We Don’t Need No Stinking Social Media Etiquette
April 25th, 2008 | by Brad King |Several months ago, I was having a drink with my friend Krista when she started talking about the need for etiquette rules for social media.
The more I started listening to the conversations around me, the more I began to hear people discuss this so-called need for rules.
Frankly, it’s frightening.
Let me take a step back, though, before beginning this rant. It’s important to understand the history of social media types of technology before jumping into the debate about current technologies because what we know as the Web and mobile networks grew out of — and were created — with very specific thematic elements.
Namely, that information should be free, access should be open to everyone and we should all have access to the hardware and software so we could fix the problems in a system without going through a bureaucracy.
It’s the Hacker Ethic as defined by Steven Levy in his book Hackers. And you can’t make a decision about ethics without understanding this.
The idea of participatory media is that it democratizes how information is shared. There are no filters, or more accurately, we become the filters for the information we want to receive.
Like the Unconference, we vote with our feet. Only in the participatory media world, we vote with Opt In and Opt Out.
The idea that any one person, one group or one entity has the intelligence, foresight and understanding of every social community on the planet (because participatory means that while we don’t have everyone now, we believe that at some point, everyone will be connected — and thus, we can’t make decisions today that would limit the ability of a group to enter into the participatory sphere) is both maddeningly arrogant and wildly short sighted.
The rules of participatory media are like the ocean, an even-moving and powerful force that isn’t easily defined or controlled, but filled with the inevitability that some movement will happen. Like the currents in the ocean, the rules of engagement are changed by certain forces. In this case, those forces are the people who happen to be engaged at the moment.
If you don’t like some action in a participatory area, you must either decided to engage that person, ignore that person or remove that person from your sphere.
Not set rules so that some idea or action YOU don’t like can never be represented again.
We must be open and willing to accept that "ist" groups — racist, sexists, ect — and disturbing — child predators — will use these tools for what many deem socially deviate activities.
And we must embrace that they can, and use the same tools to fight what we perceive as a wrong.
In other words, the participatory media puts the impetus on each of us to engage, interact and participate. We will largely be defined by the actions we do — and do not — take.
We are participatory media, which brings with it a certain responsibility. Not to add layers of our individual social ethics, but to create a community that both encourages everyone to play and develops an ever-changing rule of law decided upon by those who are engaged.
2 Responses to “We Don’t Need No Stinking Social Media Etiquette”
By cynthiacloskey on Apr 25, 2008 | Reply
In addition to opting in and opting out, we each also have the opportunity to try to persuade each other.
So, for example, if you (to choose someone at random) were to blog in a way that was mostly great but had one big flaw (too few footnotes, let’s pretend), I might try explaining to you the great value of footnotes before giving up and opting out of reading your site.
I think some of the people who have published etiquette guides for blogging and using Twitter and such meant these lists as guides, not commandments. This has to be OK to do: There’s no wrong in making a suggestion or pointing out a positive or negative side effect of an action, right?
If the suggestion is sufficiently good and/or the persuasion is effective, then people can adopt that technique too. If it’s not, people can argue against it.
The fact that we have the ability to opt in and out doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t talk about what’s working and what’s not.
By Brad on Apr 25, 2008 | Reply
I’m not arguing that we don’t have a dialog about what works and what doesn’t. What I’m arguing against is setting out rules for what works and what doesn’t.
I would also argue that the dialog in a read/write world is different than a conversation in public. This is much more organic. It’s based on action-reaction and less on direct conversation.
Does that make it hard for newbies? Yes. Might there be guidelines? Sure.
Neither will be perfect and fool-proof. Rules and etiquette by definition are more strict than I would suggest. (Of course, guidelines are strict — after all, guidelines assume a certain ’social norm,’ which I reject out of pocket. Generalized norms in a sandbox are bad).
Where does that leave us? It leaves us in a murky place where rules change. The West isn’t set up for that. We want rules. We demand limitations. Restrictions. Guidelines. We like desks in rows and books open.
The world is different than that now. It is participatory.
Talk about the rules all you want. The fact remains: talk is cheap. By the time you settle on a norm, thet norm will have changed because new people showed up.