Talk:Mutual respect

From Blogging

[edit] Heart of the code: mutual respect

From Gerald Duffy: My words, my voice, my real name.

Key concept missing in the code so far: mutual respect. Can’t be legislated but it underlies our best hopes for Internet discourse:

Freely exchanged opinions/views/perspectives/information on any subject

Civility/decency (note: not the opposite of indecency)

Contention with manners

Freedom of speech comes with responsibility and accountability. But, likely our founders did not have vicious, nasty, rude, anonymous, ad hominem attacks in mind. With some notable exceptions, however, anonymity is protected under our 1st amendment rights [1].

Some things for bloggers/site owners to consider:

Actively promote freedom of speech (a great American contribution to the world we can be proud of) – but expect mutual respect. 1st amendment rights are at the heart of WWW at its best

Appeal to contributors’ better selves and ask them to respect the cybercratic oath: Do No Harm. If they insist on playing dirty, delete their content until they’re willing to play by the rules. The "FOAD" in the entry above this one makes it a good candidate for deletion.

Ask contributors to take the living-room test: would they say that in someone else’s living room?

Living-room test may be expecting too much. Alternative approach: conduct the town-hall test: would the contributor be willing to stand up at a community meeting and say that? A short pep talk: Sure, speak your mind, your heart, your passion, but remember you have to live with these people (which we do, even on the Internet: we are more than our pixels and bytes). When you open your mouth, you define yourself. If you do it with respect, people nearly always listen.

(Only half tongue-in-cheek) As a public service, create special mud-pond blogs/forums etc – free-for-all, full contact zones especially for trolls. Encourage anonymous insults, the nastier the better. After a few pig-piles with each other, they’ll probably get bored with insulting one another and find some other outlet for the vitriol/nastiness. Incidentally, this could be a source of great entertainment for non-trolls.