month I want to talk about how we use it and misuse it.
Some people operating out there in cyberspace have totally lost their sense of humor and civility. They're taking the fun out of it for the rest of us. I'm talking about the rude, ho
stile tone that's showing up too frequently in e-mail. C'mon guys, this is the medium that can knit us together. It doesn't give a fringe group license to spit digitally in other peoples' faces.
Don't get me wrong -- I'm all in favor of impassioned, even intemperate, debate and protest. I'm a New Yorker by birth and conviction. I prefer outspoken to agreeable, contravening conventional wisdom to confirming it.
What I don't like is when people threaten to e-mail everyone you know or work for if you don't do as they demand. Or people who accuse you of being corrupt or vicious if they disagree with you. Or people who conduct spamming campaigns, clogging your already-clogged inbox with hundreds of childish flame messages because you're not validating what they swore to their boss was true.
Now it's not enough to disagree with someone. Statements that are merely controversial become "such nonsense" or "totally ignorant" or "an embarrassment." Bathroom language, sometimes even violent language, comes in
to play. My first reaction was, "Oh, talk radio has come to the Net." But e-mail lacks even that rough democracy, in which callers must at least brave the listening public and risk on-the-air ridicule.
Make no mistake, the Net is going in two directions at once. More and more people are enmeshed in stimulating and lively e-mail threads, conferences, newsgroups, and chats.
Unfortunately, out here on the information highway, we also have a growing number of virtual drive-by shooters who are more interested in hit-and-run than in fighting for their point of view. I know, because I reply to most of these information vandals. I point out what I perceive as the fallacies in their arguments, own up to the parts I think they're right about, and attempt to further the dialogue. Almost without exception, I get no reply.
Our standard should be, "Would you say these things to a total stranger, face-to-face?" Certainly not in my experience, at least not if you wanted to continue the conversation. And that's j
ust the point. If e-mail is going to continue to grow into a conversational medium that dissolves distance and culture, it needs to have some level of civility. E-mail is a tool. Archimedes said, "Give me where to stand, and I will move the earth," not "Give me where to stand, and I will toss the earth around until I get my way."
It's not a new problem, nor one on a par with world hunger or AIDS. We certainly won't solve it with laws or e-mail filters or censorship. It's an issue of community: our community. It's time to exert some community pressure and make this behavior socially unacceptable -- in the same league as obscene phone calls.
A lot of highfalutin words have been written about the global village and the digital revolution. It's up to us to keep it from becoming the digital equivalent of CB radio. (A quick refresher course: This was a popular portable two-way radio medium of the 1970s that was choked by rude people who were making vulgar comments about female drivers). Refuse to be spammed
into silence! For those of you who must flame, be responsible enough to provide some light along with the heat.
If we're going to be the builders of a new technoculture, let's do it right.
Mark Schlack, Editor in Chief,
mschlack@bix.com
Peace on the Wired Planet
