SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 4, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday December 28 2016, @03:35PM
I know such discussions often lead to shouting contests ("Those darn Trump fans!" "No, you're all Leftists fascists who don't want to hear dissenting views!"). But is there at least the possibility that both sides have legitimate points here??
I certainly think so. I'll defend free speech as a legal doctrine anywhere, and I'll argue against anyone who wants government censorship of speech. I'll also strenuously argue for the value of public (and private) forums where all speech is welcome and "there are no rules."
On the other hand, I also have seen discussions taken over by a group of jerks who are more interested in disrupting things than having discussion. Is there a place for that? Sure. But I personally prefer NOT to participate in a place with that sort of pervasive trolling. I find it tiresome.
And again, I'm absolutely NOT talking about suppression of VIEWPOINTS. I'm talking about being a jerk and deliberately inciting flamewars rather than having a discussion about different views.
There's a difference (to me) between "political correctness" in the sense of liberal "policing" of discourse vs. simple civility and rational discourse. One can actually express very "un-PC" viewpoints without NECESSARILY acting like an ass. One can (at least in theory) argue in favor of racism, sexism, White Nationalism, or whatever on the merits -- but instead it seems TFA is at least getting at an important point about how such discussions seem to degenerate into trolling instead. (And yes, it is certainly possible for leftist folks to troll too in such ways -- I've seen it. But the vast majority of it seems to come from the other side....)
To come at it from a different perspective, some people like a quiet working environment. They're happiest in a library or whatever. Others need noise and bustle, and would happily be immersed in a group with loud music blaring. Both are legitimate preferences, and both have different social norms. And if the librarians took over the world, I can see the need perhaps for some pushback.
But it seems that many forums today are going further -- beyond just being "anti-PC" (which I personally agree with, to the extent that "PC" is sometimes a synonym for suppression of non-liberal views), it leads to forums which become completely dysfunctional in terms of reasoned discourse. The library-preference folks find it harder to find a place. NOT a "safe space" where only views they like can be aired -- just a place that isn't overrun by jerks and trolls.
For one example, I saw it happen on the Dan Carlin forums. They were hosted by Dan Carlin, a guy who has two relatively popular podcasts ("Hardcore History" and "Common Sense"). I never participated much there, but several years back it used to be a rather cool place for historical discussion. Dan definitely encouraged a "no rules" environment that led to intense debates. Yes, it sometimes degenerated into insulting and flaming (as all online forums sometimes do), but there was also a lot of smart, interesting discussion.
But he ended up shutting the forums down a few weeks ago, after a decade or whatever. I know why, because when I visited the forums a few months back, they seem to have become taken over by a bunch of trolls who were more interested in in-jokes and over-the-top insults and takedowns than they were in actually talking about anything. For every informative post, there were now like 25 BS back-and-forths about nothing. And a lot of it (though not all) was exacerbated by Trump fans in the past year.
Do I defend the LEGAL right of these people to say whatever they want? Of course. Should they have other forums hosted online where they can say what they want? Of course! But I also lament the fact that they ruined what used to be an interesting and rather unique community for discussion of rather arcane historical topics, etc. That old forum had some value too.
To me, this issue has NOTHING to do with viewpoints. It has to do with people who are jerks and just like to act like jerks. I'm happy they have forums to act however they want, and I'll defend the right for such forums to exist. But I personally am more interested in engaging in reasonably civil discourse. When things cross that line (and it DOES seem to be happening more frequently now, and it IS OFTEN correlated with Trump supporters), that -- to me -- is a concerning trend. Not the Trump stuff. The flight from rational argumentation and degeneration into name-calling, flamewars, etc.