7 ms·

Teaching Civility: Two Daring Assignments

57 points by nkzednan 12y ago

qsymmachus 12y ago
Interesting article, though it's essentially a extension of the the concept of "filter bubbles" into the social sphere (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble). I question the hypothesis that the internet is uniquely responsible for the formation of filter bubbles – "cultural or ideological bubbles" can be formed a variety of ways, and have been forming for all of human history. Having said that, technology may accelerate this process, or lower the barriers required to connect with like-minded people, for better or worse.
- randallsquared 12y ago
  So you agree with the article that "[...] the Internet isn’t the main culprit (the trend began in the 1960s), [...]"? I would argue that even if the internet didn't start the trend, online communication has been an enormously more efficient technology for one-dimensional community.
  - qsymmachus 12y ago
    Ah, I missed that line. That only pushes the timeline back 40 years though. I still chafe at the idea that this is a uniquely modern problem.
    - mokus 12y ago
      I completely agree, but is it really the point being argued? Perhaps the issue is not that there are bubbles at all, but that where there were previously larger bubbles shared by multiple people, there now tends to be one bubble per person, nucleated around the work of an external entity (a search engine's statistical analysis) poorly understood by the individuals it's affecting. Not that I would concede that it's a worse situation than preceded it, just that it may be the qualitative difference of the bubbles being personal that people are referring to. If anything, it seems like a better situation overall, and I'd rather emphasize the fact that large-scale telecommunications has made it much more possible to escape the "filter bubble" of the people you live and interact with on a daily basis. Even if you're just escaping into a new bubble of your own, that bubble is naturally much more permeable due to its smaller size and greater number of neighbor-bubbles, leading to more effective diffusion of ideas throughout the foam as a whole. I speculate that this is an important positive long-term effect but comes with a lot of short-term pains.
fiatmoney 12y ago
Why has "community engagement" broken down? The author phrases it in terms of "omg kids and their cell phones, lol" but it's at least worth contemplating: - there was a massive campaign of neighborhood destruction from post-WW2 era to perhaps the mid 1990s, resulting in atomization, suburbanization, and quasi-military occupation of the remainder. There is a robust hypothesis that city living is at the root of civic engagment and that, eg, the Great Migrations explain the timing of the civil rights movement. Suburbanization is basically that in reverse. The atomization that happens when you geniunely can't trust your neighbors is as well. - "civic engagement" of a kind retrospectively judged to be "wrong" now goes on your Permanent Record. It's potentially unsafe to organize to do many meaningful things. - major institutions have lost their ability to be as exclusionist as they historically felt necessary to prevent entryism that fundamentally changes the nature of the institution. Instutions historically leading "civic engagment" become ineffective or lose their original purpose. - relentless focus on vacant aggregation-friendly metrics amongst our elite. You can put "volunteer hours" on a spreadsheet, thus, you get the optimal number of "volunteer hours", rather than civic engagment per se. Elite high school & college-age populations simply lack time for meaningful civic engagement, most of which is indistinguishable on a spreadsheet from "hanging out" - ironically, "chilling on the agora" is essentially what civic engagement breaks down to.
- cbd1984 12y ago
  > there was a massive campaign of neighborhood destruction ... driven by the fact most people who lived in cities, pre-WWII, didn't live in nice gentrified neighborhoods with fixed-up brownstones and Local Character. They lived in slums with crappy, run-down tenements and whatever you call what happens when you shove as many people as possible into as little room as you can bribe someone to let you get away with. Crime and disease, that's it. Having a GI Bill education, a car which let you move even if the trolley schedule said you stayed put, and a house with a yard where your kids don't end up in roving gangs sounded pretty damn good. It sounded like the American Dream. > There is a robust hypothesis that city living is at the root of civic engagment and that, eg, the Great Migrations explain the timing of the civil rights movement. To be clear, I agree with all this. My point is that it's important to maintain historical perspective, lest we fall into the trap of imagining that people from the past weren't reacting to comprehensible forces. Yes, some of those forces came down to frank racism, but others were as I mentioned above, and ignoring the good reasons while emphasizing the bad ones is not only an insult to history, it's a stumbling block to understanding the present. > major institutions have lost their ability to be as exclusionist as they historically felt necessary to prevent entryism that fundamentally changes the nature of the institution. So... social clubs have to let in blacks, now? Is that what you're saying? > relentless focus on vacant aggregation-friendly metrics amongst our elite. You can put "volunteer hours" on a spreadsheet, thus, you get the optimal number of "volunteer hours", rather than civic engagment per se. If you don't have rules, you have favoritism. If you do have rules, you have rules lawyering. If you have rules which are up to interpretation, you don't have rules.
quanticle 12y ago
Has the good professor considered the fact that the sneering condescension of his hard no texting/no e-mailing rules encourages the very breakdown in civility that he's studying? At one point the landline telephone was the cause of the very same moral panic that people are having about texting and cell phones. It was thought that having instantaneous voice communication would erode the "civility" of letter writing. Social rules change as the means of communication change. Attempting to preserve social rules at one period of time, whether it's 1890 or 1990 is foolhardy.
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  He's not saying that texting and emailing are problematic in themselves, but that he has a problem with people constantly fiddling with their mobile devices while in his lecture. That impedes his ability to do his job, and short-changes the students who do want to engage with him. I find it equally irritating if people are messing with their phones in a movie theater. It's not that I want to limit their use of the internet, as that I don't want to be distracted by flashing objects in my peripheral vision when I'm trying to focus on a screen. If you want to text at the same time you're watching the movie then go sit in the back row where it won't impose upon other people. Civility is not a matter of one technology being better than another, but of not being an ass towards the people in your immediate vicinity.
  - quanticle 12y ago
    >short-changes the students who do want to engage with him I don't see how it does that at all. If the students were being loud or otherwise actively disruptive, I'd get your point. But if my neighbor has her nose buried in her cellphone, I fail to see how that impedes my ability to engage with the professor by taking notes, asking questions, etc.
    - msellout 12y ago
      Some (many) people are distracted by non-participating neighbors. It's somewhat like second-hand smoke.
ef4 12y ago
The whole thesis falls apart if you accept that digitally-mediated communication can be as meaningful as in meatspace. And it should be obvious that many people already treat it as meaningful in their own lives. Finding it meaningful depends on the fidelity of the technology. As the tech keeps improving, the circle of people who experience real community online keeps expanding. There was a time when only perceived-maladjusted uber-geeks found community through digital networks. Now the average young person does. Eventually everyone will, it's blindingly obvious that that's where the tech is going. I think most people lack an appreciation of the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem. Anything you can experience in "the real world" can be reproduced at arbitrarily-fine resolution in a sufficiently advanced digital system.
- alexbecker 12y ago
  I don't think the author's main problem is that communication is shifting to the digital, but rather some of the side-effects of that. 1. We live in "meatspace" to an extent no matter what, so it's unfortunate that we have a less fulfilling experience when we're there. 2. More importantly, the web gives us a great way to find people like us. In a lot of ways our digital communities are much more uniform than our physical communities, and there are serious downsides to this. (This is not explicitly brought up in the article, but is I think underlying several of his concerns.) Also: > Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem. Anything you can experience in "the real world" can be reproduced at arbitrarily-fine resolution in a sufficiently advanced digital system. This is an extreme misapplication of technical mathematics to pop psychology.
  - ef4 12y ago
    > We live in "meatspace" to an extent no matter what, so it's unfortunate that we have a less fulfilling experience when we're there. The distinction is an artifact of our tech still being pretty immature. There's no reason you couldn't experience remote and physically-present people simultaneously on even footing. We keep our digital world locked behind screens, but only for now. > In a lot of ways our digital communities are much more uniform than our physical communities, That generalizes even further: the more freedom and choice you give people, the more they sort themselves. I understand why that freaks some people out, but I find it hard to get worked up over more people getting more of what they want. There are better ways to keep the peace between disparate groups than by forcing them share close quarters. > This is an extreme misapplication of technical mathematics to pop psychology. I think it's pretty uncontroversial. Short of proposing a soul or some weird quantum-based source of consciousness, we all just process inputs, and we can't tell the difference between the original signal and once that's been digitally sampled at sufficiently high frequency and reconstructed.
heyhi 12y ago
rant{ how do you compare texting, tweeting, and video games. HOW. texting and tweeting are meant as a means of communication. Video games are not. They are done by people who want to engage with a particular medium, like reading. They may HAVE communication such as, I don't know, shopping. Whatever argument you want to make about our new culture that we've developed as a result of assimilating new technology, fine. But do not lump unrelated activities that may look similar from the outside as a means to prove your point. If you argue that video games shut people off then you have to admit that books, and to some extent movies, do the same. Video games are ENTERTAINMENT that one might (and probably does) require full focus on and solitude with which to focus. Texting and Tweeting are things that require very small, quick amounts of attention and it is not a focused effort with the goal of getting something out; you just want to communicate. Which makes it easy to make our presence in the community inconsistent.}
- dllthomas 12y ago
  A lot of people use video games as a social activity.
  - greenpresident 12y ago
    When I was in middle school, Battle.net was our main tool of communication. I hung out in channels with my friends from school and we chatted and played together. Diablo and ICQ were our way of texting. I guess the comparison is fair if it's based on the social interaction without face-to-face engagement. People would have been on the phone for hours but that used to be prohibitively expensive. Other people from school hung out on the basketball court and smoked weed, not really a great alternative either. I know it's a false dichotomy but those were my relevant options at the time.

57 points by nkzednan 12y ago

Interesting article, though it's essentially a extension of the the concept of "filter bubbles" into the social sphere (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble). I question the hypothesis that the internet is uniquely responsible for the formation of filter bubbles – "cultural or ideological bubbles" can be formed a variety of ways, and have been forming for all of human history. Having said that, technology may accelerate this process, or lower the barriers required to connect with like-minded people, for better or worse.

randallsquared 12y ago
So you agree with the article that "[...] the Internet isn’t the main culprit (the trend began in the 1960s), [...]"? I would argue that even if the internet didn't start the trend, online communication has been an enormously more efficient technology for one-dimensional community.
- qsymmachus 12y ago
  Ah, I missed that line. That only pushes the timeline back 40 years though. I still chafe at the idea that this is a uniquely modern problem.
  - mokus 12y ago
    I completely agree, but is it really the point being argued? Perhaps the issue is not that there are bubbles at all, but that where there were previously larger bubbles shared by multiple people, there now tends to be one bubble per person, nucleated around the work of an external entity (a search engine's statistical analysis) poorly understood by the individuals it's affecting. Not that I would concede that it's a worse situation than preceded it, just that it may be the qualitative difference of the bubbles being personal that people are referring to. If anything, it seems like a better situation overall, and I'd rather emphasize the fact that large-scale telecommunications has made it much more possible to escape the "filter bubble" of the people you live and interact with on a daily basis. Even if you're just escaping into a new bubble of your own, that bubble is naturally much more permeable due to its smaller size and greater number of neighbor-bubbles, leading to more effective diffusion of ideas throughout the foam as a whole. I speculate that this is an important positive long-term effect but comes with a lot of short-term pains.

fiatmoney 12y ago

Why has "community engagement" broken down? The author phrases it in terms of "omg kids and their cell phones, lol" but it's at least worth contemplating: - there was a massive campaign of neighborhood destruction from post-WW2 era to perhaps the mid 1990s, resulting in atomization, suburbanization, and quasi-military occupation of the remainder. There is a robust hypothesis that city living is at the root of civic engagment and that, eg, the Great Migrations explain the timing of the civil rights movement. Suburbanization is basically that in reverse. The atomization that happens when you geniunely can't trust your neighbors is as well. - "civic engagement" of a kind retrospectively judged to be "wrong" now goes on your Permanent Record. It's potentially unsafe to organize to do many meaningful things. - major institutions have lost their ability to be as exclusionist as they historically felt necessary to prevent entryism that fundamentally changes the nature of the institution. Instutions historically leading "civic engagment" become ineffective or lose their original purpose. - relentless focus on vacant aggregation-friendly metrics amongst our elite. You can put "volunteer hours" on a spreadsheet, thus, you get the optimal number of "volunteer hours", rather than civic engagment per se. Elite high school & college-age populations simply lack time for meaningful civic engagement, most of which is indistinguishable on a spreadsheet from "hanging out" - ironically, "chilling on the agora" is essentially what civic engagement breaks down to.

cbd1984 12y ago
> there was a massive campaign of neighborhood destruction ... driven by the fact most people who lived in cities, pre-WWII, didn't live in nice gentrified neighborhoods with fixed-up brownstones and Local Character. They lived in slums with crappy, run-down tenements and whatever you call what happens when you shove as many people as possible into as little room as you can bribe someone to let you get away with. Crime and disease, that's it. Having a GI Bill education, a car which let you move even if the trolley schedule said you stayed put, and a house with a yard where your kids don't end up in roving gangs sounded pretty damn good. It sounded like the American Dream. > There is a robust hypothesis that city living is at the root of civic engagment and that, eg, the Great Migrations explain the timing of the civil rights movement. To be clear, I agree with all this. My point is that it's important to maintain historical perspective, lest we fall into the trap of imagining that people from the past weren't reacting to comprehensible forces. Yes, some of those forces came down to frank racism, but others were as I mentioned above, and ignoring the good reasons while emphasizing the bad ones is not only an insult to history, it's a stumbling block to understanding the present. > major institutions have lost their ability to be as exclusionist as they historically felt necessary to prevent entryism that fundamentally changes the nature of the institution. So... social clubs have to let in blacks, now? Is that what you're saying? > relentless focus on vacant aggregation-friendly metrics amongst our elite. You can put "volunteer hours" on a spreadsheet, thus, you get the optimal number of "volunteer hours", rather than civic engagment per se. If you don't have rules, you have favoritism. If you do have rules, you have rules lawyering. If you have rules which are up to interpretation, you don't have rules.

quanticle 12y ago

Has the good professor considered the fact that the sneering condescension of his hard no texting/no e-mailing rules encourages the very breakdown in civility that he's studying? At one point the landline telephone was the cause of the very same moral panic that people are having about texting and cell phones. It was thought that having instantaneous voice communication would erode the "civility" of letter writing. Social rules change as the means of communication change. Attempting to preserve social rules at one period of time, whether it's 1890 or 1990 is foolhardy.

anigbrowl 12y ago
He's not saying that texting and emailing are problematic in themselves, but that he has a problem with people constantly fiddling with their mobile devices while in his lecture. That impedes his ability to do his job, and short-changes the students who do want to engage with him. I find it equally irritating if people are messing with their phones in a movie theater. It's not that I want to limit their use of the internet, as that I don't want to be distracted by flashing objects in my peripheral vision when I'm trying to focus on a screen. If you want to text at the same time you're watching the movie then go sit in the back row where it won't impose upon other people. Civility is not a matter of one technology being better than another, but of not being an ass towards the people in your immediate vicinity.
- quanticle 12y ago
  >short-changes the students who do want to engage with him I don't see how it does that at all. If the students were being loud or otherwise actively disruptive, I'd get your point. But if my neighbor has her nose buried in her cellphone, I fail to see how that impedes my ability to engage with the professor by taking notes, asking questions, etc.
  - msellout 12y ago
    Some (many) people are distracted by non-participating neighbors. It's somewhat like second-hand smoke.

ef4 12y ago

The whole thesis falls apart if you accept that digitally-mediated communication can be as meaningful as in meatspace. And it should be obvious that many people already treat it as meaningful in their own lives. Finding it meaningful depends on the fidelity of the technology. As the tech keeps improving, the circle of people who experience real community online keeps expanding. There was a time when only perceived-maladjusted uber-geeks found community through digital networks. Now the average young person does. Eventually everyone will, it's blindingly obvious that that's where the tech is going. I think most people lack an appreciation of the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem. Anything you can experience in "the real world" can be reproduced at arbitrarily-fine resolution in a sufficiently advanced digital system.

alexbecker 12y ago
I don't think the author's main problem is that communication is shifting to the digital, but rather some of the side-effects of that. 1. We live in "meatspace" to an extent no matter what, so it's unfortunate that we have a less fulfilling experience when we're there. 2. More importantly, the web gives us a great way to find people like us. In a lot of ways our digital communities are much more uniform than our physical communities, and there are serious downsides to this. (This is not explicitly brought up in the article, but is I think underlying several of his concerns.) Also: > Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem. Anything you can experience in "the real world" can be reproduced at arbitrarily-fine resolution in a sufficiently advanced digital system. This is an extreme misapplication of technical mathematics to pop psychology.
- ef4 12y ago
  > We live in "meatspace" to an extent no matter what, so it's unfortunate that we have a less fulfilling experience when we're there. The distinction is an artifact of our tech still being pretty immature. There's no reason you couldn't experience remote and physically-present people simultaneously on even footing. We keep our digital world locked behind screens, but only for now. > In a lot of ways our digital communities are much more uniform than our physical communities, That generalizes even further: the more freedom and choice you give people, the more they sort themselves. I understand why that freaks some people out, but I find it hard to get worked up over more people getting more of what they want. There are better ways to keep the peace between disparate groups than by forcing them share close quarters. > This is an extreme misapplication of technical mathematics to pop psychology. I think it's pretty uncontroversial. Short of proposing a soul or some weird quantum-based source of consciousness, we all just process inputs, and we can't tell the difference between the original signal and once that's been digitally sampled at sufficiently high frequency and reconstructed.

heyhi 12y ago

rant{ how do you compare texting, tweeting, and video games. HOW. texting and tweeting are meant as a means of communication. Video games are not. They are done by people who want to engage with a particular medium, like reading. They may HAVE communication such as, I don't know, shopping. Whatever argument you want to make about our new culture that we've developed as a result of assimilating new technology, fine. But do not lump unrelated activities that may look similar from the outside as a means to prove your point. If you argue that video games shut people off then you have to admit that books, and to some extent movies, do the same. Video games are ENTERTAINMENT that one might (and probably does) require full focus on and solitude with which to focus. Texting and Tweeting are things that require very small, quick amounts of attention and it is not a focused effort with the goal of getting something out; you just want to communicate. Which makes it easy to make our presence in the community inconsistent.}

dllthomas 12y ago
A lot of people use video games as a social activity.
- greenpresident 12y ago
  When I was in middle school, Battle.net was our main tool of communication. I hung out in channels with my friends from school and we chatted and played together. Diablo and ICQ were our way of texting. I guess the comparison is fair if it's based on the social interaction without face-to-face engagement. People would have been on the phone for hours but that used to be prohibitively expensive. Other people from school hung out on the basketball court and smoked weed, not really a great alternative either. I know it's a false dichotomy but those were my relevant options at the time.