Mind your manners online

Online speech is inherently ambiguous. It can be either a conversation or a pronouncement, or something in between. If you think you're standing on a soapbox in Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park, why would you feel impelled to act like you're at a dinner party? That's why the single change that would most improve online communication would be if posters made an effort to frame their remarks as part of a conversation, not as a diatribe. Once you see the anonymous participants in a discussion as real people, it's much harder to scream at them. When I was an editor at Salon, in the days when we hand-selected and edited letters, I learned that if I responded by e-mail to abusive letters, and signed my name, the letter-writer would almost invariably moderate his or her tone, and frequently apologize.

The result of people not regarding their postings as two-way communications is a trail of rhetorical wreckage that litters the Web like burned-out vehicles after a strafing raid. Grunts, shouts and gestures replace arguments. Online conversations bog down or trail off down inconsequential byways. The chess game is no longer played at a high level. Worse, the coarser rhetorical and emotional tone that is set becomes self-perpetuating. The salon slowly turns into a gladiatorial arena. It isn't a Darwinian processs, either, because in this arena, the strongest and smartest aren't the ones who usually survive. The loudest, rudest and most obnoxious are the winners. The quiet, the shy, the reflective are driven away. Even those who have thick skins, and are not themselves involved in a discussion, will often simply give up trying to mine a thread for interesting ideas. It isn't worth the psychological agita.

A good example of a publication whose discussions are so ferocious that you have to enter them with a suit of armor is the Web site of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. Haaretz is a superb newspaper, and there are always intelligent and thoughtful postings somewhere in the discussion threads after its stories. But the threads tend to be so nasty that I've mostly given up reading them. Even if you're just a bystander, you feel battered and spattered.

Of course, politeness isn't everything. Knowledge and intelligence affect the quality of an online discussion. There are plenty of high-quality discussions that are dominated by brassy, extroverted, competitive people, who may sometimes verge on rudeness, but who are also seriously smart. And there are other threads that are as decorous and polite as a Japanese tea ceremony, but are boring and worthless. But the fact remains that good manners are more important in nurturing a civilized, dynamic, sophisticated discussion than knowledge or brains. In any group, there's always going to be a wide range of erudition and intelligence. No one can do anything about their I.Q., but they can do something about their behavior. Without good manners, you don't have communication, you have soliloquys, or harangues, or sterile arguments.

The real issue here is how to generate the right kind of argument. The Internet is always going to be dominated by arguments. The very factors that make it easy to be rude and self-absorbed also make it easier to have online arguments. This is a good thing. We don't have enough arguments in our lives. It's much harder to argue with an actual human being than it is with a paragraph on a computer screen. Yet arguments are a sign of a society that is awake and alive: The ur-texts of the Western philosophical tradition, Plato's Dialogues, are exquistely polite arguments. The goal, then, is not to get rid of online arguments -- an idea about as practical as the Walrus and the Carpenter's visionary plan to use seven maids with seven mops to sweep all the sand off the beach -- but to encourage the best kind, while discouraging the worst. How do we move away from destructively competitive and testosterone-driven arguments, and promote ones that are frank, passionate and engaged, yet preserve the fragile bonds of civility?

Two words: good manners.

Moderation plays a huge role in the inculcation of online manners. There are already many different types of moderation, from the most restrictive to the loosest, from ones enforced by the community itself, as on Slashdot, to ones run by employees of the site. At Salon, we have opted for minimal monitoring; we only monitor after postings go up, and only egregiously abusive posters are flagged, warned and very rarely banned. We do step in and highlight letters we think are noteworthy. The New York Times is much stricter, reading posts before they publish them and weeding out would-be posters who are off-topic or inflammatory. Other Web sites have their own rules. As the Internet evolves, moderation will evolve as well, becoming more varied and sophisticated and sorting Web sites into different categories. Online carnivores will have their red-meat sites, vegetarian verbalists will have theirs. That's as it should be. But moderation can only do so much. If Web users made a conscious effort to see their posts as parts of a conversation with real people rather than as pronouncements, the online universe would be a more enlightening place.

Of course, this is a quixotic appeal. It's asking a lot to suggest that people be polite online. It requires an almost Christ-like faith in the goodness and potential of humanity. The people who post most online are not likely to be shrinking violets, and they are likely to be highly argumentative -- and not necessarily in the best way. The Internet's libertarian, anarchistic ethos often seems to foster a perverse insistence on thumbing one's nose at any strictures on behavior, including self-generated ones. Moreover, the whole idea of having civilized discussions runs against the most powerful currents in American society. Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh are not making gazillions of dollars because they're conducting Oxford Union debates. In a larger sense, "asking" the Internet to do anything is like asking the universe to do something. It seems absurd on the face of it.

All true. And yet everyone who posts on the Internet is a human being who can choose how he or she wants to behave. The Web's ethos is absolutely compatible with self-discipline and a self-generated concern for others -- indeed, without it, that radical political philosophy dissolves into destructive selfishness.

The Internet is a mirror of humanity. It would be a fine thing, and an important thing, if when we look in that mirror, we see a reflection of the species that created the British Parliament, built the Taj Mahal and wrote the U.S. Constitution, or even just the species that says "thank you" to the toll taker. The Internet is vast. A little more civilization might even make it beautiful.

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