February 2nd, 2007
An Example in Civility
In a past life, I worked as an application developer in Lotus Notes. Like any good worker bee, I tried my best to stay current in what was going on with the program by reading the online materials and blogs.
Ed Brill, a major big executive at IBM in relation to the Lotus Notes products, has had a blog running for about 4 years now at www.edbrill.com.
Since I no longer work with Notes, I don’t read the Notes blogs regularly but I kept them in my RSS reader anyway and checked in now and then. This posting regarding civility on the blogs caught my eye because it spoke to the current debate on deafread.com and other places about anonymous postings and the general lack of civility among commenters.
Even pointing to “Bah, humbug”, one of the things that I attribute the success of this blog conversation to is that I have no tolerance for anonymous comments or trolls. I’ll take the beating as long as I can see my attacker (I’ll take the kudos and handshakes too :-).
I’ll admit to having posted a few anonymous comments in the long ago past but these days, I try to make sure I’m posting with my name on it. Likewise, I think many other blogs would be well served by establishing a similar policy.
What do you think? Should bloggers set a policy of allowing only people who use their real name instead of a pseudonym to post comments?
February 3rd, 2007 at 8:49 pm
Neil, I know quite a few people who would say this is a great idea. However, I see it as stifling discourse. The First Amendment exists for a reason. And there is a preponderance of legal precedent establishing our right to privacy. There are also court decisions up the wazoo protecting anonymous “speech.” People who do not want to use their names for whatever reason will then not participate in this long-term discourse we’re experiencing via blogs. For example, I blog anonymously largely because I’m concerned about my job. I had to sign a paper saying I would never publicly say anything bad about my place of employment nor about my employer. Well, I don’t *think* I have anything to worry about, but then again, if *they* find anything objectionable by *their* standards, I’m screwed. I’ve also seen many ideas shot down simply because of the messenger, which is unfair. So all in all, I think requiring real names is a mistake.
I do think there is a better approach to upping the level of civility, so to speak. I am very much against flames and name-calling, and on the few occasions I’ve received such comments on my blog, have deleted them. It doesn’t matter where the comments were directed - if they were disrespectful in any way toward anyone, out they went. Comment moderation, respectful blog posting, and expectations of civility and respect are the way to go, in my opinion. I’ve noticed the respectful bloggers do not seem to attract nasty comments the way bloggers who do not show the same restraint seem to do. Furthermore, respectful anonymous commenter seem to usually choose one pseudonym and stick with it. (IamMine and WildStarrySkies, for example, and there are many more out there.) This shows a willingness to stand by their comments in a similar way to people who post using their real names.
To sum, active moderation and modeling respect while blogging are what bloggers should do in order to keep their corners of DeafBlogLand respectful and civil… At least, in my humble opinion.
February 3rd, 2007 at 9:40 pm
Neil,
I think it really depends on the topic as to whether or not anonymous comments should be tolerated. I work at Gallaudet. Personally, I think it’s unprofessional for someone to say negative things about their employer in a public forum, such as a blog. Although personally, I think the “management by intimidation” thing was WAY overblown, I think that an employer would and should certainly have second thoughts about putting employees in certain positions or situations when they knew that the employee was trashing their place of work. I know I would, if I was someone’s boss. I really don’t think that my comments should be discounted just because I don’t want to use my name. There is a famous cartoon, and I can’t think of where it was published, of a dog sitting and typing at a computer keyboard. The caption was “on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog”. That’s the beauty of it. As long as what I say isn’t libelous, there shouldn’t be any problem with me not using my real name. I would much rather see reasonable posts from anonymous posters, than people who trash others while using their real name (e.g. Ricky Taylor).
February 4th, 2007 at 5:21 pm
Moi and Anonymous;
You raise excellent points but let me put forth a contrasting viewpoint: By posting anonymously, there is no way for anyone to determine the credibility of the source.
For example, let’s say anonymous posts a blog or a comment that alleges that the Mayor of XYZ town has been skimming money from the town’s rainy day fund. Now, we could easily assume that someone in the town’s financial department is reporting this information anonymously to protect their job. But it’s equally easy to imagine the source could be a disgruntled employee with no knowledge of the financial details or a former opponent in a campaign.
There’s been a lot of discussion at various media outlets about the propriety of using “anonymous sources” and how it does a disservice to the readers. (Valerie Plame, anyone?)
If a person uses a pseudonym that can be traced back to an online presence (ie: wildstarryskies), then I’d give that greater consideration than a anonymous comment with an obviously fake email address.
Thoughts?