Surreal Notions

A recent article on ReadWriteWeb hit on a topic that I’ve been thinking about quite a bit lately.  Oh FriendFeed, What You Really Need is Accountability.  Can trolls, even spam, be minimized with accountability?

This is a problem that has come up many times in the last few years. In fact, there are a couple social networks I’ve worked on that discussed rating-style solutions.  I, ultimately, agree with the article that this is a problem of accountability, but I don’t know if something like rating really solves it.  After all, we don’t really go around rating people in the real-world.  We might internally denote good or bad experiences, but I doubt many people have given me a solid one to five star rating (not counting the occasional employer of course).

Perhaps, the underlying problem is in the technology itself. We simply don’t internalize text the way we do other forms of communication. We’re not wired that way biologically.  Text is a somewhat dehumanizing medium, which leads to a perception of no accountability. Rating systems might work as a stopgap measure, but probably won’t create a lasting solution (after all, people will game any system given the opportunity).  Crowd sourcing does have limitations, because crowds have a tendency of turning into mobs.

I suspect this is a growing pain of social media (or even the Internet as a whole). Consider the rapid increase in available printing presses during the mid-18th century. The pamphlets and propaganda published by our founding fathers wouldn’t exactly pass muster today. They frequently “trolled” one another via call and response on their respective papers (go back and read some if you have time, it’s quite entertaining when they break down to name calling). The only difference is there was a week or more lag between call and response. Even up through the early 20th century, news papers were the premier form of mass communication and left much to be desired (take Hurst of example, modifying news to sell product is hardly new). Hurst famously said, “Give me the pictures, I’ll give you the war.”  Today, responses occur within seconds and the negative feedback loop becomes an almost self-sustaining torrent of hate (and then somebody calls you Hitler).

My point is this, it took us the better part of 150 years to develop some form of decorum within the modern paper medium – and that’s debatable.

What if our technology outpaced our social development too much? I’m just thinking out loud here, but these solutions presume that people are generally polite and respectful. However, that might be a construct of physical interaction… a throw back to our biological need to avoid pissing off the alpha male , being the weakling left behind or getting injured by a predator. Those are survival instincts I can get behind.  Text, whether on the Internet or in print, removes you quite a bit from the consumer of the information. Without the gates inherent to print (cost and risk of using limited resources to print and distribute something), perhaps we just begin to realize how twisted people really are. Ayn Rand would be proud (although I’m more of a John Stewart Mills fan… never cared for Rand much).

Perhaps we just need to learn a new decorum of respect in an age when publishing is freely available to anyone. It took more than 150 years for news paper reporters and press owners to learn some respect (and they occasionally forget it still today). We don’t have that kind of time to figure this one out though. Once society begins to internalize social media and the Internet as an extension of yourself, things like trolling will be limited to people that actually behave this way (e.g., frat brothers). I don’t think simple ratings will a) create an accurate enough picture of the interactions or b) effectively minimize trolling in the first place.