| All Of This Has Happened Before
One thing to take to heart is that even as the netroots continue to expand at a fantastic pace, spirited (indeed, rancorous) online debate has been around for decades, and the behavior patterns are fairly well-established. There's been quite a lot written on this topic, and a set of norms, values and nomenclature have developed within communities that value discourse. Silly as it may sound, there's a lot we can learn from people who spent years debating Macs vs. PCs in USENET forums, or Linux vs Windows in IRC:
Trolling vs Flamebait
The important thing here is to recognize our goals. In a community such as OpenLeft, participants are ostensibly somewhat like-minded and generally aligned towards promoting progressive change, left-wing values, etc. We don't want to slag eachother off and have a lot of stress and hard feelings, even though sometimes that's what happens.
Trolling is generally understood as malicious, intentional disruption. A low-caliber example would be a freeper posting Bill Ayers-related rants here. Easily delt with via the 0 rating.
Higher-caliber trolling is really quite sophisticated and manipulative. It's about creating the appearance of honest intentions, obscuring the true goal of seeding chaos. Hard to spot, very destructive to a community; this is the reason why "Troll" is a real insult.
I take it on faith that anyone bothering to read this is not really a troll.
Flame-bait on the other hand, is a statement from a community member which is, as the name suggests, incendiary. It may contain a number of valid points, and maybe only one simple phrase that will set other people off, but the presence of that one phrase is really all that matters.
You don't want to be flame-bait.
The means here are really pretty simple and obvious: think before you post. Give what you want to get back. Try not to use language you know will piss people off, because it will just piss people off, and then you'll be fighting about whatever that was rather than having a meaningful dialogue (which could still be full of deep disagreement!) on more substantive topics.
The Path To Victory Isn't A Shouting Match
I see this a lot, where someone makes a really great (or even just perfectly valid) point, but closes their comment with a statement like, "though it's unlikely anyone like you would ever understand this..."
Those kinds of comments are kind of tragic to me, because whatever real information was being conveyed will be lost in the inevitable battle of tit-for-tat one-upsmanship that will result.
The golden rule works really well here. You get what you give, in most cases. We can all make things better by trying to address the substance of what other users are saying, by being observing The Principle of Charity in our discussions:
In philosophy and rhetoric, the principle of charity is an approach to understanding a speaker's statements by interpreting the speaker's statements to be rational and, in the case of any argument, rendering the best, strongest possible interpretation of an argument. In its narrowest sense, the goal of this methodological principle is to avoid attributing irrationality, logical fallacies or falsehoods to the statements of others, when there is another coherent, rational interpretation of the statements.
This is how we make progress, because ultimately we all want a lot of the same things. Nobody's goal is to get over on some other poster, that's a distraction. The principle of charity is an excellent one to keep close as we navigate the unexplored territory to come.
I don't really expect this diary to have much of an impact on the tone of the debate. These things tend to move in waves. Primaries are dogfights. Issue and identity fault-lines produce big flare-ups. People get touchy around issues of power. These things happen. However, I do hope that by giving a few more users some understanding of the context of online debate, and the deep history here, we can salvage a few more worthwhile threads.
In conclusion, I don't ever mean to suggest anyone just STFU; I just mean to be cognizant of how choosing your words has an effect. Heck, sometimes it's fun to argue. If that's where your heart is, flame on! |
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