Resources
The core reasons for online incivility are many. Several of the key themes have been tied together into an overarching thesis called the "digital hollows" (see right).
There are a number of books on civility, although not necessarily focused on online discourse. One worth recommending is "Choosing Civility" by P.M. Forni, a co-founder of the Johns Hopkins Civility Project.
Tim O'Reilly, a champion of "Web 2.0," once called for a "Blogger's Code of Conduct," but that call invited its own criticism, much of it uncivil.
Recent newspaper op-ed columns of intrerest are as follows: Kathleen Parker, "Politics with a little politesse," The Washington Post, November 15, 2009; Jimmy Wales and Andrea Werkerle, "Keep a Civil Cybertounge," The Wall Street Journal, December 29, 2009; and Nicholas Kristof, "The Daily Me," The New York Times, March 18, 2009.
David Pogue's blog entry "Whatever Happened to Online Etiquette?" in The New York TImes (December 14, 2006) is worth reading.
Finally, one of our most civil Founding Fathers, George Washington, absorbed the wisdom of this guide to civility when he was in school.
In our modern world, where we face exobytes of information and are at the same time forced to be our own editors, we naturally self-select our sources of information to favor those that reinforce our biases. Factually challenged data may be given more credibility than more accurate data from a source we don't deem as credible.
Eventually we find ourselves in "digital hollows," deep valleys of our own creation where we are cut off from robust, balanced discourse. When the only voices we view as reasonable are in our own valleys, it is easy to react with venom to a viewpoint from another valley.
Read more here in "Digital Hollows: Information Isolation and the Myth of Post-Partisanship" (PDF).
What are Digital Hollows?
