The Greens oppose the CPRS not because it is too weak, but because it will point Australia in the wrong direction with little prospect of turning it around in the timeframe within which emissions must peak, says Senator Christine Milne.
Hamilton: The Internet’s belligerent Brutopia
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It is commonly believed that the advent of the Internet has been a boon for free speech. No longer do the mainstream media act as the exclusive gate-keepers of public opinion. Anyone with a point of view can set up a website and start publishing. Online news and analysis sites like Crikey, New Matilda and On Line Opinion have proliferated. Dozens of well-read blogs provide an outlet for a plethora of views that would rarely have found their way into newspapers or onto the airwaves. Mainstream news organisations have been forced to establish their own online opinion and comment sites open to the public. Everyone with something to say can go online to say it and be sure that someone will be reading. The Internet should represent a great flourishing of democratic participation. But it doesn’t. An ugly culture of dogmatic and belligerent interventions now dominates social and political debate on the Internet. Comment sections on Internet forums are blighted by a kind of cyber-rage that drowns out debate with table-thumping assertion and a style of personal engagement that owes more to Gordon Ramsay than Socrates. A new vocabulary has developed to describe the variety of offenses, with neologisms such as “flames”, “trolls”, “snarks” and “sock puppets”. Moderators of blog and comment sites do their best to control the rage by setting rules against racism, sexism, coarse language and ad hominem attacks. John Quiggin’s blog, one of the best, bans those who flout the simple rules of courtesy. An indication of what he is up against is suggested by his seventh rule:
You can be sure these rules were developed after a long and painful period of failed attempts to maintain civility through appeals to self-control. While a few defamation suits may have been avoided, the rules have had little impact on the ugly culture of the net. Many have entered into a public debate on a website only to find themselves the target of a torrent of abuse from the regular army of anonymous users who have no respect for any higher principle of free speech. Their attitude is: “if you don’t like the heat then get out of the kitchen”. The truth is that large numbers of people who would like to participate in Internet forums are driven out because they find the experience unpleasant and upsetting. Even a public commentator as thick-skinned as Peter Faris declined a request from Crikey to join its blog, citing the unpleasant attention opinion writers invite: “Crikey will find that some contributors will not want to expose themselves to this sort of hate and abuse …”. Crikey is by no means unique on this score. The brutality of public debate on the internet is due to one fact above all — the option of anonymity. The belligerence would not be tolerated if the perpetrators’ identities were known because they would be rebuffed and criticised by those who know them. Free speech without accountability breeds dogmatism and confrontation. Moderate opinion tends to be based on a more nuanced and thoughtful view of the world and is more inclined to consider alternative views. Yet these are precisely the contributions excluded from discussion by the bullying culture of online forums. There is little scope for the back-and-forward of debate when the normal social rules of respect and reciprocity do not apply. To be sure, there are corners of the World Wide Web where communities with common interests engage in civilised discussion, where opinions are formed and changed. Yet there is always a danger that these polite exchanges will be gate-crashed by an opinionated cyber thug roaming the net. If free speech means no more than the absence of restrictions on people using public forums to say whatever they want, and however they want, then the Internet is the promised boon. But if free speech means encouraging a free-flowing dialogue that draws the public into an exploration of alternative ideas and enriches civic culture, then the Internet is its enemy. Clive Hamilton is professor of public ethics at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics. |
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26 Comments
Clive, my opinion of you has dropped sharply over the last year. I enjoyed your work in the past (Affluenza, Silencing Dissent), but this pro-censorship, anti-online discussion direction you’re taking has eroded my faith in your intellectual powers. “The Internet is the enemy” of free speech? That’s the biggest load of nonsense I’ve heard in a long time.
Right now on Twitter, I’m in a real-time discussion with about over 3000 people about how wrong you are. I couldn’t have done that before the interwebs.
You see the key difference: John Quiggin decides what is courteous. This might be different from what the government decides. He might be more liberal than the government on what is acceptable. If that offends some people they have the right not to read his blog. But at least it is his blog.
Fairly simple. I agree with Jin. This is surely a parody.
Onya Clive another fine mess you’ve got yourself in. I suggest next time you ask for civility it ought to start with you.
Found this on Juan Quiggler’s site about you (on this very subject). Sound pretty uncivil, Clive. Want to explain why?
Joel B1 is a brand.
It epitomises the very best in contrarian thinking.
But the owners of “Joel B1” don’t want bricks thrown through their windows, dog poo smeared on the Porche etc.
So, much like NIKE is a respected (not exploitative) brand there’s something to said for anonymity.
Indeed people are often rude, crude and illogical on blogs. But is it more irritating and timewasting than the SPAM and other unneeded emails one deftly deletes from one’s Inbox? I can’t see why anyone, even if they have disclosed their own name, should do more than shrug the shoulders at anonymous abuse.
Anonymity has more than one virtue. It is possible to float ideas that one doesn’t necessarily want to follow through on or be committed to supporting ever after. It also allows comment on issues on which the dangers, reasonably anticipated and totally left field, of arousing wrath and having to back down humiliatingly (possibly for some trivial slip) are too great for something one only has limited time for. E.g. you could so easily get caught in the Israeli-Arab propaganda grinder when you thought you were simply giving innocent examples of why both sides might be regarded as to blame, or as having a case…
People, please, think of the children.
“Free speech without accountability breeds dogmatism and confrontation.”
What an excellent observation. I look forward to the expansion of this principle to encompass voting, so that everyone is accountable for their political leanings.
Well, I have observed the behaviour Clive is talking about. Go and post a serious comment that is polite and thoughtful, but against Bolt’s opinion (on his blog), and see what his supporters do.
Others have also discussed this. Clay Shirky, for example, from a few years ago:
http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
I’m not sure though that the Internet is really the enemy of free speech, as Clive concludes.
I think he means the Web mostly, not the Internet. Usenet has been around for longer, but the structure does not allow for more constructs like reputation (Digg, etc). The other uses of the internet surely can’t be called an enemy of free speech. Email, an enemy of free speech? You might as well cite Aussie Post. Be specific, Clive, be accurate.
Really, though, it’s early pioneering days still on the Web in terms of large-scale human interaction. Calling the web an enemy of free speech goes a bit far. If your words are strong enough, they will stand, no matter what petty abuse is thrown at them. I’d say that those guys in China translating the Economist would have a different opinion to Clive.
“The truth is that large numbers of people who would like to participate in Internet forums are driven out because they find the experience unpleasant and upsetting.” Absolutely. However, there is room for both - for places with rules and places without.
Zed Shaw has the same concern “The Internet needs identity, reputation, and retribution”, and he sees the solution as hate:
http://www.savingtheinternetwithhate.com/
I’m not sure that’s what you had in mind, though.
I spend a bit of time at whirlpool.net.au, which is a heavily (some say over) moderated forum. Nevertheless, if someone starts getting abusive at me I refuse to throw herrings (ask for a deletion) and instead blind them with erudition and incontestable facts. It tends to make the troll look even sillier. I suggest you try it, Clive.
Of course, if I can’t come up with the requisite facts, perhaps I deserve the flak…
… and another thing!
Clive writes, “The belligerence would not be tolerated if the perpetrators’ identities were known because they would be rebuffed and criticised by those who know them.”
That’s utter garbage, and speaks loudly of Clive’s inability to comprehend discourse on the internet.
Perpretrators’ identities may be unknown TO HIM, but they’d be equally unknown and obscure TO HIM if they used their real names. The plain fact of the matter is that most participants in online discussion forums tend to use the same identity within the context of that forum, and as in other forms of human discourse identity comes with reputation attached.
So if someone’s identity is unfamiliar they’re treated with all the credibility and seriousness of a drive-by commenter. If their identity is well known to other forum participants, those participants will approach their missives from a direction suggested by evaluations of the commentator’s prior contributions.
Clive’s problem is that over the last 12 months or so he’s established an identity and reputation for himself as someone who (yes!) belligerently passes judgment on communities and subjects about which he knows nothing, with the inevitable result that members of those communities and experts on those subjects tend to think his judgments are all a light-weight joke.
If someone sat at my dinner table and pontificated as ignorantly as Clive has about my friends, views, motivations and expertise I’m pretty sure that person would get exactly the same reaction Clive gets when he writes pornography-laden op-eds in AustralianIT. If that person did it in a pub, they’d probably be taken home in a bucket.
We all accept that Clive has a right of free speech, which means he can say these things even if they’re odious and stupid. The correct response to odious and stupid speech is more speech which persuades readers to understand its odious stupidity. Whether or not it’s anonymous is irrelevant.
As a commenter to lots of stuff that interests me (both newspapers and online) I welcome your article. You are facing up to the hard problem.
As a scientist and medical practitioner my work over decades has seemed controversial because it makes a monkey of the treasured and protected paradigms and looking at the horrors (some essentially examples of serious criminal behaviour) various apparently government authorities have perpetrated against me a bit of loud, ignorant, intimidatory, insulting verbal claptrap would be nothing. I don’t hide behind a disguise and believe your view of accountability is virtuous. By the way, time and lots of good science by the best of others in that time (1.5 to 2 decades later always) has put each of my controversies mainstream. Of course in a paternalist pandering profession like medicine that just creates more internal enemies.
Welcome to the internet Clive.
This article seems a very long-winded way of saying, “Sometimes people are rude. They’re more likely to be rude if they’re anonymous, and it can be easier to be anonymous on the Internet.” Is this really news, Clive? I mean, sociologist Sherry Turkle covered this — with actual research and references and all that respectable academic stuff — in her book “Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet”. In 1995.
In the decade and a half since then, things have moved well beyond just whinging about the problem and exaggerating it into a mythical “regular army” of “cyber thugs”. (“Cyber”. How quaint.) There’s plenty of discussions about how to manage communities online, and even people like the redoubtable Laurel Papworth teaching regular courses on how to do it.
This is just another propaganda piece in your long-term battle to portray the internet as “the enemy”, isn’t i? Lines like “the brutality of public debate” keep omitting one key word: “some”. Once again, you take the bad behaviour of “some” people and conflate it with “all”. The bad guys are an “army”, the civilised communities in the “corners”, an implied minority. But where are the statistics backing up your claims? Where, Clive? Why this obsession with the negatives?
I know you’re smart enough to realise that unsubstantiated generalities are a corrupt technique. You also know that an argument is still valid even if expressed rudely. You criticise logical fallacies when others use them. Why do you imagine it’s acceptable when you do it?
As irritating as the trolls, flying monkeys and assorted wingnuts from each end & beyond the political spectrum are, they can be, and are, ignored - without responses their fruitfly attention spans flit off elsewhere.
I think the sock puppets & rabble soothers are actually a bigger issue. The latter esp. seem, at first glance, reasonable and beneficent with their magisterial corrections of the benighted & confused.
And, quel surprise, always on the conservative side of any issue.
As far as I’ve seen, their insertions contain no typos. and few of the more common grammtical errors and almost always in that tell-tale MBA airhead speek that lulls one into torpor.
As irritating as the trolls, flying monkeys and assorted wingnuts from each end & beyond the political spectrum are, they can be, and are, ignored - without responses their fruitfly attention spans flit off elsewhere.
I think the sock puppets & rabble soothers are actually a bigger issue. The latter esp. seem, at first glance, reasonable beneficent with their magisterial corrections of the benighted & confused.
And, quel surprise, always on the conservative side of any issue.
As far as I’ve seen, their insertions contain no typos. and few of the more common grammtical errors and almost always in that tell-tale MBA airhead speek that lulls one into torpor.
Clive, people have ALWAYS responded in that manner, the only difference is that on the Internet they can be heard.
- mark
I totally agree with Hamilton. Free speech is the real enemy and must be reigned in and tamed, like a horse, or a brand new sex slave.
Dear Clive, more years ago than I care to remember CB radio became widely available. It was fun for awhile then the airwaves were taken over by the same idiots that are attempting intimidation now. After awhile it sorted itself out and the cream rose to the top while the dross drifted away. Any sustained and reasoned argument will see them off, but the removal of their anonimity is the best. No name no packdrill. They will just have to p-ssoff.
It’s remarkable that so many respondents agree with my sentiment re this commentator. That such a rude and odious commentator can in this article try to portray himself as a receptacle for morals and freedom is really quite staggering. And for him to be described as “professor of public ethics” is simply mind-shattering.
Clive, your belligerent brutopia describes almost any large scale meeting, online or no.
Who can forget the shameful anti-Islamic abuse directed at the Qu’ranic Society Dar Tahfez El-Quran as they sought permission to build a school in Camden last year. The adhoc meetings attended by concerned locals were filled with anonymous ‘belligerent’ interjections and opinions - which were for the most part based upon uninformed stereotypes and irrational fears.
Contrast this with the audience participation at one of your seminars - many of which I have personally attended. Questions are asked and opinions put forth in a rational and organised manner. Many participants even raise their hands so as not to speak out of turn. I’m sure the response to inappropriate or continual interjections would remain the same had the speaker submitted them to a blog.
Not all meetings - on- or offline - will be run in an ideal manner, but that’s democracy and free speech for you. ‘Appropriate behaviour’ does not have a single definition and ‘civility’ is not always a fair rule of measure.
-Paul (my real name)
Seriously, what is the point of this article?
http://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2009/03/08/trolls-and-anonymity/#comments
here’s the comment:
stephen bartos Says:
March 8th, 2009 at 7:09 pm
I have commented on this blog, not often but on occasion over a number of years. The only time I’ve been subject to unwarranted ad hominem attack on this blog, the attacker was Clive Hamilton. I prefer names to anonymity but consider that a matter of personal preference rather than a normative judgement. Anonymity may give some commenters moral licence for brutality; but it can also protect commenters from that kind of attack
Ironically, I think Professor Hamilton is trolling with this piece.
“If free speech means no more than the absence of restrictions on people using public forums to say whatever they want, and however they want, then the Internet is the promised boon”
Here’s the thing, Professor. “Free-speech” means exactly that
Allow me to demonstrate
FREE
-Adjective
exempt or released from something specified that controls, restrains, burdens, etc.
(www.dictionary.reference.com)
“But if free speech means encouraging a free-flowing dialogue that draws the public into an exploration of alternative ideas and enriches civic culture, then the Internet is its enemy.”
Also Professor, I have a question in regards to this statement.
How can dialogue be “free-flowing” (as you so put it) if there are restrictions on what one can say, and the manner in which they say it? Wouldn’t that force one to refrain from immediately voicing their original comment (even if briefly) in order to carefully choose the words they use, and the manner in which they use them?
My point is - How can this possibily constitute as being “free-flowing”?
regards,
Anonymous
Surely this article is written by the fake Clive Hamilton, in parody of the target’s many posts containing marching armies of strawmen?