Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better. Clive Thompson
all, this venom is rooted in real-world biases that go back centuries. The Internet didn’t create these prejudices; it gave them a new stage.
But there are, it turns out, techniques to curtail online abuse, sometimes dramatically. In fact, some innovators are divining, through long experience and experimentation, key ways of managing conversation online—not only keeping it from going septic, but improving it.
Consider the example of Ta-Nahesi Coates. Coates is a senior editor at The Atlantic Monthly, a magazine of politics and culture; he ran a personal blog for years and moved it over to the Atlantic five years ago. Coates posts daily on a dizzying array of subjects: movies, politics, economic disparities, the Civil War, TV shows, favorite snippets of poetry, or whether pro football is too dangerous to play. Coates, who is African American, is also well known as an eloquent and incisive writer on race, and he posts about that frequently. Yet his forum is amazingly abuse-free: comments spill into the hundreds without going off the rails. “This is the most hot-button issue in America, and folks have managed to keep a fairly level head,” he tells me.
The secret is the work Coates puts into his discussion board. Before he was a blogger himself, he’d noticed the terrible comments at his favorite political blogs, like that of Matt Yglesias. “Matt could be talking about parking and urban issues, and he’d have ten comments, and somebody would invariably say something racist.” Coates realized that negative comments create a loop: they poison the atmosphere, chasing off productive posters.
So when he started his own personal blog, he decided to break that loop. The instant he saw something abusive, he’d delete it, banning repeat offenders. Meanwhile, he went out of his way to encourage the smart folks, responding to them personally and publicly, so they’d be encouraged to stay and talk. And Coates was unfailingly polite and civil himself, to help set community standards. Soon several dozen regular commenters emerged, and they got to know each other, talking as much to each other as to Coates. (They’ve even formed their own Facebook group and have held “meet-ups.”) Their cohesion helped cement the culture of civility even more; any troll today who looks at the threads can quickly tell this community isn’t going to tolerate nastiness. The Atlantic also deploys software that lets users give an “up” vote to the best comments, which further helps reinforce quality. Given that the community has good standards, the first comment thread you’ll see at the bottom of a Coates post is likely to be the cleverest—and not, as at sites that don’t manage their comments and run things chronologically, the first or last troll to have stopped by.
This is not to say it’s a love fest or devoid of conflict. The crowd argues heatedly and often takes Coates to task for his thinking; he cites their feedback in his own posts. “Being a writer does not mean you are smarter than everyone else. I learn things from these people,” he notes. But the debate transpires civilly and without name-calling. These days, Coates still tends the comments and monitors them but rarely needs to ban anyone. “It’s much easier,” he adds.
What exactly do you call what Coates is doing, this mix of persuasion, listening, and good hosting, like someone skillfully tending bar? A few years ago, three Internet writers and thinkers—Deb Schultz, Heather Gold, and Kevin Mark—brainstormed on what to label it. On the suggestion of Theresa Nielsen Hayden, a longtime host of online communities, they settled on a clever term: “tummeling,” derived from the Yiddish tummler, the person at a party responsible for keeping the crowd engaged and getting them dancing at a wedding. Tummlers are the social adepts of online conversation. “They’re catalysts and bridge builders,” Schultz tells me. “It’s not about technology. It’s about the human factor.” They know how to be empathetic, how to draw people out: “A good tummler reads the room,” Gold adds. “Quieter people have a disproportionately strong impact on conversational flow when drawn out and heard.”
Look behind any high-functioning discussion forum online and you’ll find someone doing tummeling. Without it, you get chaos. That’s why YouTube is a comment cesspool; there is no culture of moderating comments. It’s why you frequently see newspaper Web pages filled with toxic comments. They haven’t assigned anyone to be the tummler.
Newspapers and YouTube also have another problem, which is that they’re always trying to get bigger. But as Coates and others have found, conversation works best when it’s smaller. Only in a more tightly knit group can participants know each other. Newspapers, in contrast, work under the advertising logic of “more is better.” This produces unfocused, ad hoc, drive-by audiences that can never be corralled into community standards. Coates jokes about going to a major U.S. newspaper and seeing a link to the discussion threads—Come on in! We have 2,000 comments! “That’s a bar I don’t want to go into! They don’t have any security!” he says. These sites are trying for scale—but conversation doesn’t scale.
There are other tools emerging to help manage threads, such as requiring real name identity, as with Facebook comments; removing anonymity can bring in accountability, since people are less likely to be abusive if their actual name is attached to the abuse. Mind you, Coates isn’t opposed per se to anonymity or to crazy, free-range places like Reddit. “Those environments catalyze a lot of rancor, sure, but also candor. The fact that places like that exist might make it even easier to do what I do,” he notes.
Tummeling isn’t a total solution. It works only when you control the space and can kick out undesirables. Services like Twitter are more open and thus less manageable. But even in those spaces, tummeling is a digital-age skill that we will increasingly need to learn, even formally teach; if this aspect of modern civics became widespread enough, it could help reform more and more public spaces online. There’s a pessimistic view, too. You could argue that the first two decades of open speech have set dreadful global standards and that the downsides of requiring targeted groups—say, young women—to navigate so much hate online aren’t worth the upsides of public speech. That’s a reasonable caveat. When it comes to public thinking, you need to accept the bad with the good, but there’s a lot of bad to accept.
What tools will create new forms of public thinking in the years to come? With mobile phones, our personal geography is becoming newly relevant in a new way. GPS turns your location into a fresh source of multiples, because it can figure out if there are other people nearby sharing your experience (say, at a concert or a park). An early success of this kind was Grindr, a phone app that lets gay men broadcast their location and status messages and locate other gay men nearby (proving again the technology truism that sex and pornography are always at the forefront of tech innovation).
The ability of phones to broadcast their location has even weirder effects, because it can turn geography into a message board, with apps that embed conversations in specific physical spaces. For example, when the Occupy Wall Street movement flared in New York City, some of the activists began using a mobile app called Vibe41 that let them post anonymous messages that were tagged to physical locations around Wall Street: they’d discuss where police were about to crack down or leave notes describing events they’d seen. This is bleeding into everyday life, with services that let people embed photos and thoughts on maps and engage in location-based conversations. It’s the first stage of conversational “augmented reality”: public thinking woven into our real-world public space.
I also suspect that as more forms of media become digital, they’ll become sites for public thinking—particularly digital books. Books have always propelled smart conversations; the historic, face-to-face book club has migrated rapidly online, joining the sprawling comments at sites like Goodreads. But the pages of e-books are themselves likely to become the sites of conversations. Already readers of many e-books—on the Kindle, the Nook, and other e-readers like Readmill or Social Book—share comments and highlights. Marginalia may become a new type of public thinking, with the smartest remarks from other readers becoming part of how we make sense of a book. (Bob Stein, head of the Institute for the Future of the Book, imagines a cadre of marginaliasts becoming so well liked42 that people pay to read their markups.) The truth is, whatever new digital tools come around, curious people are going to colonize them. We’re social creatures, so we think socially.
But there’s one interesting kink. For most of this chapter I’ve been