Last week, Clive Hamilton denounced “an ugly culture of dogmatic and belligerent interventions [that] now dominates social and political debate on the Internet”.
Anyone who’s spent time exploring the wilder realms of Blogostan knows the culture of which he speaks. The Pure Poison crew monitors the more egregious proponents of “You suck!”-blogging in Australia, but the genus seems best habituated to the American environment.
Many of the biggest political blogs in the US rests upon the personality of an individual demagogue, which is then embraced and amplified by an army of acolytes, along the lines of the old poem:
Big fleas have little fleas,
Upon their backs to bite ‘em
And little fleas have lesser fleas,
and so, ad infinitum.
The dawn of the Internet in the mid-nineties saw a flurry of web utopianism, in which publications like Wired promised we’d soon be governing ourselves from a virtual public square in which we’d parade like digital Athenians, while the stockmarket made us all effortlessly rich. It’s that which seems to be Clive’s target — but his response equally rests on a very Wired kind of technological determinism, and so merely inverts the picture.
The obvious response involves pointing to the sheer expanse of the Internet, which is now sufficiently large that you can find almost anything you want. Yes, many blog debates turn nasty, but for every Little Green Footballs, there’s a Larvatus Prodeo, on which scores of people debate with remarkably civility. Why, even the most erudite arguments of the academia are increasingly taking place online, as traditional academic publishing gives way to more and more online refereed journals.
The Internet, in other words, is as malleable as other technologies, and holding it to account for Andrew Bolt amounts to blaming electricity for the electric chair.
Clive identifies the culture of online anonymity as a major culprit poisoning the democratic potential of the online environment. There’s probably something in that, but many of the nastiest hatebloggers post openly under their own names. In fact, most of the time when blog debates get vicious, they do so along pretty predictable real world fault lines.
“Is there really any doubt that women writing on the Web are subject to more abuse than men,” asked Salon‘s Joan Walsh a few years ago, “simply because they’re women?”
Female bloggers get hated on more than men, gays suffer more than straights and so depressingly on, with, of course, Indigenous Australians even more underrepresented online than elsewhere. In other words, most of the problems with Internet culture reflect deeper social issues — and that’s where we need to look to understand why the net hasn’t fulfilled its astonishing potential.
The growth of the Internet coincided with a massive expansion of the white-collar workforce. More and more of us work behind desks rather than with our hands; office jobs have lost the status they once had and become instead increasingly routinised. The old media proprietors consciously designed their products around the rhythms of the working day. The broadsheet implied a reasonably leisurely middle-class breakfast, with the news spread out over the table; the tabloid was constructed so you could read on the bus on the way to the factory. The more successful online formats recognise that most of use the Internet at work, and we generally do so when we’re bored. It’s not a coincidence that Crikey turns up in the middle of the day, when you’re ready for a break from whatever you’re supposed to be doing.
As Clive Hamilton himself has documented, the tremendous social transformation over the last decades involves more than a shift from dull blue-collar jobs to dull white-collar ones. In 2000, Robert Putnam famously described how Americans were increasingly “bowling alone”, alienated from political parties and trade unions, adrift from club membership and sporting teams in a society comprised of an aggregation of lonely individuals. The statistics are the same in Australia, with fewer and fewer people belonging to political parties, trade unions or churches. In 1975, the Liberal Party boasted 130,000 members; by 1990, it was only 69,000. Union membership has declined from 49% in 1982 to 23% in 2002.
If we’re not involved in any collective projects in the real world, it’s not so surprising that participatory democracy doesn’t necessarily flourish online. The social connectivity of Facebook or Twitter can’t compensate for a general social atomisation. The Internet offers a truly magical potential, but if you’re bored and frustrated and surreptitiously surfing rather than working, you’re not exactly well situated to exploit it. Yes, we could be downloading the complete works of Shakespeare. But most of the time, we’re looking for diversion rather than edification, and so we prefer LOLcats to Lear.
The Internet reflects, in other words, the way we live now. Yes, it has problems. But the solution doesn’t lie with more censorship. It lies with changing the real world.
I agree with Bernard that the problem is not so much the peculiarities of the internet as a means of communicating but our our habits of social and political respect and our poorly practiced arts of civil social debate. I do wonder too if part of the problem with excessive aggression (and verbosity) on the internet is because we are still experiencing the flushes of pent up frustration and anger at people being effectively excluded from any formal channels of political and social influence. The internet is still acting as the main outlet for that frustration while we have yet to come up with better, regularized forms of political participation – where people are taken seriously and in which norms expect people to act accordingly. At the moment, we act more like teenagers still treated as deficient (by the left and the right) and still shouting to be heard.
On top of that, it has to be remembered that it was not so long ago that talking about politics and religion/ethics between strangers (let alone family) was very bad form and was to be avoided at all costs for fear of the destructive social conflict it could create. You only have to think of the race riots in the UK and the USA in the 1950s and 1960s and the hatred between the Protestants and Catholics to realise aggression towards others is not something confined to our time, nor does it have some intrinsic association with ‘crass individualism’ (in fact i would say group affiliation practices are often far worse). We should also be thankful that v internet aggression itself doesn’t draw blood. It might of course, like videos, help to foster ‘rool’ aggression elsewhere but unlike videos at least you can talk back and directly counter prejudice, demagogic lies, hateful speech etc.
You are spot on Jeff. The crass individualism of the 2nd half of the last century has driven us apart. We no longer make decisions for the common good, and our competiveness has has all too often focused on good outcomes for the individual.
Not only do political parties have a decline in membership, almost all organisations have suffered the same fate, Scouts, Churches, Sporting clubs etc.
Maybe the ‘good life’ that enables you to view all things from the comfort of the lounge room ; the ability to have independent transport; to go to footy and tell the players and the umpires what they should have done, rather than to get involved and getting our hands dirty, are but symptons of our malaise.
Let’s hope that the economic downturn and the changing weather patterns will change our focus?
We desperately need a different mind set to the one that is already apparent in tackling these issues which I believe, are the outcomes of that crass individualism that has no concern for others or the environment.
It does seem that it takes catastrophes of enormous proportions to change direction.
I strongly agree with Clive Hamilton’s point about anonymity, if that’s how you spell it. True not everyone can have a law degree or know about risks of defamation but some basic do’s and don’t’s should be in every free license to use the web in your weeties packet.
Take for instance Allende’s Popular Unity Government overthrown by neo Nazi fascists 11 Sept 1973 – this was the culmination of some years of egregious defamations by the conservative press. That’s not civil society, or free speech, that’s hate and lies. A good reference is Joan Jara’s: Victor: An unfinished song.
You need good transparency of identity in a civil society for real accountability. And yes you need effective defamation laws. Take the example of the Jewish Anti Defamation League. There are probably a range of minority groups who could do with a similar body.
So not for me the pseudonyms and handles. At one point the peanut gallery targeted my blog on their hero Tim Blair. So I invited them to keep at it because it provided a useful dossier evidencing The Rabid. It stopped cold as some wiser counsel prevailed. TB asked for a correction and I obliged with a clarification as such.
I noticed recently Bolt used the same tactic of alleging abusive tendencies against a traditional foe. A self serving situation by Bolter but the tactic is valid one for outing a genuinely abusive organised lobby.
It seems anon defamation on the web can damage the smearer if handled the right way too. But a thick skin to begin with always helps.
I dunno Jeff. I agree with you but I’m also of the view that one of the strengths and weaknesses of the internet is that the snarkiest thrive. Those most capable of communicating with a combination of insulting effectiveness and command of facts and reason tend to do best. It means logical argument can be overwhelmed by wit and snideness and personal abuse, but I’m not sure that’s too different to the alleged, so-called “rool world”. Clive appeared to be of the view that snark predominated on the internet and not reasoned discussion, and that’s pretty much what you’d expect I guess. But I still feel strongly that if you can’t back up your arguments with wit, appropriate aggression and a capacity to identify your interlocutor’s weak point and zero in on it, then you might think about being careful of what sites you frequent. A bit like the rool world, I guess.