It's easy to see Facebook comments as a symbol of society's slide into entropy, but are they instead the growing pains of something better?
Facebook is supposed to be an endless party with your best friends and family where you all hang out and talk about what's going on. More often, though, it's like one of those parties where everyone's brought along an uninvited guest and you get stuck on the couch with an obnoxious stranger while your CDs are stolen.
The nature of the platform means it is not the curated shangri-la we imagine. Everyone's news feed includes opinions from friends of friends that don't jell with our own. That's fine in as much as it is like real life - it's impossible to tune out crazy people as you go about your business.
The difference is that Facebook is still a new forum and a lot of people seem to assume their own set of rules apply universally.
On Facebook, everyone assumes they're the one throwing the party, that the things they write are somehow sacrosanct and unchallengeable, the "this is my page so you can't tell me I'm wrong" point of view presents again and again.
More importantly though, with many of us living amongst friends selected over years, Facebook is the only place we encounter such violent dissent, and thus the issue of intention versus the way our message is received. (Facebook, then, is the equivalent of family gatherings.)
If you say, for example, "that's so gay" when you mean "that's so lame", someone might find that offensive. You're fundamentally not allowed to tell them they're wrong, but some people will. When you write something, the message is sent and you lose control of how it is read. Saying "that's not what I meant" doesn't cut it. That misunderstanding, to my mind, is the foundation of many Facebook disputes.
This came up for me in the last week when a story went up on the ABC website under the headline Broken Hill 'Perfect Place' for Asylum Seekers.
The article outlines a lawyer's view that regional Australia is a better destination for refugees than detention, offering them a better quality of life while injecting money and population into our shrinking regional centres. In the interest of disclosure: it's a viewpoint I share. It's certainly better than cramming ever more people into our straining cities, or locking people up indefinitely and expecting their mental health to do anything but disintegrate.
Broken Hill is my home town. I lived there most of my life and I'm still - via family, Facebook and my emotions - connected to the city's day-to-day existence. So when the story was shared on a number of Broken Hill-centric Facebook groups, I was privy to the comments they generated.
Some of the comments were spectacularly racist. Beyond that, they were racist in that casual, venomous way that's so hard to even interface with, let alone address, where commenters immediately jump to conclusions about the character of individuals based on an umbrella term like "boat people".
I'm going to intersperse the rest of this post with some of the comments that fell under that article, not all of them overtly rage-motivated, to illustrate what I'm talking about.
It's easy to get despondent about the state of the world when this sort of thing occurs. Social media gives us unparalleled insight into the minds of the community. So when Twitter is awash with rape threats or, in a similar situation, we see the epic level racism on this year's US Big Brother, it appears that the society we imagine we inhabit is just a thin veneer over a bubbling pot of dark ages awfulness.
And look, in some ways that's true. No-one in their right mind would argue that racism isn't an issue in Australia unless they were trying to win an election. We no longer hang "whites only" signs on the doors, but just quietly make non-whites feel bad about going in. We're improving, but we're not finished. That itself makes the issue harder to grapple with, as any discussion of race or racism now involves declarations of race cards, political correctness or something else along the spectrum of people frittering away their responsibility to be a non-jerk either through bigotry or terminal over-reactionness.
At this moment in history, however, many still view social media as a private space. Conventional wisdom holds that people say terrible things online due to the freedom of anonymity, but on Facebook, people say abhorrent things under their real name, next to a picture of their own face, on a profile that often tells the world where they work and who their mum is.
They do this because they feel safe there. They treat the platform as a private conversation and say things they're no doubt saying at home or in the shed with their mates, but may not say at work.
You see this often when people's Facebook posts are reproduced and they insist that is somehow inappropriate, that it's unfair. I may see it with what I'm doing here.
Eventually, everyone will figure out that this isn't true; that Facebook is public, or at best, one step from being public. For now though, we have an opportunity.
Despite the awfulness of it all, this public conversation allows us to see what's really going on and to address it. We can to interrogate these views and start changing them before they head back underground. We can have hope that this is the mechanism to expunge this last, private reservoir of awfulness from our country.
Facebook is supposed to be an endless party with your best friends and family where you all hang out and talk about what's going on. More often, though, it's like one of those parties where everyone's brought along an uninvited guest and you get stuck on the couch with an obnoxious stranger while your CDs are stolen.
The nature of the platform means it is not the curated shangri-la we imagine. Everyone's news feed includes opinions from friends of friends that don't jell with our own. That's fine in as much as it is like real life - it's impossible to tune out crazy people as you go about your business.
The difference is that Facebook is still a new forum and a lot of people seem to assume their own set of rules apply universally.
On Facebook, everyone assumes they're the one throwing the party, that the things they write are somehow sacrosanct and unchallengeable, the "this is my page so you can't tell me I'm wrong" point of view presents again and again.
More importantly though, with many of us living amongst friends selected over years, Facebook is the only place we encounter such violent dissent, and thus the issue of intention versus the way our message is received. (Facebook, then, is the equivalent of family gatherings.)
If you say, for example, "that's so gay" when you mean "that's so lame", someone might find that offensive. You're fundamentally not allowed to tell them they're wrong, but some people will. When you write something, the message is sent and you lose control of how it is read. Saying "that's not what I meant" doesn't cut it. That misunderstanding, to my mind, is the foundation of many Facebook disputes.
This came up for me in the last week when a story went up on the ABC website under the headline Broken Hill 'Perfect Place' for Asylum Seekers.
The article outlines a lawyer's view that regional Australia is a better destination for refugees than detention, offering them a better quality of life while injecting money and population into our shrinking regional centres. In the interest of disclosure: it's a viewpoint I share. It's certainly better than cramming ever more people into our straining cities, or locking people up indefinitely and expecting their mental health to do anything but disintegrate.
Broken Hill is my home town. I lived there most of my life and I'm still - via family, Facebook and my emotions - connected to the city's day-to-day existence. So when the story was shared on a number of Broken Hill-centric Facebook groups, I was privy to the comments they generated.
Some of the comments were spectacularly racist. Beyond that, they were racist in that casual, venomous way that's so hard to even interface with, let alone address, where commenters immediately jump to conclusions about the character of individuals based on an umbrella term like "boat people".
I'm going to intersperse the rest of this post with some of the comments that fell under that article, not all of them overtly rage-motivated, to illustrate what I'm talking about.
It's easy to get despondent about the state of the world when this sort of thing occurs. Social media gives us unparalleled insight into the minds of the community. So when Twitter is awash with rape threats or, in a similar situation, we see the epic level racism on this year's US Big Brother, it appears that the society we imagine we inhabit is just a thin veneer over a bubbling pot of dark ages awfulness.
"what? U would want broken hill over run by ppl from another country, who may not be even able to speak English ... we are not talking a few families; we are talking hundreds of ppl," Jan Hayman
And look, in some ways that's true. No-one in their right mind would argue that racism isn't an issue in Australia unless they were trying to win an election. We no longer hang "whites only" signs on the doors, but just quietly make non-whites feel bad about going in. We're improving, but we're not finished. That itself makes the issue harder to grapple with, as any discussion of race or racism now involves declarations of race cards, political correctness or something else along the spectrum of people frittering away their responsibility to be a non-jerk either through bigotry or terminal over-reactionness.
"They don’t care about fitting in they get their benefits from the government and cause problems," Ally Whitelaw
At this moment in history, however, many still view social media as a private space. Conventional wisdom holds that people say terrible things online due to the freedom of anonymity, but on Facebook, people say abhorrent things under their real name, next to a picture of their own face, on a profile that often tells the world where they work and who their mum is.
"I think they should be made live in the swers away from any human contact besides there own kind and leave this town alone ... We should start a riot," Peter PWalks Walkins
They do this because they feel safe there. They treat the platform as a private conversation and say things they're no doubt saying at home or in the shed with their mates, but may not say at work.
You see this often when people's Facebook posts are reproduced and they insist that is somehow inappropriate, that it's unfair. I may see it with what I'm doing here.
"Don’t send them 2 regional Australia send the Bastards back 2 where they came from," David Sibson
Eventually, everyone will figure out that this isn't true; that Facebook is public, or at best, one step from being public. For now though, we have an opportunity.
"F**k them off back in the boats they f**king came in on!!" Kat Reardon
Despite the awfulness of it all, this public conversation allows us to see what's really going on and to address it. We can to interrogate these views and start changing them before they head back underground. We can have hope that this is the mechanism to expunge this last, private reservoir of awfulness from our country.