forceful moderation
Thinking about the fine gray patch between moderation and censorship, in particular reflecting on Nubian's post "i won't stop", I have some technical solutions to propose.
There are larger issues of social space and safety to deal with, but I'm tech-identified, so I'll throw in my two cents, digitally.
Is a blog a public space or a private space? Something in between? I'm sure someone else has thought about this more, but at least when it comes to commenting on non-corporate blogs written by a single individual, I feel that that individual should feel justified in defining her own boundaries for the kind of discourse that is acceptable on her blog.
By eliminating anonymous commenters, she can ask for a little bit more accountability, and some systems even allow you to filter comments on a per cookie (machine, roughly) or per user basis.
On one hand, this sounds like censorship. On a larger scale, it can be seen that way, when practiced by the majority party or group. However, when practiced on a smaller scale, in ways that are not normatively consistent or aligned with the majority, it's not about censorship, I feel, it's about safety and space to learn and heal each others and ourselves.
What can we do to help make this distinction more palatable? One way would be to ask commenters to agree to a kind of EULA before a comment is published. Simplifying, we could integrate explicit discourse management into systems for authenticating humanity (CAPTCHAs).
Another option would be to allow the blogger and/or her chosen representatives to mark posts (and, implicitly, posters) as either safe or "unsafe" by the blogger's chosen community guidelines.
Blog readers could then opt-in to seeing "unsafe" comments and discussions, depending on how strong they feel that day, or even perhaps statististically self-safe-personalized in a Market Basket sense (one of Sergey's earlier areas of interest before Google's PageRank).
On one hand, I don't want to encourage virtually enforced blinders that let the majority ignore minority complaints, but on the other hand, some of us get enough flak during the day, that we'd like that safe space not to be blind, but to have space to be ourselves without a fight and an argued explanation.
I haven't read the MIT spam conference proceedings, but I'm guessing that they are more concerned with "authentication" (You must be accountable by corporate standards) and "security" (You must not invade our virtual terrority or usurp our power) and Bother (spam is just annoying) than they are with asking how women, young and old, on MySpace and LJ and blogger, stay safe and healthy.
Of course, we can always hack the source (or find someone who can) -- some blogging software is open source -- but the software below the blogosphere is fragmented enough even if you just consider aggregation, which, at least when I first think about it, seems easier than the larger issue of social discourse online.
I've been thinking, here and there this week, as I pack for the Bay, about how I (or more specifically, we!) can help to build a larger social space online that thinks about safety, comfort, and accountability, but also about intersectionality, scale, and contextual ambiguity from the start. And... it seems hard :)
I asked my dad this afternoon to tell me more about his father, my grandfather, who was arrested by the Red Guard in 1966 and thrown in jail for thirteen years.
When my dad said "thirteen," it sounded a bit like thirty, but whether it was thirteen or thirty years (for the record, he says it's thirteen), it's a hell of a long time to spend locked up.
What was my grandfather's crime? After being encouraged by his missionary teachers to attend bible school, my grandfather married my grandmother during the Japanese occupation and started a Christian church in Hong Kong. In 1945, he was asked to return to Guangzhou, and when the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, he was arrested for being a Christian minister in communist China.
He wasn't let go until shortly before the Chinese government officially said the Cultural Revolution was a mistake, around 1981.
My grandfather was lucky to have been thrown in jail so early, my dad told me, as unlike some other Christian ministers in China, my grandfather wasn't subjected to severe physical or mental hardships along the way. He wasn't placed in a room where investigators asked him, in stern Cantonese, do you believe in Jesus or Mao Zedong?
After my grandfather was let go, he came to the States and lived in San Francisco's Chinatown.
San Francisco's where I'm headed too, for reasons that are different and yet the same, and I wanted to write down my grandfather's migrant story to the Bay before I write down my own "migrant" story to the Bay, and before I forget what my father said and how he said it.
I'm not going to talk here about the great firewall of China and the tales of Google and Yahoo dot cn -- I don't know enough yet, but once again I see "both" sides of the picture...
I'll just take a moment to write about "anti-feminist technology" -- the avoidant way to put it -- in my grandfather's era that my father also told me about today.
My grandfather on my father's side came from a family of farmers. China has a thousand year history of discriminating against females, as my father told me this afternoon, and there's a reason why (world-wide) "More than 100 Million Women are Missing"...
If you don't want to hear about infanticide, stop reading now.
If you don't want to read about methods of violence, stop reading now.
If you don't want to think about how millions of babies may have died, stop reading and go lobby for your local American (?) peers to bring "back home" a Chinese boy instead and tell him that he's handsome (or beautiful, depending on his tastes), that's there's more to his life than being an urban ninja and a well-paid-but-not-for-his-education-level Asian-American top model who can talk cogently about how small differences don't add up, they exponentiate in tournament-style log n hierarchies, where small constants to the log star of the universe do indeed seem to matter in the end.
If you'd like to know what my father said, here it is.
My father's grandmother told him how unwanted babies were dealt with.
You take a small, portable tub, the kind you might use to help you take a bath in a rural sense.
You place your baby, your friend's baby? your sister's baby? your mother's baby? on the ground.
You turn over the tub and completely cover the baby.
You surround the tub with ash. You let the ash stop any air from leaving or entering the baby's final chamber. You let your baby die.
It might sound so callous now, when we think about practices such as these, but please, let's check our own cultural egos, our classism and any-other-ism at the door before we talk and make judgments on the past or on cultures and societies which we may or may not be part of, which we may not ever understand.
I could write more -- I almost always can -- but I need to sleep.
Tomorrow, my father and I will drive to San Francisco. Perhaps we'll go for dim sum or congee in Chinatown.
It'll take us thirteen hours or so, not thirteen years, to get there, and for that, I'll try to pause and express my gratitude.
There are larger issues of social space and safety to deal with, but I'm tech-identified, so I'll throw in my two cents, digitally.
Is a blog a public space or a private space? Something in between? I'm sure someone else has thought about this more, but at least when it comes to commenting on non-corporate blogs written by a single individual, I feel that that individual should feel justified in defining her own boundaries for the kind of discourse that is acceptable on her blog.
By eliminating anonymous commenters, she can ask for a little bit more accountability, and some systems even allow you to filter comments on a per cookie (machine, roughly) or per user basis.
On one hand, this sounds like censorship. On a larger scale, it can be seen that way, when practiced by the majority party or group. However, when practiced on a smaller scale, in ways that are not normatively consistent or aligned with the majority, it's not about censorship, I feel, it's about safety and space to learn and heal each others and ourselves.
What can we do to help make this distinction more palatable? One way would be to ask commenters to agree to a kind of EULA before a comment is published. Simplifying, we could integrate explicit discourse management into systems for authenticating humanity (CAPTCHAs).
Another option would be to allow the blogger and/or her chosen representatives to mark posts (and, implicitly, posters) as either safe or "unsafe" by the blogger's chosen community guidelines.
Blog readers could then opt-in to seeing "unsafe" comments and discussions, depending on how strong they feel that day, or even perhaps statististically self-safe-personalized in a Market Basket sense (one of Sergey's earlier areas of interest before Google's PageRank).
On one hand, I don't want to encourage virtually enforced blinders that let the majority ignore minority complaints, but on the other hand, some of us get enough flak during the day, that we'd like that safe space not to be blind, but to have space to be ourselves without a fight and an argued explanation.
I haven't read the MIT spam conference proceedings, but I'm guessing that they are more concerned with "authentication" (You must be accountable by corporate standards) and "security" (You must not invade our virtual terrority or usurp our power) and Bother (spam is just annoying) than they are with asking how women, young and old, on MySpace and LJ and blogger, stay safe and healthy.
Of course, we can always hack the source (or find someone who can) -- some blogging software is open source -- but the software below the blogosphere is fragmented enough even if you just consider aggregation, which, at least when I first think about it, seems easier than the larger issue of social discourse online.
I've been thinking, here and there this week, as I pack for the Bay, about how I (or more specifically, we!) can help to build a larger social space online that thinks about safety, comfort, and accountability, but also about intersectionality, scale, and contextual ambiguity from the start. And... it seems hard :)
I asked my dad this afternoon to tell me more about his father, my grandfather, who was arrested by the Red Guard in 1966 and thrown in jail for thirteen years.
When my dad said "thirteen," it sounded a bit like thirty, but whether it was thirteen or thirty years (for the record, he says it's thirteen), it's a hell of a long time to spend locked up.
What was my grandfather's crime? After being encouraged by his missionary teachers to attend bible school, my grandfather married my grandmother during the Japanese occupation and started a Christian church in Hong Kong. In 1945, he was asked to return to Guangzhou, and when the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, he was arrested for being a Christian minister in communist China.
He wasn't let go until shortly before the Chinese government officially said the Cultural Revolution was a mistake, around 1981.
My grandfather was lucky to have been thrown in jail so early, my dad told me, as unlike some other Christian ministers in China, my grandfather wasn't subjected to severe physical or mental hardships along the way. He wasn't placed in a room where investigators asked him, in stern Cantonese, do you believe in Jesus or Mao Zedong?
After my grandfather was let go, he came to the States and lived in San Francisco's Chinatown.
San Francisco's where I'm headed too, for reasons that are different and yet the same, and I wanted to write down my grandfather's migrant story to the Bay before I write down my own "migrant" story to the Bay, and before I forget what my father said and how he said it.
I'm not going to talk here about the great firewall of China and the tales of Google and Yahoo dot cn -- I don't know enough yet, but once again I see "both" sides of the picture...
I'll just take a moment to write about "anti-feminist technology" -- the avoidant way to put it -- in my grandfather's era that my father also told me about today.
My grandfather on my father's side came from a family of farmers. China has a thousand year history of discriminating against females, as my father told me this afternoon, and there's a reason why (world-wide) "More than 100 Million Women are Missing"...
If you don't want to hear about infanticide, stop reading now.
If you don't want to read about methods of violence, stop reading now.
If you don't want to think about how millions of babies may have died, stop reading and go lobby for your local American (?) peers to bring "back home" a Chinese boy instead and tell him that he's handsome (or beautiful, depending on his tastes), that's there's more to his life than being an urban ninja and a well-paid-but-not-for-his-education-level Asian-American top model who can talk cogently about how small differences don't add up, they exponentiate in tournament-style log n hierarchies, where small constants to the log star of the universe do indeed seem to matter in the end.
If you'd like to know what my father said, here it is.
My father's grandmother told him how unwanted babies were dealt with.
You take a small, portable tub, the kind you might use to help you take a bath in a rural sense.
You place your baby, your friend's baby? your sister's baby? your mother's baby? on the ground.
You turn over the tub and completely cover the baby.
You surround the tub with ash. You let the ash stop any air from leaving or entering the baby's final chamber. You let your baby die.
It might sound so callous now, when we think about practices such as these, but please, let's check our own cultural egos, our classism and any-other-ism at the door before we talk and make judgments on the past or on cultures and societies which we may or may not be part of, which we may not ever understand.
I could write more -- I almost always can -- but I need to sleep.
Tomorrow, my father and I will drive to San Francisco. Perhaps we'll go for dim sum or congee in Chinatown.
It'll take us thirteen hours or so, not thirteen years, to get there, and for that, I'll try to pause and express my gratitude.
posted by L. Wu @ 11:21 PM
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