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Critics may accuse President-elect Donald J. Trump and his supporters of dragging down public discourse in America, but civility took leave of open discussions years ago – online. Beneath digital news stories and social media posts are unmoderated, often anonymous comment streams showing in plain view the anger, condescension, misogyny, xenophobia, racism and nativism simmering within the citizenry.
In the early days of the World Wide Web, digital conversation areas were small, disparate, anonymous petri dishes, growing their own online cultures of human goodness as well as darkness. But when virtual forums expanded onto mainstream news sites more than a decade ago, incivility became the dominant force. The people formerly known as the audience used below-the-line public squares to sound off with the same coarse "straight talk" as our current president-elect.
[...] As a scholar of journalism and digital discourse, the crucial point about online comment forums and social media exchanges is that they have allowed us to be not just consumers of news and information, but generators of it ourselves. This also gives us the unbridled ability to say offensive things to wide, general audiences, often without consequences. That's helped blow the lid off society's pressure cooker of political correctness. Doing so on news websites gave disgruntled commenters (and trolls) both a wider audience and a fig leaf of legitimacy. This has contributed to a new, and more toxic, set of norms for online behavior. People don't even need professional news articles to comment on at this point. They can spew at will.
Freedom of speech is only for approved narratives. Miss America explained it best in Bananas.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 28 2016, @11:31AM
The continual cry of the stereotypical SJW - "get educated!," in particularly lengthy form, second only to "check your privilege!" and “kill yourself!”
Well, you may be disappointed I’m not going to kill myself, even though you refrained from using that particular piece of canned insult, but in terms of being educated? I am. Perhaps not to your standards, but education does not flow solely from the font of professors who build their knowledge base and careers on a mountain of identity politics and the demagoguery of regressive candidates. Arguably that’s more rhetoric for specific political ends than any actual transference of knowledge, skill or theory. Pointing out that Hillary is a liar, thief, and incompetent is not sexist, for instance, whether or not the Russians were the ones that released the e-mails (and believing they did not, and not taking the word of the current administration that they did, is not sexist, either). Yet, on many of the boards silencing replies, this would often get the comment removed on the grounds of being sexist (and possibly racist if she weren’t white), and altogether be considered “bad behavior” for not following what I am told blindly.
I’d tell you to “stop talking” yourself, but since your only defense thus far is a smattering of insults boiling down to a wordier version of “you’re stupid! Get educated!” with no indication that you yourself have any better knowledge, or indeed, beliefs at all that aren’t simply part of the narrative you have by all indications been completely indoctrinated into, it’s pretty clear you’re never going to stop talking. It’s the only way you can drown out anything that might make you question your own opinions, not to mention questioning if they are in fact actually your own and not someone else's.
I look forward to the retort, should there be one, since it will likely boil down to more attempts to call me names in a desperate attempt to drown out the disagreement.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 28 2016, @01:24PM
I look forward to the retort, should there be one, since it will likely boil down to more attempts to call me names in a desperate attempt to drown out the disagreement.
You're a special snowflake. Does that qualify as desperate name-calling?