It's fallen somewhat out of favor these days, as a lot of people question its empirical grounding. But the Economist reports on an experiment that seems to show some support for it:
The most dramatic result, though, was the one that showed a doubling in the number of people who were prepared to steal in a condition of disorder. In this case an envelope with a EUR5 ($6) note inside (and the note clearly visible through the address window) was left sticking out of a post box. In a condition of order, 13% of those passing took the envelope (instead of leaving it or pushing it into the box). But if the post box was covered in graffiti, 27% did. Even if the post box had no graffiti on it, but the area around it was littered with paper, orange peel, cigarette butts and empty cans, 25% still took the envelope.
Interesting to think that "too pretty to steal" might be an actual defense against crime. Kottke goes further, and wonders if there isn't a broken windows theory of internet trolling:
Much of the tone of discourse online is governed by the level of moderation and to what extent people are encouraged to "own" their words. When forums, message boards, and blog comment threads with more than a handful of participants are unmoderated, bad behavior follows. The appearance of one troll encourages others. Undeleted hateful or ad hominem comments are an indication that that sort of thing is allowable behavior and encourages more of the same. Those commenters who are normally respectable participants are emboldened by the uptick in bad behavior and misbehave themselves. More likely, they're discouraged from helping with the community moderation process of keeping their peers in line with social pressure. Or they stop visiting the site altogether.
Unchecked comment spam signals that the owner/moderator of the forum or blog isn't paying attention, stimulating further improper conduct. Anonymity provides commenters with immunity from being associated with their speech and actions, making the whole situation worse...how does the community punish or police someone they don't know? Very quickly, the situation is out of control and your message board is the online equivalent of South Central Los Angeles in the 1980s, inhabited by roving gangs armed with hate speech, fueled by the need for attention, making things difficult for those who wish to carry on useful conversations.
There's definitely an imitative component, because I get waves of trolls who repeat each other, presumably mimicking some ur-troll I haven't seen. This is most readily apparent when, as happens about 50% of the time, the ur-troll has (deliberately?) misread the post in a totally unsupportable way, and his minions make asses of himself repeating the accusation without themselves reading it.
So how much of it is monkey-see, monkey-do? And how much of it is a spontaneous outflowing of nonsense?
I think the best troll wars develop when one person's honestly felt Righteous Indignation feeds another's.
Two people with RI at each other can generate a lot of energy.
(Global warming is ____ !!!)
Local papers are having a heck of a time with forum wars. Little or no moderation, anonymous users (which is fine btw). Many 'comment' threads turn into insult fests and the more reasonable people simply give up and do not participate.
Locally some have tried to pressure the paper into requiring real names for comments - but then people have been faking their names in Letters to the Editor since such things began - so good luck with that.
Moderation is good to an extent, but is also subjective. More than one moderator out there has been known to abuse their power and ban those that disagree with said mod's opinion. Television Without Pity was rife with this for a long time (perhaps still is), as were many political discussion forums in the ancient Compuserve days.
"Locally some have tried to pressure the paper into requiring real names for comments - but then people have been faking their names in Letters to the Editor since such things began - so good luck with that."
I'm amused by the example of Ben Franklin, who wrote to his own papers with what we'd now call Sock Puppets.
I've never gone the SP route, but I sometimes wonder "if Ben did it ..."
Odograph, you are such an idiot. And you need a haircut.
I see this at my internet form, where you pay $10 for a revocable membership. Not only does the ownership factor keep absolute stupidity to a minimum, because of the general tone of the place other members with no authority whatsoever will go out of their way to bop you over the head if you're being useless. You wonder about who would pay $10 to read and post on an internet forum, but of course the answer is "people who want to read and write somewhere where other people have paid $10 for the privilege." It's a value added product
Jack, you're such a goon.
*pushes you down the stairs you have in your house*
Free speech is an all or nothing deal. Once you start regulating, where do you stop? I never saw a moderator ban a "troll" who agreed with said moderator. But it is your blog so do what you think is right.
A troll is not just someone who posts hateful/offensive material, nor are they someone who merely disagrees with you (a common mistake) and feels strongly about it. A troll is someone who posts with the intent of inflicting emotional damage, either directly or indirectly. The broken glass theory of trolling doesn't really apply, because orderly discussions and environments are the very locations that appeal to a troll seeking victims. Moderation helps to a certain extent, but often you just get stronger strains of trolls.
From The Jargon File:
2. n. An individual who chronically trolls in sense 1; regularly posts specious arguments, flames or personal attacks to a newsgroup, discussion list, or in email for no other purpose than to annoy someone or disrupt a discussion. Trolls are recognizable by the fact that they have no real interest in learning about the topic at hand - they simply want to utter flame bait. Like the ugly creatures they are named after, they exhibit no redeeming characteristics, and as such, they are recognized as a lower form of life on the net, as in, “Oh, ignore him, he's just a troll.” Compare kook.
Also:
SHUT YOUR FESTERING GOB, YOU TIT! YOUR TYPE MAKES ME PUKE! YOU VACUOUS STUFFY-NOSED MALODOROUS PERVERT!!!
I am completely charmed at the picture of Ben Franklin sock-puppeting away. (Of course, he is sitting in front of the screen in his underwear, with his hair all hanging down, occasionally wandering into private chat rooms with cougars.) I'd never really thought about him as a sock puppeteer, but now that I have, I've been grinning all morning.
I rather enjoy trolls, at least when they show some creativity. But then, I'm also a fan of political attack ads.
Rum: If free speech is "all or nothing", then it's always nothing at all times, because it's never been "all".
(At least, in the real world.
A few internet places have no standards whatsoever, and no-one can be moderated or banned ... and as soon as such a place has any popularity at all, it is instantly worthless, because in similarity to Gresham's law, bad behaviour will drive out the good.
There's a reason that even the most open-minded free speech advocates will ask you to leave if you start screaming about feces at the to of your lungs and won't stop, and it's not "because they secretly aren't devoted to free speech".
It's because the freedom of speech that matters is freedom from the State (or "everyone") telling you you can't say something.
Not that you can't say it in their forum in a way that makes other speech impossible or exceeding difficult or valueless.)
Seconded. I've visited quite a few otherwise good and useful blogs where the comments section was a bunch of drivel because moderators either banned anyone with unpopular viewpoints or didn't ban anyone at all. Those comment sections quickly became the denizen of lowlifes who insulted each other or anyone who bothered to offer a constructive or critical comment. And since I'm less inclined to blogs where I can't offer any sort of feedback (or learn anything from anybody else's feedback) I stay away from those blogs.
Generally I support a flexible standard. Debate should be rowdy and vociferous, but hostility, abuse and deliberate trolling should not be tolerated. And I'm fine with anonymity as long as those standards are met.
This could be one of those poorly-designed experiments. What would you expect of people in the vicinity of well-kept mailboxes vs those in the vicinity of trashed ones? Better yet, what about the two vicinities?
People in well-kept areas are going to have higher ethical standards than those in trashed areas.
There's a lot of misunderstanding about "free speech". There's "free speech", and there's "freedom of speech". That last is what's guaranteed in the Constitution. It says (in case anyone wants to look) that the government shall make no law abridging it.
"Free speech" is the utopian ideal where anybody can say any damn thing he wants, regardless of anybody else. It's an ideal we really don't want to have around. Think of all the people that would be trampled in crowded theaters.
Since the Constitution restricts only government's restriction on speech, if any newspaper editor (or blogger) doesn't want to run somebody's letters or comments, that's their prerogative. Anybody who's upset because their rant didn't run, is certainly free to start their own blog.
It shows people's ignorance when they cite Ben Franklin writing under the name "Silence Dogood". If anybody's read the Federalist Papers, you'll see that in that time, everybody wrote under a pen-name. For one thing, it followed a long-established and honorable tradition, where people would write under famous names. (Franklin had a completely different reason.)
Xanthippas: "I've visited quite a few otherwise good and useful blogs where the comments section was a bunch of drivel because moderators either banned anyone with unpopular viewpoints or didn't ban anyone at all..."
(PS: great name. Socrates would be amused) From what I read, a certain blog whose name implies a certain small, Sherwood-Forest-colored, prolate spheroid, has used that tactic to great effect.
Are you trolling w/ that statement? Isn't it more likely that people in messy areas have less time or money to keep everything neat, clean & ethical than their more ethical "betters" in "well-kept" areas?
Isn't it more likely that people in messy areas have less time or money to keep everything neat, clean & ethical than their more ethical "betters" in "well-kept" areas?
Apparently they have enough time and money to buy paint and put graffiti on things.
Well, I don't think it is necessarily true that people in well kept areas have higher ethical standards, but there might be some connection. But this is somewhat besides the point. Broken windows theory kind of says that crime leads to more crime so stop the crime. But how? Clean up the facades of buildings and the trash on the ground? Probably won't do that much. Policing is important, and it is a major issue in the literature that discusses this type of topic. A sociological idea that attempts to delve deeper than broken windows is "collective efficacy". Sociologists who adhere to this idea (that close-knit communities in which citizens actually care for their fellow citizen to the point where they do not need much policing at all) tend to think that simply putting more police in an area won't always get to the root of the problem - poor communal ties. A trashy area may reflect such an underdeveloped community (if you look at communities as being in different stages) which I think is getting more to the heart of the problem. Anyway, I haven't read much on this for a while....go here (http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a713646711~db=all) for an abstract for an article on situational policing and it might make a little more sense. It's all I could find right now, but look in any criminal justice policy/criminology lit.
"The Broken Windows theory . . . was first popularized in our very own magazine, and became a favorite of Rudy Giuliani's police department."
In FACT, it was not Giuliani, but Raymond Kelly, Police Commissioner in the Dinkins administration, who deployed the "Broken Windows" strategy.
Giuliani fired Kelly, largely because he was too successful in his police work (and therefore too politically independent), and replaced him with out of towner Bill Bratton who attempted to minimize the effects of the crime reducing strategies put in place by Ray Kelley.
Kelley was reappointed by Mayor Bloomberg and is considered one of the leading figures in law enforcement in the US.
Giuliani opposed Kelley's reforms not only because they were practical and successful but because they were not "HIS" idea.
Regardless, Kelley's ideas have taken root as the most successful method of policing, as General Petraeus has further demonstrated, to neo-con dismay.
pbh
In New York City under Rudy Giuliani, we have seen the terrible resurgence of officially condoned police racism. Not long ago, a black cast member of a Broadway play was arrested and held overnight, missing his performance. Like Diallo, his only "crime" was that of being a black man in his own building at a time when it came under police attention. Ask any young black man in New York City, neatly dressed teenager or even a computer consultant wearing a suit, how many times he has been stopped and harassed by the police.
In New York City we have a terrible double standard, because if the cops had executed my white next door neighbor under identical circumstances, there would have been consequences.
Previous comment was an excerpt from March 2000 The Ethical Spectacle