Crowdsourcing norms of civility?

Global X, CC BY 2.0, flickr

A colleague just pointed me at a recent post at The Monkey Cage on crowdsourcing norms of civility in social media conversations. Go read it for yourself - it provokes some useful thinking, and links out to some good research - and then what I write below might make sense. :-)

I think that the two main findings, as summarized by Farrell, are partially unsurprising, but also significant, especially as they reflect the nature of the mechanisms of social media feedback. Up/downvotes are the bluntest possible feedback indicators - no nuance, pure affirmation/rejection - and as such, lend themselves quite excellently to overinterpretation. My tweet gets 35 favorites, and I feel personally validated - irrationally, I know, but I still feel it. My comment on a Chronicle article gets 35 downvotes, and I feel hurt - again, irrationally, but the reaction is there.

Ceteris paribus, that mechanism alone would tend to trigger, I think, a strong challenge reaction. What motivates you more to take the time and energy to engage in public discourse - the prospect of competing with contrary views, or the prospect of preaching to the choir?

Now mix in the finer-grained feedback mechanism of comments. At first glance, you'd think these would have a mitigating effect on the blunt-impact up/downvotes. But then consider how poorly, overall, we communicate in the written word, especially in online contexts. Comments can be no more nuanced than a "like"; they often reflect a respondent's own agendas and priorities, which are orthogonal to any consideration of the original poster at all; and they are often embedded within a pre-existing conversational structure which tends to promote a spiraling escalation of reaction.

I think that Wong is right - the problem, such as it is, is that his position tends to get borne out over timeframes that are too long for individuals. Sure, redditors may trend toward higher-level discourse under Wong's laissez-faire model - over generations, maybe. And if trolls can game such a system in the short-term to predominate and push out the non-trolls, that long-term gameplan is a dead strategy.

But beyond the explicit point of the article, I was really interested in considering the idea of reddit as a government. The criteria for identifying geopolitically-relevant entities have varied over time, right? Family-based, early on; geography-based, mostly; sometimes ideology-based (hello, Roman Catholic Church!); nowadays, increasingly corporation-based. As online spaces continue to merge into our meatspace in socially, economically, and politically salient ways, why would we imagine that online communities would be exempted ex hypothesi from geopolitical relevance? (for fun, Cory Doctorow, "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth" 2006). (for serious, interesting conversations around open-source governance - Doug Rushkoff's Open Source Democracy and spin-off/inspired projects like airesis.us, wematter.com, efficasync, the Shadow Parliament Project, and the broader "libre culture" conversation).

Jet-Lagged Thoughts.

Jet-lagged, because I've just returned from InstCon 2014 in Park City UT, and in spite of a full night's sleep (and then some!), this East-coast boy is not yet back in the usual rhythms of sleep/wake.

But it occurs to me that there's a sort of general theme relevant to some of the various things I've been thinking about lately -

• teaching, and the reasons I value it - and am frustrated by it;
• critical wariness of  my own responses to certain technologies;
• long-term considerations about edu systems' sustainability

That general theme, says my travel-addled brain this morning, is scale.

One (very vocal!) part of my internal dialogue is outraged at the claim that mere numbers should have any important, determining role in the nature and structure of how education goes. Education is essentially humanistic - its very essence, its raison d'être, is to cultivate and empower every individual qua individual to be creative, critical, engaged; to value principles of inquiry, and to live a life which actively employs these mental habits and commitments in a public space with others, fellow-citizens (locally and nationally) and fellow humans (globally). As the process where this happens, education absolutely must take as paramount the individual relations between teacher and student, the individual histories, strengths, character, goals, and habits of each student. When does education go bad? When we see students and teachers treated as interchangeable parts, judged by standardized exams or crammed into huge classrooms with no opportunity for personal contact. We need to be vigilant that numbers not creep into our decision-making about the heart and soul of education, because bean-counting and quantification may make life easy for bureaucrats and administrators somewhere, but they do nothing but insidiously subvert true learning.

So says Gerol-1.

So now let's think about something else.

• 317 million people in the U.S.
• 50 million students in public K-12, plus 22 million students in U.S. colleges/universities.
• trends in population growth, and in enrollment in our edu systems.

And here's where Gerol-2 says: Are you kidding me? How can you seriously claim, with some kind of Panglossian certainty, that the system as a whole will work well, simply if each individual classroom cultivates individual connections between a teacher and students? Fallacy of composition, anyone?

OK, so Gerol-2 is clearly a fan of speaking for rhetorical effect. But he may have some point. Or at least I haven't been able to shut him up yet. I find myself worrying: is the rhetoric of pro-individualistic education, and anti-"factory" education, actually sustainable as we try to educate massive numbers of people?

Do we actually have a commitment to a system of education? If so, how do we think and plan and create distribution and feedback mechanisms for that system without scalable practices?

Or maybe we should bite the bullet, if we want to be honest and consistent, and admit that each of us is really only interested in is making sure that my individual school, or my individual classroom, meets the needs of my students. In that case, Gerol-1 is all set: he can just build those personal connections with his few students each semester, and grumble about rubrics and standardized tests and outcomes and state-imposed parameters as a perpetually-imposed bureaucratic drag on what education should be, in a perfect world.

Hey, I warned you that I was jet-lagged. But if you care to jump in and let me know where I'm going wrong, I think it could be an interesting conversation.