The current tempest in the teapot of the academic blogosphere is the stalking of Scott Eric Kaufman. John Holbo has a decent summary, with links to most of the relevant original posts. The short form is this: Scott commented negatively on the “Jesus’ General” blog about what he thought was an overreaction to a post by a Nashville blogger. As a result, he offended a commenter there, who responded by sending a bunch of letters to the administration of Scott’s university accusing him of being a white supremacist. Things went downhill from there.
This whole episode is yet another sad example of the power of screechy monkeys on the Internet.
There are a series of posts at Jesus’ General in which he expresses dismay at what’s happened. All he meant to do was to draw attention to an offensive post, he says, and it ended up costing the Nashville blogger in question her job. He says that he never meant for people to harass her directly, or to move on to harassing Scott– all he wanted was an apology. The problem is, to someone who’s been around for a while, everything that happened has a depressing air of inevitability.
The power of blogging is also its curse. Blogs make it possible to direct the attention of large numbers of people at some problem or story– to, in the famous words of an early blogger, “fact-check your ass.” People have done a lot of good with this in some cases– dozens of different bloggers have raised money for charity, or raised the profile of some story that otherwise would’ve been overlooked. You can accomplish an awful lot by directing the attention of a huge distributed network of people to where it needs to be.
The problem, though, is that some fraction of those people are screechy monkeys, and react to pretty much any provocation by howling and flinging feces. At most sites, they’re a tiny fraction of the readership, but a tiny fraction of millions of Internet readers still adds up to many thousands of screechy monkeys. And it’s important to remember that when you point the reasonable people at some person, you’re also loosing the screechy monkeys on them.
Jesus’ General is not the first to have some situation go horribly wrong because of the screechy monkeys, and he won’t be the last. The Nashville blogger who had to resign isn’t the first to lose a job to the screechy monkeys, and Scott Eric Kaufman won’t be the last to be put through the wringer. There are just too many people discovering blogs for the first time, who will need to make the same mistakes that have been made in the past.
But if there’s going to be any shred of good salvaged from this whole sordid affair, let it be this: Be aware of the screechy monkeys. No matter how good and noble you think your cause is, remember that some of the people you’re directing to it are screechy feces-flinging monkeys.
In particular, if you post somebody’s personal contact information (their email, their employer’s email), you are effectively sending them a box full of screechy monkeys– if you post contact information for someone who has offended you, they will be contacted, and some of the people doing the contacting will be screechy monkeys, who will screech and curse and fling feces all over the place. Before you post, think very carefully about whether you really want to inflict that on another person over something they wrote on the Internet.