-wheeling anonymous forums is acceptable? Should there be any constraints on it? Do you prefer the anything goes TGR model or the self-policing AZ model? Do you know of any examples of bad, or good, cyber-behavior elsewhere than AZ? How anonymous should posters be? Instead of touching on the subject in the context of other snowsports threads, this thread can focus on it exclusively.
