Seebach: Incivility, if tolerated on Internet, gets worse

Published April 14, 2007 at midnight

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When the Rocky Mountain News launched its print redesign in late January, we also made changes to the paper's Web site. For Commentary, which operates independently from the News department, that meant posting some letters and Speakout op-eds on the Web in addition to those that appear in the paper, and allowing reader comments.

These aren't blogs in the conventional sense, but they're managed with blog software, and they seem to be popular with readers. Letters, especially, draw hundreds of comments a week. So we face a problem shared by other blogs - how to keep the comments reasonably civil, without shutting off free-wheeling debate.

The New York Times ran a story Monday, "A call for manners in the world of nasty blogs," about efforts by publisher Tim O'Reilly and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales to establish guidelines for good conduct on blogs. I don't expect that to get very far, but O'Reilly has written about it at http://radar.oreilly .com/archives/200 7/04/code_of _conduct.html if you're interested in how the debate is shaping up.

Here are some things Commentary has experimented with that a diligent reader of the Letters comments might have observed (no, I'm not giving away any secrets). Several different people look after the blog, at various times and for various purposes, so there is no single arbiter of good taste.

Most commenters use screen names, which is fine, but occasionally someone will appropriate another person's screen name for a post that might be embarrassing to the person who usually uses that name. If we find out about it - if the person thus "spoofed" puts up an indignant comment disavowing the false post, say - we verify the real user's comment and mark the false post as a spoof, saying [impostor's post removed] or or some such thing, depending on who does it. Then it doesn't happen again for a while.

We're concerned about vulgar language, not because we're unfamiliar with those words - it's a newsroom, after all - but because readers are put off by vulgarity. (And besides, I tend to think that people who can't talk without being vulgar are unlikely to have anything valuable to say, unless I have personal evidence to the contrary.)

After we admonished one commenter he (or she) replied, "Hey, Editor, did someone pee in your corn flakes this morning? I didn't say anything close to what even the FCC would disallow. Anyway . . ." and went on to repeat his comment in a slightly more subdued manner.

But we're not the FCC, and if we invite you to come sit on our porch for a while and watch the world go by, we can disinvite you, too, if you are making the space uncomfortable for others.

One of our commenters whom I asked for advice wrote this, "I work with criminals (parole and probation) and the way I handle them in group therapy is by 'outing' them in front of the therapy group. With that in mind, when there is a note that says, for example, [*** should mind his manners], everybody grins and chuckles except the guy who got the note."

O'Reilly thinks people should not tolerate on the Internet conduct they wouldn't tolerate in the physical world. That might be a little too much to expect. "Flaming" has been a part of Internet culture almost as long as there has been an Internet. But I think he's got a point when he says, "I believe that civility is catching, and so is incivility. If it's tolerated, it gets worse."

Linda Seebach is an editorial writer for the Rocky. She can be reached by telephone at 303-954-2519 or by e-mail at seebach@RockyMountainNews.com.

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