Stop Cyberbullying: Is A Zero Violence Pledge The Right Way To Go?

The blogger Ron E., who writes at Brandcurve, proposes a policy of "zero violence blogging".

While I admire his sentiments, I don't agree.  I haven't searched through my own blog, but I'm willing to bet I might have said something like, "I could strangle him/her".   Or "He/She needs to be hit with the clue stick".  Or any number of other figures of speech rooted in violence. 

A friend's kid was put on "in school suspension" the other day for "aggression and violence".  What did this child do?  Using a scented marker, the child drew on a teacher's assistant.  Oh, and the child is under 7 years old.

Don't get me wrong -- I think the words and images used against Kathy Sierra went well beyond a limit.    I think Eliot Stein's postings were unseemly and hurtful.

But I also think that all human behavior comes in a spectrum, and we divide behaviors along that spectrum in culturally-determined ways.  Lately, the dividing line between "normal" and "/aggressive/violent / dangerous " have been drawn too fine for my world view.

Again,  I am not minimizing the threat made to Kathy Sierra.  One commenter hoped for her virtual decapitation, and that the perpetrator would ejaculate into the wound. This is well beyond  any limit.

At  Stop Cyberbullying, David Weinberger has  a draft list of  what would be included in a "No Bullies" pledge.

It is definitely a work in progress, and as David says:

I like having various flavors because what you think of bullying may be to me tolerable behavior. E.g., I wouldn't pull a comment because someone called someone else an asshole. I wouldn't encourage it, but I don't count that as intolerable bullying. Likewise, ad hominem arguments are fallacious but not offensive enough to me (in general) that I'd invoke Rule 8 and pull the post. There's lots of gray in this area. So, I think we should be able to say with some precision what sort of behavior we won't tolerate.

This also gets at what may be another difference between us. I don't want to come up with a code telling people how to behave. I want for us to come up with a way of clarifying the codes (or "rules of engagement") people already have.

I've been thinking about ritual verbal aggression (remember, my undergraduate training was in anthropology).  It's most familiar in the United States as "Yo Mama", "playing the dozens",  "snapping" and latterly, as "trash talk".  Flyting is the word for the same behavior in ancient Germanic and Icelandic cultures;  fanciful and outrageous rhetoric among the cowboys of the Old West -- I am seeing a pattern here.

I've also been thinking about the post in my blog that has attracted the most problematic commenters.  That would be The Riot at Ivy Ridge.  Most of the commenters were themselves inmates at the Academy at Ivy Ridge (AIR), and many express themselves with a great deal of profanity and anger at their experiences while at AIR.   (Looking back over the comments, I realize I've missed quite a few profanities.  Many of the commenters express a desire to do violence to AIR staff, or having perpetrated physical violence while in the program.

The short version: I don't think a prescriptive answer is the solution.

To be continued later -- my internet access is about to be shut off

 

Comments

[Rhea]

I want to add my two cents that cyberbullying is simply another expression of the woman-hating that permeates our culture. The Internet is home to a multi-billion-dollar pornography industry. If there was ever a group of second-class citizens it is women. We should get to the root of the problem.

[Kelly Christopherson]

Liz, I don't necessarily agree that cyberbullying is all women hating but whom ever it targets, it is wrong. I've seen a great number of comments about different blogs or videos that should not have been allowed. I don't think we professionalize it or anything like that but, instead, we continue to put a focus on those who are doing such things and root them out. We seem to have outbreaks of conscience when looking at someone in the wrong way is bullying then it drops off while some other social issue tops the charts for awhile. Society is full of bullies and until society decides that this behaviour is not acceptable, they will continue to create problems for the bullied. What we are discussing is much larger than the internet or blogs. This is a "how we treat other people" issue that comes right down to a societal discussion about people interactions. We can root out some of those who are offensive but we don't all have the same definition of what is acceptable - so back we go. Interesting view and good discussion starter.