Nolan O'Connor's e-Portfolio

After honing our deliberation skills in an in-class deliberation on Gen-Ed reform, we took our skills to the online world where Internet trolls and the radically opinionated roam free. In this essay, I reflect on my deliberative experience and explore the use of the Internet as a medium for deliberation. 

 

Online Deliberation: A Reflection

Deliberation is the epitome of democracy: allowing the opinionated to congregate and exchange ideas, learn alternate perspectives, and ultimately grow more knowledgeable on the subject at hand. It is through deliberation that a sort of consensus is reached: the two parties may not budge in their respective opinions, but after a successful deliberation some sort of middle ground is often established. The birth of the Internet expanded the deliberative sphere with an unforeseen magnitude, allowing for worldwide conversation among people of different backgrounds and varying views while also concealing the user with a veil of anonymity. However, while this deliberative revolution does present more opportunities for the opinionated to interact and express their views, it typically fails to retain many of the important characteristics that comprise a successful deliberation—namely respect for the opinions of other participants, prioritizing key values, weighing trade-offs. In an attempt to carry out a fruitful, deliberation, I took to commenting on relevant news articles, projecting my opinions and trying to engage other Internet-goers in discussion—an effort that, although seemingly hopeful at times, ultimately failed to produce an effective online deliberation.

 

Contrary to my previous statement, grouping the entire Internet into one category is not particularly fair when trying to determine the success of an online deliberation. While many sites attract those that simply take advantage of their online anonymity, others appeal to those genuinely interested in a productive discussion; the success of an online deliberation depends largely on its venue. Due to its use of a moderator and its overall esteem as a news source, I figured the New York Times as a proper host for a fruitful deliberation. However, after leaving comments on a story of a current and somewhat pressing controversy between the Senate and the C.I.A, I had failed to engage any users in conversation, and upon further examination of the site, I discovered that most of the comments were without rebuttal. Instead of the back-and-forth that I expected to find, users on the site tend to state their own opinions on the matter with seemingly little regard to anyone else’s. Because the comments must first go through a moderator, there is a delay between when the comment is typed and when it appears on the site, rendering a back-and-forth discussion somewhat inconvenient. However, the use of a moderator along with an incentive—the New York Times selects what it perceives to be the most intelligent, thought-provoking comments and filters them into a separate category—resulted in an array of insightful, well-informed posts, just without the proper environment to foster a productive deliberation.

 

Without much success on the Times website, I decided to use the CNN website in hopes that the lack of a moderator would result in a more deliberation-based comment section. Luckily, after posting on a few stories, I managed to elicit some comments from other users (the CNN website did not notify me of most of the comments until a few days after they were posted, delaying my retorts and thwarting any chance at a back-and-forth deliberation.) While the rebuttals to my posts were not belligerent or particularly disrespectful, they all disagreed with at least one aspect of my statement, a logical pattern considering an agreement with a particular post is easily expressed with the “Upvote” button present under each post. Although a few of my posts managed to evoke responses, many did not, and this is largely due to their length and content. A six-sentence long post even on a hot-button topic like privacy on Facebook failed to generate any responses, largely because of its length but also due to the fact that the post didn’t contain any provocative, eye-popping statements. In an online deliberation, brief, often inflammatory statements generate the most activity—a result of the users’ tendency to quickly skim each post while scrolling. The comments of mine that generated the most buzz all concerned the NSA, which is unsurprising considering that it is a topic that tends to ruffle the feathers of even the more tame Internet users. While these posts were certainly ripe for deliberation, CNN’s delay in notifying me of these posts effectively hindered any chance of a true exchange.

 

Neither of the two sites were able to produce a successful deliberation, but a combination of their elements could certainly foster a deliberative environment. While the Times’ use of a moderator encumbered a free-flowing, back-and-forth exchange, its separation of the best comments provided users with an incentive to post shrewd and stimulating comments that could have easily prompted a productive deliberation. CNN’s hands-off approach did well to promote proper exchange, but the lack of censorship and incentives allowed for a slew of uninformed, occasionally irrelevant posts. By combining the Times’ incentive system with CNN’s lack of moderation, users can easily sift through the Internet trolls and uninformed comments to the posts that could potentially harbor deliberative exchange.

 

However, any amount of alterations to a website will not render an online deliberation as effective as one that takes place in person. The Internet offers an extraordinary opportunity to communicate with people of all views, but it is difficult to produce a completely genuine and effective deliberation. A productive deliberation requires a truly free flow of ideas and that both parties closely adhere to the nine deliberative criteria and reach an understanding of the alternate view. During the Civic Issue Forum, although not everyone was in complete agreement at the end of the discussion, we all better understood each other’s approaches and the reasons behind them—an indication of a productive deliberation that would be difficult to replicate online. No comment forum—moderated or not—could possibly match the free flow of ideas present in a face-to-face discussion. Additionally, combatting the presence of those that take advantage of the Internet’s anonymity further stifles this free exchange of ideas that is so critical to a productive deliberation. While the Internet can foster a fruitful and effective deliberation, many obstacles must be overcome in order to render it as productive as its face-to-face counterpart.