"The Sinister March of Net Niceness"
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From Colin Rule's blog. August 2009 |
From Valleywag (warning: heavily airbrushed and quite cleavagey model picture after the link): "...that's the thing about being impolite online: it might be needlessly abrasive 95 times out of 100, but those other five times it's awesome, conveying fresh perspective readers would not have seen were it not for the cloak of anonymity. Cohen says we should make anonymity utterly shameful, except in cases where there is a "reasonable fear of retribution," but this sort of etiquette is basically just a way of regulating opinion, and runs counter to the rawness that has historically been one of the Web's great strengths. You could say the same thing about Wikipedia's new mechanisms for institutional control. Anonymous writers might not always absolutely need the secrecy the shroud themselves in, but they have good reason to want it.
Put another way, if we have to choose between prim scolds like Randy Cohen and impolitic ankle-biters like Fake Steve Jobs (anonymous for many months) or NYTPicker, we'll take the latter any day, even if the price is wading through tons of crap."
I don't think people should be required to be nice all the time. I'm all for free speech, and rawness is part of the deal -- sometimes the truth hurts. But I think each individual should have a pretty high mental bar that they have to clear before they are willing to engage in anonymous, ad hominem attacks. I agree that anonymity has its place, but those who engage in it for selfish, hurtful reasons should be ashamed. I think it's non-sensical to say "this sort of etiquette is basically just a way of regulating opinion" -- etiquette doesn't regulate anything. People should be embarrassed if they engage in this kind of thing without a good reason, and to say they shouldn't be embarrassed because they may censor themselves is to miss the point. I think individuals should censor themselves, but they shouldn't be censored. That's how etiquette works.
Biography
Colin Rule is currently director of dispute resolution for ebay.com.
Previously, Colin co-founded Online Resolution, an online dispute resolution (ODR) provider, in 1999 and served as its CEO (2000) and President (2001). Before this, Colin was General Manager of Mediate.com, the largest online resource for the dispute resolution field. Colin also worked for several years with the National Institute for Dispute Resolution in Washington, D.C. and the Consensus Building Institute in Cambridge, MA.
Colin has presented and trained throughout Europe and North America for organizations including the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, the Department of State, the International Chamber of Commerce, and the Center for Public Resources. He has also lectured and taught at UMass-Amherst, Bentley College, MIT, Southern Methodist University, the University of Ottawa, Lasell College, and Brandeis University.
Colin is the author of Online Dispute Resolution for Business, due for publication by Jossey-Bass in the second half of 2002. He has contributed more than 30 articles to prestigious ADR publications such as Consensus, The Fourth R, ACR News, and Peace Review. He authors the online conflict resolution column in ACResolution Magazine and serves as editor of ODRNews.com, a daily news resource chronicling developments in the ODR field. He holds a Master's degree from Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government in conflict resolution and technology, a B.A. in Peace Studies from Haverford College, and has completed advanced coursework in dispute resolution at the University of Massachusetts- Boston.
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