As internet social
media draw more and more people into their reach, so the odds of them
being put in touch with others, whom they would try to avoid in
offline life, rise. Therefore, the major players very sensibly
provide a Block function, so that their users can hide themselves
from anyone who they suspect may attempt to harass them on line, or,
worse still, track them down for committing physical violence in the
real world. Risks identified, remedy provided, job done.
Nobody has to justify
their use of a Block against a potential menace, and any procedure
requiring them to do so would be a counter-productive deterrent that
I could not support. However, with the right to use Blocks freely
comes the moral responsibility to use them fairly and ethically. I
fear there are so-called libertarians, libertines really, out there,
who feel their rights to behave unfairly and immorally take
precedence over any obligations to the rest of humanity, and there
always have been, but they have to be written off as a lost cause,
while I offer food for thought to the more conventionally decent of
my readers.
If your social media
involvement goes no further than using Facebook to swap gossip with
your immediate friends and family, then you can control matters well
enough by setting everything to Friends Only and taking care who
those Friends are. However, once you start going to Facebook's Groups
and Pages, or using Twitter, or Youtube comment threads , or that
dying dinosaur of Noughties internet, MySpace, then you have gone
public, and even if you have the technical facility to be a control
freak to those internet users that immediately surrounds you, you
have ventured out of your private zone and should behave
appropriately to the virtual public place you have chosen to put
yourself in.
And what does all that
have to do with blocking, you may ask. Simply this: Internet forums
and discussions run on the assumption that each and every participant
in the thread can follow the development of a discussion entry by
entry. This linearity is why we call them threads and not scatters!
They are virtual representations of public meetings. However, it
would soon reduce a discussion to chaos, if substantial numbers of
its members could not see each others contributions. How is a
participant supposed to make sense of a discussion, if, for a
hypothetical example, the second and third commenters can't see each
other, unknown to them, they do know the fifth commenter and seventh
commenter can't see each other and they have been blocked by the
fourth commenter and don't even know that they are there? The
dynamics just become unworkable. Even so, there is a deplorable fad
for capricious blocking spreading through Jersey's online political
community amongst both left and right wingers.
Slamming the cyber-door
in the face of a cyber-bully is fair enough, although such retreat
cannot be credibly spun as victory. What is inexcusably rude to an
entire group, though, is to refuse to interact with all in that group
on an equal footing, save those one has already fallen out with
outside of the group. And yet, we are starting to see a tactic
emerging where certain people, unfortunately including a couple of my
own friends, wilfully disrupt the functioning of discussion groups by
blocking people who have made no attempt to be malicious. Blocking
someone for expressing an opinion you do not share, but are too lazy
to articulate your disagreement with, or because they do not feel
safe enough themselves in the online environment to expose their
offline identity or lifestyle, is both boorish behaviour and
ineffectual politics.
Political discussion is
all about the exchange and comparison of ideas. If you will only read
what you already think, you will never learn anything new. Progress
depends on considering one another's views and having the integrity
to change minds when faced with better ways. Thus, the most important
people to address and be addressed by are not your own comrades, but
those on the other side to whichever your own may be. If, instead,
you refuse to engage with them, whether from rudeness or
spinelessness, then you are marginalising yourself as a participant
in the political process, a mistake for an activist and a catastrophe
for a candidate, and may as well get out of the game altogether.
Free and open public
discussion of political issues is the foundation of democracy.
Attempting to exclude others from engaging is a threat to this
foundation. Unless you genuinely believe that somebody will ruin your
life, if you dare to let them communicate with you, and I fully
realise that sometimes there really are such cases, then do not block
fellow members of forums and discussion groups. It does far more harm
than good to both the cause of politics in general and your
reputation in the eyes of anyone who realises what you are doing.
