Online commenting: the age of rage

Interesting article in The Observer about online communities (like this one).

Excerpts follow.

How the internet created an age of rage
by Tim Adams
The Observer, Sunday 24 July 2011

Link

.... [Comedian] Lee is, of course, not alone in having this anonymous violent hatred directed toward him. On parts of the internet it has become pretty much common parlance. Do a quick trawl on the blog sites and comment sections about most celebrities and entertainers – not to mention politicians – and you will quickly discover comparable virtual rage and fantasised violence. Comedians seem to come in for more than most, as if taboo-breaking was taken as read, or the mood of the harshest baying club audience had become a kind of universal rhetoric. It's not quite heckling this, though, is it? A heckle requires a bit of courage and risk; the audience can see who is doing the shouting. Lee's detractors were all anonymous. How should we understand it then: harmless banter? Robust criticism? Vicious bullying?

The psychologists call it "deindividuation". It's what happens when social norms are withdrawn because identities are concealed. .... The combination of a faceless crowd and personal anonymity provoked individuals into breaking rules that under "normal" circumstances they would not have considered.

Deindividuation is what happens when we get behind the wheel of a car and feel moved to scream abuse at the woman in front who is slow in turning right. It is what motivates a responsible father in a football crowd to yell crude sexual hatred at the opposition or the referee. And it's why under the cover of an alias or an avatar on a website or a blog – surrounded by virtual strangers – conventionally restrained individuals might be moved to suggest a comedian should suffer all manner of violent torture because they don't like his jokes, or his face. Digital media allow almost unlimited opportunity for wilful deindividuation. They almost require it. The implications of those liberties, of the ubiquity of anonymity and the language of the crowd, are only beginning to be felt.

....

It was one of the first moments when the possibilities of the new collective potential [of the internet] was tainted by anonymous lowest-common-denominator humanity, a pattern that has subsequently been repeated in pretty much all virtual communication. Barbarians, or "trolls" as they became known, had entered the community, ignoring the rules, shouting loudly, encouraging violence, spoiling it for everybody. Thereafter, anyone who has established a website or forum with high, or medium-high ideals, has had to decide how to deal with such anonymous destructive posters, those who got in the way of constructive debate.

Tom Postmes, a professor of social and organisational psychology at the universities of Exeter and Groningen in his native Netherlands, and author of Individuality and the Group, has been researching these issues for 20 years. "In the early years," he says, "this online behaviour was called flaming. And then that became institutionalised. Among friends, the people who engaged in this activity were actually quite jocular in intent but they were accountable to standards and norms that are radically different to those of most of their audience. Trolls aspire to violence, to the level of trouble they can cause in an environment. They want it to kick off. They want to promote antipathetic emotions of disgust and outrage, which morbidly gives them a sense of pleasure."

Postmes compares online aliases to the tags of graffiti artists: "Trolls want people to identify their style, to recognise them, or at least their online identity. But they will only be successful in this if an authority doesn't clamp down on them. So anonymity helps that. It's essentially risk-free."

There is no particular type of person drawn to this kind of covert bullying, he suggests: "Like football hooligans, they have family and live at home but when they go to a match the enjoyment comes from finding a context in which you can let go, or to use the familiar phrase 'take a moral vacation'. Doing this online has a similar characteristic. You would expect it is just normal people, the bloke you know at the corner shop or a woman from the office. They are the people typically doing this…"

Some trolls have become nearly as famous as the blogs to which they attach themselves, in a curious, parasitical kind of relationship. Jeffrey Wells, author of Hollywood Elsewhere, is a former columnist on the LA Times who has been blogging inside stories about movies for 15 years. For the last couple of years his gossip and commentary has been dogged by the invective of a character called LexG, whose 200-odd self-loathing and wildly negative posts recently moved Wells to address him directly....

....

He has resisted insisting that people write under their own name because that would kill the comments instantly. "Why would you take that one in 100 chance that your mother or a future employer will read what you were thinking late one night a dozen years ago if you didn't have to?" For haters, Wells believes, anonymity makes for livelier writing. "It's a trick, really – the less you feel you will be identified, the more uninhibited you can be. At his best LexG really knows how to write well and hold a thought and keep it going. He is relatively sane but certainly not a happy guy. He's been doing this a couple of years now and he really has become a presence; he does it on all the Hollywood sites."

Have they ever met?

"Just once," Wells says. "I asked him to write a column of his own, give him a corner of the site, bring him out in the open." LexG didn't want to do it, he seemed horrified at the prospect. "He just wanted to comment on my stuff," Wells suggests. "He is a counter-puncher, I guess. The rules on my site remain simple, though. No ugly rancid personal comments directed against me. And no Tea Party bullshit."

The big problem he finds running the blog is that his anonymous commenters get a kind of pack mentality. And the comments quickly become a one-note invective. As a writer Wells feels he needs a range of emotion: "I also do personal confession or I can be really enthusiastic about something. But the comments tend to be one colour, and that becomes drab. It's tougher, I guess, to be enthusiastic, to really set out honestly why something means something to you. It takes maybe twice as long. I can run with disdain and nastiness for a while but you don't want to always be the guy banging a shoe on the table. Like LexG. I mean it's not healthy, for a start…"

Wells does his own marshalling of the debate, somewhat like the bartender of a western saloon. Other sites – including our own Comment is Free – employ moderators to try to keep trolls in line, and move the debate on. A young journalist called Sarah Bee was for three years the moderator on seminal techie news and chat forum the Register. She started as a sub-editor but increasingly devoted her time to looking after the "very boisterous" chat on the site. She has no doubt that "anonymity makes people bolder and more arsey, of course it does. And it was quite a politically libertarian crowd, so you get people expressing things extremely stridently, people would disagree and there would often be a lot of real nastiness." She was very liberal as far as moderating went, she thinks, with no real hard and fast rules, except, perhaps, for "a ban on prison-rape jokes, which came up extremely often".

Every once in a while, however, the mood would get "very ugly" and she would try to calm things down and remonstrate with people. "I would occasionally email them – they had to give their email addresses when registering for the site – to say, 'Even though you are not writing under your real name, people can hear you.'" In those instances, strangely, she suggests, most people were incredibly contrite when contacted. It was like they had forgotten who they were. "They would send messages back saying, 'Oh, I'm so sorry', not even using the excuse of having a bad day or anything like that. It is so much to do with anonymity…"

Bee became known as the Moderatrix – "all moderators have an implicit sub-dom relationship with their site" – though she was just about the only person in the comment section who used her own name. "There was a lot of misogyny and casual sexism, some pretty off-colour stuff. I would get a few horrible emails calling me a cunt or whatever," she says, "but that didn't bother me as much as the day-to-day stuff, really."

The day-to-day stuff was, though, "like being in another world. It got really wearying. I would go home sometimes and just sigh and wonder about it all."

She is keen to say that the Register itself she thought a great thing, and loved the idea of working there, but being Moderatrix eventually got her down. "A hive mind sets in," she suggests. "Just occasionally good sense would prevail but then there is that fact that arguments on the internet are literally never over. You moderate a few hundred comments a day, and then you come in the next morning and there are a few hundred more waiting for you. It's Sisyphean."

In the end she needed a change. She's in another "community management" job now, dealing through Facebook, which is a relief because "it removes anonymity so people are a lot more polite". When she retired Moderatrix she did a goodbye and got 250 comments wishing her well. She doesn't miss it, though. "Just occasionally I would let a stream of the most offensive things through, just to let people know how those things looked in the world… People would realise for a bit. But then the old behaviours would immediately set in. The thing any moderator will tell you is that every day is a new day and everything repeats itself every day. It is not about progress or continuity…"

There are many places, of course, on the internet where a utopian ideal of "here comes everybody" prevails, where the anonymous hive mind is fantastically curious and productive. A while ago I talked to Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, about some of this, and asked him who his perfect contributor was. "The ideal Wikipedian, in my mind, is someone who is really smart and really kind," he said, without irony. "Those are the people who are drawn into the centre of the group. When people get power in these communities, it is not through shouting loudest, it is through diplomacy and conflict resolution."

Within this "wikitopia" there were, too, though, plenty of Lord of the Flies moments. The benevolent Wiki community is plagued by "Wikitrolls" – vandals who set out to insert slander and nonsense into pages.

....

Wales, who has conducted perhaps the most hopeful experiment in human collective knowledge of all time, appears to have no doubt that the libertarian goals of the internet would benefit from some similar voluntary restraining authority. It was the case of the blogger Kathy Sierra that caused Wales and others to propose in 2007 an unofficial code of conduct on blog sites, part of which would outlaw anonymity. Kathy Sierra is a programming instructor based in California; after an online spat on a tech-site she was apparently randomly targeted by an anonymous mob that posted images of her as a sexually mutilated corpse on various websites and issued death threats. She wrote on her own blog: "I'm at home, with the doors locked, terrified. I am afraid to leave my yard, I will never feel the same. I will never be the same."

Among Wales's suggestions in response to this and other comparable horror stories of virtual bullying was that bloggers consider banning anonymous comments altogether, and that they be able to delete comments deemed abusive without facing accusations of censorship. Wales's proposals were quickly shot down by the libertarians, and the traffic-hungry, as unworkable and against the prevailing spirit of free-speech.

Other pioneering idealists of virtual reality have lately come to question some of those norms, though. Jaron Lanier is credited with being the inventor of virtual worlds. His was the first company to sell virtual reality gloves and goggles. He was a key adviser in the creation of avatar universe Second Life. His recent book, You Are Not a Gadget, is, in this sense, something of a mea culpa, an argument for the sanctity of the breathing human individual against the increasingly anonymous virtual crowd. "Trolling is not a string of isolated incidents," Lanier argued, "but the status quo in the online world." He suggested "drive-by anonymity", in which posters create a pseudonym in order to promote a particularly violent point of view, threatened to undermine human communication in general. "To have substantial exchange, you need to be fully present. That is why facing one's accuser is a fundamental right of the accused."

....

Social psychologist Tom Postmes has been disturbed by the coarsening of debate around issues such as racial integration in his native Netherlands, a polarisation that he suggests has grown directly from the fashionable political incorrectness of particular websites where anonymity is guaranteed. "There is some evidence to suggest that the mainstream conservative media even cuts politically correct or moderate posts from websites in favour of the extremes," he says. "The tone of the public debate around immigration has diminished enormously in these forums."

One effect of "deindividuation" is a polarisation within groups in which like-minded people typically end up in more extreme positions because they gain credibility by exaggerating loosely held prejudices. You can see that in the bloggers trying to outdo one another with pejoratives about Stewart Lee. This has the effect of shifting norms: extremism becomes acceptable. As Lanier argues: "I worry about the next generation of young people around the world growing up with internet-based technology that emphasises crowd aggregation… will they be more likely to succumb to pack dynamics when they come of age?" The utopian tendency is to believe that social media pluralises and diversifies opinion; most of the evidence suggests that it is just as likely, when combined with anonymity, to reinforce groupthink and extremism.

....

One simple antidote to this seems to rest in the very old-fashioned idea of standing by your good name. Adopt a pseudonym and you are not putting much of yourself on the line. Put your name to something and your words are freighted with responsibility. Arthur Schoepenhauer wrote well on the subject 160 years ago: "Anonymity is the refuge for all literary and journalistic rascality," he suggested. "It is a practice which must be completely stopped. Every article, even in a newspaper, should be accompanied by the name of its author; and the editor should be made strictly responsible for the accuracy of the signature. The freedom of the press should be thus far restricted; so that when a man publicly proclaims through the far-sounding trumpet of the newspaper, he should be answerable for it, at any rate with his honour, if he has any; and if he has none, let his name neutralise the effect of his words. And since even the most insignificant person is known in his own circle, the result of such a measure would be to put an end to two-thirds of the newspaper lies, and to restrain the audacity of many a poisonous tongue."

The internet amplifies Schopenhauer's trumpet many times over. Though there are repressive regimes when anonymity is a prerequisite of freedom, and occasions in democracies when anonymity must be preserved, it is clear when those reservations might apply. Generally, though, who should be afraid to stand up and put their name to their words? And why should anyone listen if they don't?

-----

 

The difference between internet forums, blogs and so on and hate mail is that one is public and directed at a large audience whereas the other is private and directed at one individual.