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Colleges Struggling With the Digital Bathroom Wall
theodp writes "Back in the day, anonymous character assassination was confined to permanent marker scrawl in bathroom stalls. But now, thanks to sites like the student-run CollegeACB.com (ACB=Anonymous Confession Board), which can get hundreds of thousands of hits on a good day, TIME reports that anonymous slander is going viral on campus. Even the most elite universities — normally the land of the politically correct — have been struggling with the problem of anonymous gossip sites and their very un-PC posts, which an Amherst dean likens to 'the worst of junior high.' If he thinks things are bad now, wait until the kids start getting creative with Google Sidewiki."
Really, it's futile in the long term to try and ban "harassment comments" or whatever you want to call it, unless you want to really compromise free speech and become worse than China. Maybe instead stop being so bloody touchy about stupid things stupid people write? What is it we've told our children for ages - "stop caring, don't give it attention"?
Political Correctness is just a new version of Politeness. Those who make sad and angry noises about PC are just upset that their version of PC is out of style. Perhaps they were Emily Post fans.
We now frown on slurs and other degrading language where once that was celebrated. We now allow discussions of topics in public that were once forced by the Olde PC to be kept private to the determent of those who needed the topics aired.
When someone complains about 'PC' they're just complaining that THEIR version of right/wrong in public has been pushed out by the majority.
Blar.
This is hardly a new problem. Check out the old "Consumers Guide to MIT Men", a 1970's rating book for MIT men in bed designed to mock the rating guides for easy lays published internally by the fraternities of the day. Sadly, the book failed to mention that the authors were sleeping with drunk boys from the "Strat's Rat" bar at MIT, where the high male/female ratio and cheap liquor contributed to their research.
They tried to censor that, too. And make no mistake: the great desire of university publicity departments and administrators is to shut down such documents, not to prevent slander or libel. We need to be very careful about what actually gets blocked: anonymous has a long, proud history in the US dating back to Thomas Paine and the Federalist papers, and the courts are quite aware of how chilling of free speech even mild restraints can be. The anonymity is critical to protect people from repercussion: www.wikileaks.org is critical proof of this, and I highly recommend it for people to see how amazing the information their bosses and newspapers and governments don't publish really is.
Freedom of speech wears-out only if you don’t use it.
— Maurice Maréchal, founder of the satirical french weekly “Le Canard Enchaîné“.
on anything that is driven by user content. Unmoderated content is simply useless and the more inter-connected that user accounts become, the better. A cross-site karma system would be excellent, eventually anyone who doesn't want to have to read shit from every moron with a keyboard won't have to. If karma could be propagated across news-sites, IMDB, /., etc. and linked into everyone's Facebook, we'd be better off. I just don't read unmoderated, anonymous content; it's worthless. There will always be fuckwads (sorry, reference to the Penny-Arcade comic another commenter posted) on the Internet, but it doesn't mean we can't flag them as not worth listening to.
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
It's funny how this particular thread is attracting all the Anonymous Cowards
"Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish"
Albert Einstein
Have you been encased in a cement bunker for 20 years? "PC" is not just about avoiding overt insults or, say, the fact that we have condom ads on television now with a guy getting his junk buffed in a wind tunnel. When recent polls in the polls in the UK indicate that 80% of the population is tired of political correctness, you have a real problem, not a generation gap.
When people complain about PC, they mean the sort that causes valid or even scientific discussion from even taking place because some hypersensitive miseryshit somewhere might be offended.
It's the sort of PC that chastises a kid in a Halloween pirate costume for wearing an eye patch because it's offensive to the disabled. Oops, I mean differently-abled! Sorry! Don't sue me for causing emotional distress, please! It's curious they never seem to ask an actual other-abled person. No, wait, "other" sounds exclusionary doesn't it? Argh! The low seas of PC be treacherous, me mateys!
Political correctness also seems to be covering hypersensitivity to safety, so you have it applied to cases where trapeze artists are required to wear hard hats or the Army is told to make their training courses safer to the point of, well, pointlessness. That seems odd to me, but the street finds its own uses for words, much like hacker is used in place of cracker by the general population. Language evolves- deal with it.
The first one is obviously the best choice. I'd much rather have to deal with being slandered than have whistleblowers stifled. Hell, you get used to being slandered way early on in life, that's practically what elementary and high school are anyway. It's just now the teachers are taking exception to when it's done to them and not the kids.
If every stall had a board tied to the board in every other stall for collaborative graffiti, that would be pretty neat.
Kids do stupid things. That's aout as newsworthy as the sun rising I the East. Within a few years, stupid comments you made way back when will be recognized as such.
But while there is real slander going on, that's the extreme edge of a real sea-change going on. Sites like RateYourProfessor.com have fundamentally changed how studets and learning institutions interract! My wife, daughter, and two oldest sons are all attending CSUs and they all rely on RateYourProfessor HEAVILY to decide what classes to take. They find that it's quite accurate, too!
This is something that strikes at the very heart of (IMHO) antiquated conncepts like tenure, which often works to cement boring, mediocre teachers into irrevokable positions in schools, draining the will of otherwise good students, and making education more expensive and less valuable to all others involved.
This is a very good thing!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
This is something that strikes at the very heart of (IMHO) antiquated conncepts like tenure, which often works to cement boring, mediocre teachers into irrevokable positions in schools, draining the will of otherwise good students, and making education more expensive and less valuable to all others involved.
While tenure may keep professors teaching when they're not that good at it, that's not the purpose of tenure, and to claim that it is seems a bit disingenuous. Tenure serves to protect professors from retaliation, either in terms of their research or general academic politics, of which there are far too many.
Personally, I feel that there is too much emphasis on research positions at schools when there should be more space for professors who focus primarily on teaching, but this is a separate issue from tenure.