In his book, Education for Life, J. Donald Walters defines maturity as the ability to relate to realities outside of one’s own. Walters points out that contractive attitudes are their own reward - it is painful when our awareness shrinks in ever-smaller circles.
I think the salvation of the Internet rests with communities whose members are so generally expansive that immature people feel uncomfortable there. When they word-vomit, they are shamed into leaving or forcibly removed.
I’m thinking of rec.running, which was too diverse, and too open, to hold against the handful of sociopaths and psychopaths who flooded it with their slime. rec.running is now the Combat Zone of running. Mature people have emigrated to the moderated forums at Runner’s World and Cool Running. Those communities work. Possibly because they include open forums (psych wards) for the immature.
I have to say that content of Wil’s original posting left him completely open to the label of “a-hole”.
Certainly Wil deserves his share of criticism. Criticism is a good and welcome thing, as I said in the post. That’s not what I object to. I object to ineffective criticism, which is a waste of everyone’s time-- the writer, the reader, and the audience. And when you degenerate into calling someone an a-hole, that is, by definition, ineffective criticism. As Wil said in his reply:
You kind of kill your own point by insulting me while telling me it’s not cool to ever insult anyone. It’s like holding a gun to someone’s head and yelling, “GUN CONTROL! NOW!”
Is it really necessary to “win” an argument? It might be more constructive not to think of disagreements in terms of winners and losers. It is possible, even desirable, to have equitable disagreement.
I don’t think that civility ever existed in computer communications. Back in the 80’s, almost every BBS I visited (yeah I am that old) was rife with nastiness and flaming. The Internet didn’t invent the lack of civility, but computer-based communication certainly helped it evolve. I think the relative anonymity of forums and such are more to blame than anything else…
I still think of anyone who uses all caps as “Some idiot with an Apple ][”. (For those of you too young to remember or too old to have any memory left, Apple’s didn’t have upper and lower case so they always seemed to be yelling on the BBS’s).
Telling someone to ‘google it’ or the equivalent (RTFM, STFW, Use the Source, Luke, and so on) is born out of wanting to keep the communications channel as full of useful discussion as possible, as opposed to rehashing the same half-dozen questions asked by an endless stream of people who won’t stick around to become part of the ongoing discussion (and may not, in fact, stick around long enough to read the answer). It is an intensely pragmatic reaction to the fact there will always be more experts than petitioners, and that people don’t use documentation unless they absolutely must.
In short, if you don’t like places where ‘google it’ is considered an acceptable response, stay out of them. The regulars will thank you.
As a side comment, and humble suggestion of article, how much of the industry is effected by The Psychological as opposed True Reason ?
Whilst Trolls or Nerd Rage are annoying destructive examples, how about some thought about the less obvious thinking that causes problems in software development ?
The actual source of the Nerd Rage was an “attack” upon a programming language. This idea of wanting to change from Old Thinking to New Thinking often meets this pointless emotional resistance.
As somebody who has dabbled in language design, I would like to point out that languages are often not the real problem. For instance some body has been pressuring me to move from using Java to Python. Now I have nothing against Python, in fact i rather like Python. I keep trying to explain that in my case it is not the language, but the libraries.
Coherent arguments in internet forums will continue to be extremely rare. The ancient Greeks had the art (yes, they viewed it as an art) of debate down to an… well… art.
Rhetoric and debate were considered worthy subjects to study and become proficient in. Unfortunately, this is no longer the case, and thus you have people with no clue thinking that swearing is the way to “win” an argument.
It’s not going to go away. And to those who think using reasoned logic and debating skills instead of knee-jerk swearing is “pussifying” the internet, I just shake my head at how low the lowest common denominator actually has become.
The internet reflects, and amplifies, the popular culture. It is not the cause, per se. Civility, particularly in public debates has gone the way of the dodo, mostly due to talk radio and extremist “political” commentators (O’Reilly, Coulter, et. al) who, like other instances of the “shock jock” class, discovered that wild statements equal ratings which equal advertising dollars.
Unfortunately, nonsense, spurious reasoning and rudeness, repeated often enough in ANY media have an effect on everyone. Absurdly venomous comments on something as ultimately trivial as language preference are just another symptom of this.
Since anonymity is widely seen as bad for civility, should blogging platforms offer the option of requiring commenters to use real names (which could be verified through credit cards, as in the amazon.com Real Name system)?
“That’s fair, but don’t you think it’s ultimately more effective to respond reasonably, rather than assuming the tone of the writer you are responding to?”
I was addressing the topic of this post: “Whatever happened to civility…” But yeah, once people start name-calling, the argument is pretty much over (as you said in your post about ad hominem attacks).
“particularly in public debates has gone the way of the dodo, mostly due to talk radio and extremist “political” commentators (O’Reilly, Coulter, et. al)”
Don’t forget to look to your left – MoveOn, Daily Kos, “et al”. Those guys made their bones on name calling (“BushHitler”, “Nazis”, etc.). Not much civil discourse to be found there, either.
And on what basis do you think internet merely “reflect” popular culture, whereas other media (TV and radio) actually influence it? More likely, the directional nature of TV and radio make them market participants, not market makers. They have a product to sell, and they’re successful because there’s a market for it. On the internet, the discourse is largely divorced from market forces.
Point taken. The left is no better than the right, and I stand corrected. Reflection implies unidirectionality. Causality is certainly bidirectional between media and its audience, with all the feedback phenomena which that implies.
Since no one seems to have connected the dots: The rise of the virulent right wing, exemplified by Cheney’s “Go F yourself” to Leahy on the floor of the Senate, just might, might I insist, have something to do with the decline of civil discourse in society. That, and hearing George Will, liar of the first water, declaim similarly. Sometimes, the only response is to Nuke 'em Back to the Stone Age. 2 points for knowing who first said it.
And just to clear up the confusion. The dot to be connected was “The rise of the virulent right wing”. This is not confined to the US, certainly. The examples were Cheney and Will. Sarkozy, for the Euro-centric, might do.
I think the post itself and many of the subsequent comments illustrate why social networking sites are becoming more popular, particularly in business circles.
Being an asshole has consequences when you remove anonymity. In the context of, say, LinkedIn, Facebook, Ryze, etc., being an a**hole will eventually revoke your right to participate in the group. And assuming that most people want to participate in the group, that’s an effective social check on behavior.
Regarding blogs, I’m all for open dialog on blogs, and I’m certainly welcome to people disagreeing with me. But you know, my blog is like my house. And if you come into my house and start calling me a jackass, I’m going to throw you out. Come to my blog and do the same, and your comment will be deleted. That’s not censorship – that’s simply expecting a modicum of respect while you’re on my property. The fact that it’s virtual real estate doesn’t change that.
Sure, least-common-denominator attacks where a person simply calls you names is one thing, but the use of vulgarity is hardly reason to dismiss a criticism altogether. Sure, the rest of they said might have been more convincing to some people without the name-calling, but so what? If somebody is an a**hole, then calling them one is justified. I don’t think this was the case in your example, but I’m referring to your generalized point here.
And, by the way, I like your articles but you do come off as arrogant.