Internet civility badges: because mean people say mean things

Gerard Van der Leun's always a pleasure to read. Here he is on the unique happy-go-lucky world of the techbloggers that has been so rudely interrupted:

These technobloggers do the heavy lifting for the manufactuers of everything with chips, and are hence beloved by all and sundry in the industry. Unlike political bloggers they are long on cool but light on ideas; lighter still on abuse in their comments: "Zune sucks." "So does Vista" "Get a Mac." "Get a life." is pretty much the extent of it. We live in a world that wobbles on the brink of catastrophe, but they graze placidly in a realm in which everything can be solved by just a little more battery life, a recumbent bicycle, and a hybrid car with a bumper strip that reads "My other car is a computer." (Note: I did that one in 1990. Don't ask.)

All in all, this tempest in a capture buffer is just a page out of Herman Hesse's masterful Glass Bead Game in which is foreseen the Age of the Feuilleton, "an intellectually superficial and decadent period when middlebrow journalism replaced serious reading and reflection" -- only Hesse could not have foreseen MySpace.

People in foreign lands are calling for the death of this American college professor because of things he wrote on the internet. I urge him in that post, as I have in prior ones, to buy a gun and learn how to use it. And I'm serious. I gave the same advice to another blogger, Jeff Goldstein, who had bizarre sexual threats issued against his child by a deranged blog-stalker. These incidents are even over and above, I think, the usual torrent of filth and hatred that flows through the inboxes of Michelle Malkin, who would be well advised to brush up her marksmanship as well. There are dozens more incidents I can think of involving harassment, intimidation, threats, libel, egregious obscenity, and the like against political bloggers--mostly on the right, though those are the cases I'm familiar with and I don't deny we have our share of crazies at the fringe.

This little blog isn't important enough to merit death threats, but I occasionally get called a terrorist or unprintable names. On the list of frustrations and concerns I have about blogging, those don't really scratch the surface.

Much of this comes with the territory. There's the whole "disintermediation" thing, in which you feel free to rant through the web at people you can't see in real life. And as far as the worst stuff goes, evil and vile people don't take well to being criticized or investigated, and if bloggers are turning over the right rocks, some nasty things are going to crawl out.

So the idea that we can regulate our comments with a series of little civility badges made me laugh out loud when I read it in the SF Chronicle. Civility would be nice, and I encourage it. But people who think it's entirely acceptable to e-mail a stranger to call her a c-word aren't going to be deterred by little gold stars--let alone the death-threat stalkers and the fatwa boys. What a lovely little paradise these folks must live in to think it will.

I think there's a parallel here to foreign policy, which I will let you draw for yourselves.

PS: One of the guidelines for civility mentioned in that Chronicle article is a good one: Taking care of conflicts in private. I've seen any number of stupid blog feuds started by public postings either in someone's comments or on the complainant's blog, usually about stuff that would be handled best by an e-mail saying "Listen, I don't mean to be a killljoy, but don't you think..." Blog wars are fun, but they're destructive and harmful to the medium. Debate is one thing, but if some personal disagreement can be hashed out privately, it probably should.