Government: Don't feed the trolls

Mark Bahnisch — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 01:48:59 +0000

The last couple of weeks have seen a fair bit of furore about those intertubes. Anna Bligh wrote to Facebook about the defacing of a couple of memorial sites for a child and a teenager who’d been murdered in Queensland. Nick Xenophon suggested an Internet Ombudsperson, a suggestion Kevin Rudd applauded. There’ve also been numerous controversies about high school students posting racist groups, or offensive ones (for instance, effectively calling for attacks on sex workers). All this no doubt warrants condemnation – but it’s also worth observing that only a certain subsection of offensive content (usually involving children in one way or other) comes to the attention of the media and politicians. Little outrage is directed to the much larger subset of racist groups on Facebook (which don’t happen to be set up by high school kids), or the everyday misogyny that permeates much of the online space.

There’s no doubt that there are problems with Facebook’s method of dealing with offensive content. But the fundamental errors in this debate are twofold:

(a) Social networking sites are far more akin to phone networks than a traditional publishing model. A huge multiplicity of users constantly and simultaneously post content. Unlike talking on a phone, it leaves a permanent trace, but it’s a much better analogy;

(b) The direction of causation is the wrong way round. It’s not that the internet encourages people to do dumb and wrong things. It’s that people do dumb and wrong things, and they do them on the internet too.

The noise coming from politicians, and the ‘solutions’, make one wonder whether they understand at all how social networking works. Part of the problem is one very easily resolved through taking more responsibility on the part of group creators for the little bit of the internet they set up, and using privacy and content management tools intelligently.

There’s an interesting take on all this from Colin Jacobs of Electronic Frontiers Australia, from whom I’ve borrowed the title of this post, and for a deeper examination of the issues, I’d also recommend the Oxford Internet Institute’s report on balancing freedom of speech and child protection online, which seeks to find some common ground between interlocutors who often seem to talk past one another.

Always on: the internet, social media, communications and everyday life

Mark Bahnisch — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 13:22:15 +0000

Mark Deuze pings how mediated so many aspects of our everyday lives now are – and how he deftly places this constant mediation – through email, mobile phones, the intertubes, and so much more – in its sociological context, leveraging off the work of Zygmunt Bauman. Some day, when I have time, I’ll have more to say about that, and there’s lots of nifty academic research – a fair bit from my colleagues at QUT’s Creative Industries Faculty – which is exploring many of the ramifications of everyday mediation. Loath as I normally am as a sociologist to believe the new new anything really is fundamentally new under the sun, I am starting to be convinced that a shift in the conditions of our everyday lives is taking place, though I’m totally unconvinced by claims that it’s “dumbing us down” or whatever.

It’s a real pity that the dead tree media still choose to frame all these complex and overdetermined shifts in “internet and technology evil” or “internet and technology brilliant” dichotomies – the latest, though by far one of the least egregious, being sleep deprivation and increased stress from social media and entertainment technologies – not, mind you, from the effective disappearance of any boundary between work and non-work for many folks, which may in fact be much more serious an issue. Laurel Papworth has a neat post satirising the latest “OMG!” meme, but I thought it might be interesting to throw it open for discussion and to treat it seriously – what are the downsides and upsides of being “always on”?

Larvatus Prodeo » moral panic

Government: Don't feed the trolls

Always on: the internet, social media, communications and everyday life