Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day,something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one elsewould be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to be always part of unanimity.
A fine sentiment, but if there’s one thing that Technorati teaches us, it’s that it’s pretty dang hard to read something NOBODY else is reading or to say anything SOMEBODY else isn’t saying these days. I grabbed the quote this morning from an RSS feed of quotes of the day from my Google home page, and it’s a pretty sure bet that somebody else has done the same.
And you know what? In the words of Laurie Anderson, “Oh Boy. Right. Again.” A quick technorati search shows the quote used here at the Blonde Monologues, here at Musings for grown up girls, here at Just me, here at The Watchtower of Destruction, here at tumbléo, Who am I and Why am I here? and Perma Smile — all within the last eight hours, along with 900 others.
There’s a scary, Orwellian side of this, of course: the more that the web becomes our primary information resource, the more that the deep channels of popular content widen and deepen into GroupThink.
But there’s the happy hippy Age of Aquarius side as well. Collective conversations can mean collective solutions, collective priorities, and collective decisions to change the way things are. Look at Sierragate (as John Lebkowsky calls it). As regular readers know, I’m a huge fan of Kathy Sierra. (See this cap? See this feather?) But when the news first broke that she was canceling appearances out of a fear of attack, all because a clearly adolescent idiot posted a death threat and misogynist images of her, I felt sympathy, but I also thought she was being a bit naive.
Perhaps because I see militaristic drivel and threats about Greenpeace every day (“I’m going to finish the job those French F*s started when they tried to blow up your ship”) and Beavis and Butthead content on our forums and in response to our news items, I reckoned this was simply something Kathy should recognize as the price of having an opinion, and one of the downperks of fame.
But the debate that has ensued has set off every “Where’s The Fire” alarm I’ve seen, and we, the blog/borg collective (along with viewers of CNN, apparently), are actually having a healthy discussion about whether this really IS just the way things have to be, and whether any of us should accept the abusive noise of the nose-picking fringe or if there’s something that ought to be done.
The conversation itself will have an impact, apart from any actions that arise. Simply by raising the question of how we can be more civilized, we civilize ourselves. When I read about evolutionary psychologists concluding that as a species, we’re less violent today than we have ever been in history, I can only take heart that the lesson is a hopeful one: We do learn. Bad experiences like war and misogynist attacks, when exposed and talked about openly, eventually lessen their likelihood of occurring again. We may be talking about evolutionary timescales, and for activists of all cuts this is too slow, and so we provoke society into conversations about these things as ways to speed up that process. 30 milliion people out in the streets around the world didn’t stop the Iraq war, but it was the biggest showing of anti-war resistance in history. And next time it may be 50. And next time it may work. Kathy Sierra may not stop hate comments on the internet by refusing to speak in public, but the controversy she has provoked may be one of the snowflakes that eventually becomes an avalanche. This is my morning rose-tinted hope, that Atlantis and Shambala are cities of the future, not of our past.
And while reaching into new areas of exploration does require we all split up and maintain our diversity by reading and writing eclectically, there’s also a need to jump into the unanimity of our global commons, and join the discussion. It’s good for the soul of the planet.
technorati tags:violence, kathy_sierra, sierra, uniqueness
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4 Comments to 'Can we talk? Evolutionary psychology, Sierragate, and Borg vs Aquarius'
April 5, 2007
[...] markomundo wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptRead, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day,something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one elsewould be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to be always part of unanimity. … [...]
April 6, 2007
Hmm. I agree that adolescent shouting happens a lot on the web, but you’re right, it’d be great if we could change that.
When the Iraq war was starting I found an odd forum populated by US Hawks and Arab Nationalists. It was full to the brim with insults and hate. As an experiment I started wading in pointing out that poster x was racist, poster y an anti-semite and so on.
The amazing thing was how quickly people backed away from their stated hatreds. Some would debate a little but most seemed to retreat in the face of someone prepared to express and enforce some social norms (you don’t get to go round being openly racist). I doubt I changed any minds, but it did clean up the space a little.
The other odd thing about this forum was that people disagreeing would start with insults and only move on to debating the issue once that failed. It was really odd, the only way to elicit an intelligent response was to begin with a volley of abuse and then make your point. If you only did one or the other you got nothing useful back.
Still, social norms on the internet are something we need more of…
April 10, 2007
> The conversation itself will have an impact, apart from any actions that arise.
It’s happening! And in fact, actions are arising:
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/04/draft_bloggers_1.html
Good for Kathy Sierra, this kind of discussion has been needed for a long, long time.
July 17, 2009
Fine sentiment but if there´s one thing that Technorati teaches us itâs that it’s pretty dang hard to read something NOBODY else not reading or to say anything SOMEBODY else isnât saying these days?
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