Editors provide a service to writers and readers through clear, lively presentation of information and the circulation of important ideas. But as the distribution of news and comment speeds up and diversifies, unmediated online communication between engaged peers is taking a new role in invigorating democratic exchange. Direct communication is raising afresh questions of broadcast and reception that have, in a sense, been suppressed or at least kept in the background by the presss central control of reporting and comment.
Blogs are an obvious recent landmark in this revolution. Their one-to-many broadcast capability appeals in a media culture that celebrates celebrity and individualism. Meanwhile, openDemocracys discussion forums have been learning to debate democratically since 2001. As a many-to-many broadcast system, forums lack some of the peculiar satisfactions of blogs. But they have their own delights to offer. As openDemocracys community has grown, so have its character, robustness and identity. At their best forums offer a genuinely challenging diversity of interests, dynamics and styles. But at their worst discussion forums can descend into an online form of bar-room brawl.
Open discussion brings into focus the prisms through which interlocutors view the world, while mainstream journalism has on the whole become adept at leaving readers blinkers and filters in place, through a need to create, maintain and guard audience share. Forums demand self-conscious writing. From the most highly crafted argument to the briefest riposte, the forum post demonstrates its authors sense of audience and self-presentation. The process of debate hones many skills persuasive writing, examination of sources, expression of personality and so on. Good forum discussion probes assumptions, overturns expectations and changes minds.
Forum member Simon Heywood pinpoints the great strength of such conversation:
I find the level of debate and diversity of opinion is pretty hard to find elsewhere. If you don't convince the other, you can test and refine your ideas and attain mutual insight, and come to a recognition of common ground, if there is any. I think this has happened in some cases! This is powerful, highly emancipatory stuff.
Brave new world?
So are forums an ideal space where ideas are tested on their intrinsic strength, rather than on the personal traits or the clout of the speaker? Where people debate not to achieve position or status, but to improve their arguments and to persuade others on the merits of a case where democratic exchange is both means and end?
This article forms part of the Peer Power: Reinventing Accountability debate.
AccountAbility, openDemocracys partner in this debate, will hold a major event, Accountability 21: Reinventing Accountability for the 21st Century on 3-5 October in London.
Also in this debate:
Becky Hogge & Geoff Mulgan, Open source nation
John Lloyd, The responsibility of the harlot
Bill Thompson, The Democratic Republic of Cyberspace?
Simon Zadek, Reinventing Accountability for the 21st Century
If you find this material valuable please consider supporting openDemocracy by sending us a donation so that we can continue our work and keep it free for all
Not exactly. Like sci-fi, the internet often reveals our existing human arrangements rather than conjuring from nowhere a brave new world. openDemocracy sets out to produce and facilitate independent global debate and discussion of democracy in politics. The forums buzz with American English, UK English, Antipodean Englishes and second, third or fourth language Englishes. They are international but they are not without borders. Technology and language are just two of the obstacles to limitless communication. Even putting aside real world cultural and contextual differences between people venturing into this conversational space, the media shape divergent centres of concern, interest and understanding. We draw on the media in forming our own views, and we draw on different experiences, sources and reference points. No one thinks and writes in a vacuum, and many have become accustomed to thinking, writing and talking in an echo chamber.
Can people talk democratically in such circumstances? Is it as simple as logging in and making your point? Do words free from faces, bodies and voices create a rich enough environment for bridging difference and debating issues that are both vitally important and highly contested? In a media environment of corroded trust and degraded information, how can you even begin to contemplate debate with a stranger on the other side of the world?
Building a common project
In achieving informed global conversation and nurturing democratic practice, forums have developed their own ecology their own logic and guiding principles. openDemocracy members joining discussions on the site often refer to the descriptions and guidance we give about the website and the space theyre entering, to set a standard loose though it is for discussions. We state on the site that we aim to provide an open, respectful space where many different voices can meet and interact: members make requirements of each other accordingly, independent of the benevolent dictator moderator (myself) who lurks in the wings, with the ability (but not the desire) to edit or remove posts that transgress the sites terms and conditions.
Over the years, the standards members set out for each other have become more clearly defined. These include sticking to the theme of a thread (or particular discussion), avoiding generalisations, attributing ideas correctly and providing links (a neat technological solution to referencing your sources). Such standards do not spring fully formed from nowhere. Many practices draw on existing guarantees of accountability, from journalism and academia.
Some of these old tools also bring with them familiar inadequacies and blind spots. Increasingly, the media fails to achieve adequate public conversation and academic study finds it hard to inspire public confidence. While the old guarantees seem to crumble, forums appear, to the untrained eye, to offer no guarantees at all. With no barriers or safeguards instantaneous self-publishing removes checks and brakes. Though forums can respond to events in near to real time and with live passion, fact-checking and emotion-checking can slip. As in any social setting, bad behaviour occurs, endangering the investment people make in a common endeavour.
Good argument and bad behaviour
I often wonder whether the non-Anglo-Saxon reader of openDemocracys forums might be perplexed at the levels of hostility and heat that sometimes build up in the discussions here. Challenges spill into confrontation and back again. Vigorous dispute toughens some but surely discourages others. It is a feature of many political forums that constructive debate gets drowned out by flame wars, where discussion escalates to a hostile level. A specialised vocabulary has evolved for dealing with bad behaviour: forum aficionados talk about spam, trolls, flaming, flooding one has even devised a forum poster typology. Our discussion forums tend not to follow the flaming route. But there are bumps and jolts in the road, provoking the question: is a democratic culture the same as an argumentative culture?
Why do forums erupt in argument? Would the compulsory use of real names, for example, keep forums civilised and constructive can forums be both anonymous and accountable? Would stronger moderation bring stronger discussion? What policy would produce the best debate? The openDemocracy team asks such questions on a regular basis. As moderator, I frequently find myself pondering the ins and outs of what produces good discussion as I read members posts.
My belief is that it is not the anonymity of posters that ultimately underlies the (Anglo-Saxon?) confrontational culture of forums. Members form identities and reputations without need for a real name, and these constitute their characters, the basis for their relationships and a kind of social capital which they then need to use, accumulate and protect. It is not the case that a real name automatically seals reputation and good behaviour. In some cases it can limit what contributors are able to say openly. Instead, moderation based on trust encourages members to own and take responsibility for the space, without a censor policing and demoralising contributors.
Some forum models codify reputation with merit systems. One example is a star system to indicate the most experienced members, who have been signed up longest, or posted the most. Thus forum technology can (rather crudely) represent social systems. When openDemocracy first set up its forums, the team decided that was possibly tacky, a bit of a blunt tool for refined discussion. Since then, increasingly sophisticated moderation methods have been developed by, for example, the karma system, created by one of the biggest online forums on the web, the technology discussion site Slashdot.
Peer to peer accountability develops more flexible and robust tools, which recognise the specific demands of debate as distinct from journalistic or academic reporting. Members do embark on research projects, producing reports and developing specialisms (or obsessions!) for the purpose of debating topics with other members. This is very useful for the exchange of certain kinds of information. However, there are other kinds of information one might wish to exchange, which are less amenable to such treatment and might require broader appeal. John Lloyd makes a plea for an agreed practice of truth-telling to improve journalistic accountability. Perhaps discussion forums have their own equivalent in the art and practice of conversation.
What is conversation?
An increasingly refined understanding of conversation may lead to a kind of debate in which many different people and topics can find a place. Are there principles one can refer to in the art of conversation?
Clues towards a language of democratic conversation are already present in specific aspects of openDemocracy forum members techniques. Humour is one readily recognisable example, which can be used to defuse hostility, acknowledge mistakes and demonstrate self-awareness. These subtler tools chime with the way the study of linguistics tackles meaning in conversation. Contrary to expectation, meaning is often conveyed most effectively through indirect means, rather than through sincerity and positive statement.
Truth-telling is not necessarily a primary conversational principle in all cultures. For example, in describing the value of truth in hunter-gatherer societies Hugh Brody points out that lying has distinct advantages to the farmer and landowner. We may pay lip service to the idea of truth, but our day-to-day practice reveals another story. Truth can even mean different things to different people. And most cultures have forms of language that reveal through ambiguity and obscurity: jokes, riddles, poems and advertising are creative rather than direct with the truth, and often overturn expectations rather than going with the grain.
This sort of language use is not always designed to deceive. Often it is used to make a point, where the matter in hand requires a creative leap. Linguists have developed cooperative theories to deal with the sophistication of the ways in which people convey meaning. One example is relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson), which suggests that meaning is uncovered on the working assumption that acts of communication are always contextually relevant, and thus can be decoded or interpreted.
How does democratic conversation work? Bring your ideas to the debate, and add your tools for talking among peers here
This may be scaled up to the level of debates. An obvious example springs to mind: a contributor repeatedly violates the rule of relevance, and it becomes clear to other contributors that there is a form of uncooperative behaviour taking place which may bring about the withdrawal of their own cooperation. This works on the basis that language, conversation and forums (and ultimately democratic politics) because they rely in their very form on the participation of more than one person and of different perspectives must at their foundation be cooperative forms. If conversation is repeatedly broken down, prevented and blocked, violence either in the form of attack or withdrawal is the usual result.
This gives us a way of dealing with the difficult soft aspects of debate, as opposed to the hard matter of fact and corroboration. My experience is that polished contributions in the forums sometimes tend to avoid the messiness of attempting to accommodate narrative complication and nuance by reliably citing sources and appealing to respect for fact (though even the culture of hard fact has its own emotional tenor and content, and facts, like people, can contradict each other in the context of an argument). Where passion or anger surface, even in productive ways, they are often treated with suspicion or disapproval.
But as John Lloyd points out, we are coming to place importance on subjectivity. If by this we mean we wish to recognise individual experience and the emotional and social content of political and cultural life, I believe we need to learn to deal with it better collectively, to allow the hard and the soft to complement each other rather than drown each other out. Coupled with fact, people and their varied perspectives are the raw materials of debate. Cooperative forum contributions can build members reputations and their store of trust, alongside other measures of value, such as use of sources, humour and experience. The forums provide a fascinating laboratory for negotiation of these issues: I hope members might take up some of these questions there!
It is early days for online conversation. Perhaps improving access worldwide and increased diversity of voices and sources will begin to produce a culture that generously gives breathing space to difference, and lays down practices that can accommodate argument cooperatively. It is not our responsibility to take care of valuable ideas alone, and to broadcast outward. Ideas gain value with communication and modification. We need to help build the organic structures to pass on, receive and nourish them. Learning and demanding to talk democratically is an exciting, and urgent, challenge for democratic societies.