The Internet began, first and foremost, as a collaboration tool. ARPAnet was designed for scientists to be able to connect with each other via asynchronous text message (aka e-mail) and change the world with discoveries.
Then, as networks of networks began cropping up and coming together, the promise got even broader. By the 1980s and early 1990s, you could e-mail someone (or many someones) all over the world even if you weren’t a scientist — even if you were a home hobbyist with a slow modem dialing up into the night.
The promise was great — the Internet was a communication tool that could Democratize, that could bring populations and communities together. When the web came along, it wasn’t very long until the technology was adapted for bulletin boards (web-based BBSes, essentially) and threaded discussion systems.
It seemed as though the promise was becoming real — anybody with a computer could participate in open discussions about a variety of topics, learning and sharing knowledge along the way.
Today, though, where are we? There are some pockets of such discussion around. But the far more common trend is the other direction. As an example, yesterday, Popular Science announced they were shutting off comments altogether on their site.
Their logic? Comments were bad for science. Why? Because anybody with a computer could participate in open discussions about a variety of topics, not learning but sharing opinion along the way.
Almost the same as the promise, but not exactly. And herein lies the conundrum: Everybody is entitled to their opinion, and in our country at least, they’re entitled to speak it. But there is no entitlement to a forum, and no entitlement to having other people listen. When we are increasingly self-selecting our information sources to conform to our own worldview, we have less and less patience for viewpoints diametrically opposed to our own.
So what does this have to do with technology? Part of it is unintended consequences — building a system that allows for basically unfettered communication in order to break down barriers for learning also breaks down barriers for opinion.
But another part is a reminder about technology’s limits. Few would argue (certainly not me) that the fault here is the technology, or that widespread networked computing is a bad thing. Rather, there’s something more societal that gives us values that permit (if not encourage) anonymous sniping and/or closed-minded trolling.
And there’s not much that technology can do about that.