I happened to be listening to Richard Bacon on Radio 5 Live this afternoon. One of the topics he covered was the recent flaming and trolling incidents on Twitter. A couple of times I thought that he or one of his contributors was going to point out that abusive behaviour has always been an unwelcome feature of “computer mediated communication” (CMC), but this was never explicitly stated. One of his contributors suggested that by improving (ICT) education, such abuse and bullying could be eradicated within a couple of generations.
Sadly, abusive behaviour has always seemed to be a feature of whatever technological mechanism has used to support CMC. Its roots can be traced far back before Twitter, Facebook and even the world-wide web made an appearance. As such, it seems unlikely to me that poor education alone is to blame for the current outbreak – after all, access to CMC in the early days was restricted to people who would have had excellent educations. It would also be wrong to think that the current high-profile incidents are uncommon – after all, I’ve also suffered from flaming and trolling in the past, as have many, many others.
Indeed, Kiesler, Zubrow, Moses and Geller note in their 1985 paper(*) which investigated affect in CMC this message posted by the Defense Communications Agency onto ARPANET (from which the internet eventually sprang):
27 Jul 82 ARPANET-BBOARDS at MIT-ML Due to past problems with messages deemed in bad taste by "the authorities", messages sent to this address are manually screened (usually, every couple of days) before being remailed to the BBoards (FILE:PS:APRINT.TXT.1).
In the same paper, Kiesler, Zubrow, Moses and Geller concluded that their experiments with CMC demonstrated:
… people who communicated by computer evaluated each other less favourably than did people who communicated face to face, they felt and acted as though the setting was more impersonal, and their behaviour was more impersonal. These findings suggest that computer mediated communication … elicits asocial or unregulated behaviour.
The academic language they use is somewhat opaque, but I believe they’re saying that the sort of behaviour on Twitter reported over the last week is a (possibly inevitable) feature of CMC. If they’re right, then no kind of automated “report abuse” feature, however simple to use, is ever going to help to address the root causes of the problem.
Instead, it would seem to me that the only way this issue can be addressed is to bring it out of the realm of CMC altogether. Only the use (or the threat of the use) of non-CMC would seem to be effective at modifying aberrant behaviour.
The positive impact of Mary Beard’s threat to “tell the mother” of her abuser and similar experiences recounted by other contributors to Richard Bacon’s show this afternoon suggest to me that “real world, real consequences” approaches are the best way to implement the social change we need, rather than ever more “buttons” or “education” sessions being prescribed as a remedy.
(*) Affect in Computer-Mediated Communication: An Experiment in Synchronous Terminal-to-Terminal Discussion – published in Human-Computer Interaction, 1985, Volume 1 pp. 77-104