Real power doesn’t have to be exercised - week 7

There is very little to find online about Virginia Shea, Princeton alumna and “student of human nature all her life”. The “network manners guru” by the San Jose Mercury News has a husband, four cats but not a Wikipedia page on her name. Shea’s most important contribution to the conversation about the evolving cyberspace is the book “Netiquette”, 160 pages of length, published in May 1994, so well ahead of the social-media era but at a time when the human interaction on the web was already frequent enough to pose questions about to-dos and don’ts in the online communication; back then mostly via emails, mailing lists, newsgroups end so on.

The book Netiquette, featured in numerous publications, still actual in is purpose, is structured as a decalogue of “commandments” to follow for proper behaviour on the internet and, quite frankly, valid everywhere.

1.    Remember the Human

2.    Adhere to the same standards of behaviour online that you follow in real life

3.    Know where you are in cyberspace

4.    Respect other people's time and bandwidth

5.    Make yourself look good online

6.    Share expert knowledge

7.    Help keep flame wars under control

8.    Respect other people's privacy

9.    Don't abuse your power

10. Be forgiving of other people's mistakes

My favourite rule is “do not abuse your power”, being the “social power” dimension the one that in my opinion is among the ones to be most prone to be distorted in the cyberspace. That’s what the authoress as to say about the topic:

“Some people in cyberspace have more power than others. There are wizards in MUDs (multi-user dungeons), experts in every office, and system administrators in every system.”

“Knowing more than others, or having more power than they do, does not give you the right to take advantage of them. For example, sysadmins should never read private email.”

There is a peculiar figure in the cyberspace not present in the real world in the same fashion: the “forum moderator” or in its other declinations such as “Facebook group administrator” and so on… The human world is filled with people in charge of moderate and administrate others, but never like in the Net those figures had the power to annihilate others with a single click on the mouse.

Let’s think how easy can be for a moderator tho kick a “troll” out of a forum, how he can perform that without checks and balances, and then think of a bouncer job to take a dangerous intoxicated person out of a pub. How more difficult is the second task? How many things can get out of control and how easier the second action can evolve in legal litigation.

Group/forum moderator found for themselves to be much easier to abuse the use of authority over the healthy leadership of a group. This is clear seeing some once healthy forums destroyed by new “rulers” that overreaching with their will to impose themself actually destroyed the “vibes” and the functionality itself of the group.

All these issues can be trivial if we are talking about gaming forums but can become substantial if more important aspects of our social life are moving, and they are, online.

Source:

The core rules of netiquette, by Virginia Shea

http://albion.com/netiquette/