There were two excellent op eds this week, one in the NY Times and one in the WSJ, both related to how we communicate online.
David Brooks’ piece Riders on the Storm describes research from years ago that hypothesized that the Internet results in polarization – a widely held view (Instead of the public square we could end up in a collection of information cocoons).
Brooks points out a new study that contradicts this theory. According to the op ed:
The core finding is that most Internet users do not stay within their communities… most people spend a lot of time on a few giant sites with politically integrated audiences, like Yahoo news… but when they leave they often go into areas where most visitors are not like themselves.
[The researchers] found that the Internet is more ideologically integrated than old-fashioned forms of face-to-face communications.
In the WSJ op ed Is Internet Civility an Oxymoron, Gordon Crovitz looks at a very specific facet of how we communicate online and argues that unmoderated, anonymous comments create more noise than wisdom.
It points out that media sites are reevaluating policies of treating all comments equally. Some sites are no longer allowing anonymous comments, or any comments at all. Others are encouraging anonymous comments (and in one case, building an entire business model around the concept).
In an interesting twist, Gawker put in a system last year that gives preference to certain commenters based on reader and editor ranking.
There is a certain amount of lack of civility. People can hide behind Avatars and sometimes voice their opinions in ways that would be considered rude or offensive. If one is going to be part of the blogosphere, I suppose it should be with the knowledge that there are sharks in the water. Avoid them if possible; remain above the fray or spam them to smithereens. There are options. It is a matter of how e choose to deal with this issue individually.