Digital Citizenship Enforcement
https://rm.coe.int/16809382f9
The article is fascinating in what it proposes for an ideal online environment. The pessimist in me feels it’s too late.
I keep wondering if things online are really so bad as you’d expect or hear. I’ve been enjoying Twitter this summer, but I still overhear my coworkers dismissing it, still see the comments on various feeds I follow talking about the nature of the site. I’m not sure we aren’t just focusing on the bad interactions and glossing over the many good communications that routinely take place. This make sense, as a bad experience tends to overwhelm or outweight even a day full of good ones.
It’s interesting to frame this concept in terms of digital citizenship, transferring a conception of civilized society to the online realm. Because what I think is that civilized society is unfortunately forced to be that way by enforcement and authority. We have police officers for a reason, to ostensibly maintain the rule of law. There are of course still crimes, and much lesser interactions that aren’t great, but there’s the expectation in real life society that if things ever get bad enough, you can have an arbitrary third party step in to restore order.
We don’t really have that in the online world, right? There’s no rule of law, except the transferrance of real life laws to the digital realm. There’s no agency that oversees our interactions online. If I’m arguing with someone on the street and things get heated and cause a disturbance, someone can call the police. A similar interaction online, there’s no authority to appeal to. It makes sense, since online we are just exchanging words, but is the real life disturbance just about the threat of physical violence or noise levels affecting neighbors? Is that the only order a police intervention is restoring in that situation?
If the idea is to restore some sort of decorum, there’s no third party force to proected discourse and speech as such on the internet. Generally this is considered to be on the part of the site provider, where the rules are codified in things like a terms of service. Listed therein are rules by which all users on a site are expected to abide by. And if you don’t, the site provider reserves the right to ban you from the site.
Except this doesn’t happen, right? Twitter in particular has become sort of infamous for how they seemingly don’t follow through on the spread of hateful discourse on their site. And all these sites consider themselves on shaky ground when it comes to monitoring speech, because of 1st amendment considerations.
It just feels like online discourse, digital citizenship, will never be able to be achieved on a whole because of the large group of users who don’t care about such concepts, and the lack of some kind of authority group to enforce the conduct we all desire in online interactions.
The article is fascinating in what it proposes for an ideal online environment. The pessimist in me feels it’s too late.
I keep wondering if things online are really so bad as you’d expect or hear. I’ve been enjoying Twitter this summer, but I still overhear my coworkers dismissing it, still see the comments on various feeds I follow talking about the nature of the site. I’m not sure we aren’t just focusing on the bad interactions and glossing over the many good communications that routinely take place. This make sense, as a bad experience tends to overwhelm or outweight even a day full of good ones.
It’s interesting to frame this concept in terms of digital citizenship, transferring a conception of civilized society to the online realm. Because what I think is that civilized society is unfortunately forced to be that way by enforcement and authority. We have police officers for a reason, to ostensibly maintain the rule of law. There are of course still crimes, and much lesser interactions that aren’t great, but there’s the expectation in real life society that if things ever get bad enough, you can have an arbitrary third party step in to restore order.
We don’t really have that in the online world, right? There’s no rule of law, except the transferrance of real life laws to the digital realm. There’s no agency that oversees our interactions online. If I’m arguing with someone on the street and things get heated and cause a disturbance, someone can call the police. A similar interaction online, there’s no authority to appeal to. It makes sense, since online we are just exchanging words, but is the real life disturbance just about the threat of physical violence or noise levels affecting neighbors? Is that the only order a police intervention is restoring in that situation?
If the idea is to restore some sort of decorum, there’s no third party force to proected discourse and speech as such on the internet. Generally this is considered to be on the part of the site provider, where the rules are codified in things like a terms of service. Listed therein are rules by which all users on a site are expected to abide by. And if you don’t, the site provider reserves the right to ban you from the site.
Except this doesn’t happen, right? Twitter in particular has become sort of infamous for how they seemingly don’t follow through on the spread of hateful discourse on their site. And all these sites consider themselves on shaky ground when it comes to monitoring speech, because of 1st amendment considerations.
It just feels like online discourse, digital citizenship, will never be able to be achieved on a whole because of the large group of users who don’t care about such concepts, and the lack of some kind of authority group to enforce the conduct we all desire in online interactions.
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