Coming up with a good definition is hard. And it’s not obvious that people are even really talking about the same thing when they identify an action or a situation as displaying civility or incivility.
So I’m wondering what kind of insight we can get by looking at some particular situations and deciding which side of the line it feels like they belong on.
Before I put the situations on the table, let me be transparent about how I’m making my calls: I’m going to be asking myself whether it feels like the people involved are showing each other respect, and I’m going to make a special effort to imagine myself on the receiving end of the action or behavior in question. (I’m also going to keep my calls to myself until other people have had a chance to weigh in. And I’m purposely choosing situations where it’s not totally clear to me what I think about the level of respect that’s coming across — so my judgments here are nothing like an official solution set!)
Category Archives: Social issues
#scio10 preparation: Is there a special problem of online civility?
Two weeks from today, at ScienceOnline ’10, Dr. Isis, Sheril Kirshenbaum, and I will be leading a session called “Online Civility and Its (Muppethugging) Discontents”. In preparation for this, the three of us had a Skype conference last night, during which it became clear to us that there are many, many interesting issues that we could take on in this session (and that we come to the subject of online civility from three quite different perspectives).
To try to get a feel for what issues other people (besides the three of us) might want to discuss in this session (or on blogs, of whatever), I’d like to bounce some questions off of the best commenters in the blogosphere (that’s you!). And where I want to start is thinking about what assumptions might be implicit is our session title:
– Is there some special problem of online civility (vs. offline civility)?
Name-changes, social science research, and USA Today.
I’m not a regular reader of USA Today, but Maria tweeted this story, and I feel like I need to say something about it or else risk leaving it rattling around in my head like marbles under a hubcap:
About 70% of Americans agree, either somewhat or strongly, that it’s beneficial for women to take her husband’s last name when they marry, while 29% say it’s better for women to keep their own names, finds a study being presented today at the American Sociological Association’s annual meeting in San Francisco.
Researchers from Indiana University and the University of Utah asked about 815 people a combination of multiple choice and open-ended questions to come up with the findings.
Laura Hamilton, a sociology researcher at Indiana University and one of the study authors, says that while gender-neutral terms such as “chairperson” have become commonplace, the same logic hasn’t carried over to name change.
“One of the most interesting things is that a lot of people assume that because language in general is gender-neutral, that name change would also be one of those things in which attitudes would be shifting towards being much more liberal,” she says.
But she says some studies have found that younger women are as likely or more likely to change their name when they marry as their baby boom counterparts. “It’s not a straight age trend.”
Respondents who said that women should change their names tended to view it as important for establishing a marital and family identity, she says, while those who thought women should keep their own names focused on the importance of a woman establishing a professional or individual identity.
Hamilton says that about half of respondents went so far as to say that the government should mandate women to change their names when they marry, a finding she called “really interesting,” considering typical attitudes towards government intervention. “Americans tend to be very cautious when it comes to state intervention in family life,” she says.
Vaccine refuseniks are free-riders.
In a post a couple weeks ago, I commented on the ethical dimension of opting out of vaccination against serious contagious diseases:
Of course, parents are accountable to the kids they are raising. They have a duty to do what is best for them, as well as they can determine what that is. They probably also have a duty to put some effort into making a sensible determination of what’s best for their kids (which may involve seeking out expert advice, and evaluating who has the expertise to be offering trustworthy advice).
But parents and kids are also part of a community, and arguably they are accountable to other members of that community. I’d argue that members of a community may have an obligation to share relevant information with each other — and, to avoid spreading misinformation, not to represent themselves as experts when they are not. Moreover, when parents make choices with the potential to impact not only themselves and their kids but also other members of the community, they have a duty to do what is necessary to minimize bad impacts on others. Among other things, this might mean keeping your unvaccinated-by-choice kids isolated from kids who haven’t been vaccinated because of their age, because of compromised immune function, or because they are allergic to a vaccine ingredient. If you’re not willing to do your part for herd immunity, you need to take responsibility for staying out of the herd.
Otherwise, you are a free-rider on the sacrifices of the other members of the community, and you are breaking trust with them.
(Bold emphasis added.)
In the comments on that post, Jennifer takes issue with the free-rider characterization:
My kids are not vaccinated, and I am not a free-rider. So far my kids have had chickenpox, pertussis, and measles. I expect my kids to get many of the diseases for which there are vaccines. By the way, the measles was from a child who had recently gotten the MMR, and was shedding the live virus.
Please stop the scaremongering. My kids got through those illnesses just fine, and are extremely healthy. I’ve chosen the possibility of occasional acute disease over the very real possibility of chronic disease. For example, 1 in 10 kids now has asthma! 1 in 67 now has autism.
I thought, therefore, that it would be worthwhile to examine at more length my claim that vaccination refuseniks are free-riders.
Silence is the enemy: addressing the causes.
Yesterday, in my first post about the Silence is the Enemy campaign, I wrote:
Addressing rape directly. From the point of view of ethics, you’d think this would be a very short discussion. It is wrong to commit sexual violence. It is wrong to act out your frustration or your sense of entitlement or your need to feel that there is something in your life that is within your control on the body of another human being. It is wrong to treat a woman or a child (or another man) as less than fully human.
Anyone who would argue otherwise could only be a moral monster. Or thoroughly steeped in a culture that regards women and children as less than fully human, and the desire, anger, and frustration of men as something that can be acted out on women and children.
The ethics of sexual violence seem pretty black and white. And yet sexual violence is a reality — as a constant threat, if not as something that has been committed — for more women than you can imagine.
As usual, Zuska say it better than anyone else:
Stepping away from silence.
This month, Sheril Kirshenbaum and Dr. Isis are spearheading a blogospheric initiative to call attention to a continuing epidemic of mass rapes in Liberia even six years after the end of its 14 year civil war, and to try to do something about it.
Last month, Nicholas Kristof described the situation in the New York Times, touching on the particular case of a 7-year-old rape survivor named Jackie:
Math and science versus femininity.
Dr. Isis has some rollicking good discussions going on at her pad about who might care about blogs, and what role they might play in scientific education, training, and interactions. (Part one, part two.)
On the second of these posts, a comment from Pascale lodged itself in my brain:
I think a lot of impressionable girls, especially in that middle-school age group, get the idea that they can’t be good at science or math if they like clothes, makeup, and boys. Is it the science/math sterotype that is the problem, or is it that girls make other choices to pursue these alternate interests? “I want to be pretty, so I don’t want to be a scientist, etc” or is it “I’m bad at math and science, so I should be pretty and study art.”
Girls’ test scores and grades don’t fall behind boys in these subjects until that age, and I find it hard to believe that girls suddenly lose the ability to do math and science. If more positive role models were present, then girls might see that they can study science and be feminine as well. I think that may be the real issue to closing the gender gap in the sciences.
This has me wondering.
Morality, outrage, and #amazonfail: a reply to Clay Shirky.
A bunch of people (including Bora) have pointed me to Clay Shirky’s take on #amazonfail. While I’m not in agreement with Shirky’s analysis that Twitter users mobilized an angry mob on the basis of a false theory (and now that mob is having a hard time backing down), there are some interesting ideas in his post that I think merit consideration. So, let’s consider them.
Some thoughts on #Amazonfail.
Those of you on Twitter yesterday probably noticed the explosion of tweets with the hashtag #amazonfail. For those who were otherwise occupied carving up chocolate bunnies or whatnot, the news spread to the blogs, Facebook, and the traditional media outlets. The short version is that on Easter Sunday, a critical mass of people noticed that many, many books that Amazon sells had their Amazon sales rank stripped, and that these books stopped coming up in searches on Amazon that were not searches on the book titles (or, presumably, authors).
What fanned the flames of the frenzy were certain consistencies in what kind of book was getting deranked. Many were books with LGBT subject matter. Some were classic books (like Lady Chatterly’s Lover) or more recent titles with what might be classified as adult themes. Some were books about disability and sexuality. A partial list of the deranked titles can be found here.
The effect of the derankings angered lots of people, indignant that a search on “homosexuality” on the behemoth etailer’s website brought up as top results guidebooks to curing your child’s homosexuality but omitted titles aimed at helping prevent suicide in gay teens. The question to which people wanted an answer was whether these changes reflected concerted policy on Amazon’s part, and whether the problem (as seen by the angry Twitterfolk) was going to be addressed.
As I write this post, the response from Amazon has been anemic to non-existent. The news outlets are reporting that Amazon blames a “glitch” for the derankings. Publisher Weekly reports:
Things could get worse before they get better (starving student edition).
Times are tough all around these days. However, at schools like mine, a large public university with a population that includes a significant number of students who are older than traditional college age, are the first in their families to go to college, and/or were in economically precarious situations before the current economic crisis, the situation feels especially dire.