Public behavior today is not known for its civility, so it’s unsurprising that online etiquette is especially terrible. Lacking even the most rudimentary incentives for decorum and restraint, social media platforms make it possible to act like a jerk to millions of people anonymously, with no consequence. If there is an online ethos at all, it’s difficult to figure out what it is, and this remains true regardless of which particular social media platform one is talking about, although the relevant valences may change. Whether one is on Bluesky or the site formerly known as “Twitter,” for example, you will be scolded and lectured by legions of maladjusted nobodies, though the social or political orientation of the scolding and lecturing may vary wildly. And if you spend any amount of time in these virtual environments, you will find yourself flooded with unhinged rants, serial cries of impotent rage, categorical judgments as to the merits (and demerits) of every element of popular arts and culture, lengthy oratories ending with “I will not be taking questions at this time,” and homemade porn; lots of homemade porn.
Social media makes it possible for anyone and everyone to broadcast messages, images, and video to millions of people worldwide, an unprecedented state of affairs, as this capacity used to be limited to high ranking public officials, celebrities, religious leaders, network news anchors, and the like. Then, the smartphone appeared on the scene and gave everyone a global platform, as if we all had a satellite-mounted megaphone pointed at the earth, controlled by a device that one could keep in one’s pocket. You’d be forgiven for thinking this a terrible idea, insofar as the power to message the entire planet seems to have gone to a lot of people’s heads, as in the case of the aforementioned self-deputized moralizers and scolds who, with their passive-aggressive “friendly reminders,” tendentious “fun facts,” and other rhetorically addled modes of communication can make even the most tech-addicted person pine for the days of the landline.
The DIY porn producers are undoubtedly the worst, failing to grasp that if one shouldn’t expose oneself to strangers walking down the street, one shouldn’t do it to (exponentially more) people online. It’s hard to imagine that one would need to be told that most people don’t want to have pictures of hairy, obese men wearing nothing but thongs or silicone boobed (and lipped) women bursting out of their clothes suddenly appear on their smartphone screens as they are sitting in waiting rooms or on public transport, but social media has turned the World Wide Web into a land of broken expectations and mores. At a time when we otherwise obsess over matters of access and consent and “trauma,” you would think that the gross incivility of forcing oneself on others in such a gratuitous manner should be obvious, but this is where the convoluted psychology effected by placing a universal broadcasting studio in everyone’s hands is revealed at its most obvious. Recently, on Bluesky, a person defended online indecent exposure by suggesting that those who object “get offline and go to bed,” a variation on “don’t look, if you don’t want to see it.” Now, this is obviously a terrible argument — the equivalent of justifying indecent exposure on the public streets by saying “don’t look up from the pavement if you don’t want to see my dick” — but it does display the inversion of common prerogatives that have developed in online spaces and which extends far beyond showing unwitting and unwilling people your private parts.
A complaint you’ll often hear from the pontificating set is about “reply guys” and people “jumping into my mentions,” which reveals that while they may want to broadcast their views to everyone, they don’t want anyone broadcasting back; or at least, not those who disagree with or contradict them. Indeed, just a week or two ago, on the aforementioned Bluesky, one poster explained that she restricted replies (i.e., set her account so that only those who “followed” her could reply to what she posted), because there was no “right” to converse with her; that whom she chose to interact with was her prerogative.
Rights talk is always fraught, but this struck me as particularly confused. I remarked that it seemed strange to announce something to millions of strangers, only to be disconcerted when one of them replies; sort of like running through a crowded train station shouting and then, when someone shouts back, saying “I wasn’t talking to you.” My interlocutor saw nothing strange about this at all and likened her public pronouncements to a highway billboard, which might publicly display a statement — even a bold or controversial one — but is not an invitation to a conversation and certainly not to blacken out its message with paint or otherwise deface it. I wondered about the comparison, as it seemed clear to me that what was wrong with defacing a billboard was not that it involved an unwanted rejection of the message but rather that it damaged someone else’s property, but before I had a chance to pursue this line of thought, another person came into the conversation and said that messaging to the world’s population was really more like wearing a politically charged shirt on a bus or train and that again, this was not an invitation to converse. Given this second interlocutor’s overall affect, I was quite certain that if he encountered someone on his morning commute wearing a t-shirt that said, “Women Belong in the Kitchen” or “Immigrants Aren’t Welcome in America,” he would very much take it as an invitation to converse (or more likely, berate), but I saw no point in pressing the matter. Certainly, if a guy is being a jerk to you online, you are entirely within your rights to block him, but if you proclaim something to him, by way of universal messaging, and prevent him from answering from the start, then you are being the jerk, not him. “I get to say and show to you, and you either applaud or shut up” is not any kind of virtuous — or even reasonable — position.
Exchanges like these have taught me that it is almost impossible to get a certain kind of person to see the analogy between online and in-person interactions and spaces. To them, the internet is a place of alternate realities and ersatz people and their avatars, where everyone is a celebrity and expert and authority all at once and free to make oracular speeches and get their weird out in everybody else’s faces. But the fact that they bristle when others adopt the same posture, develop an entire lexicon for describing such virtual interlopers, and make every effort to control who can speak to them and what they can say, in advance, suggests a “me, but not thee” attitude that contradicts the ethos just described and involves a level of self-importance that is hard to make sense of.
It also suggests that because of the unique combination of temptation, lack of accountability, and near-unlimited access to others that social media provides, the norms governing our interactions in these spaces should be more robust than those governing our in-person engagements, rather than less. Those belonging to the pontificating set clearly know this, inasmuch as they have implemented such controls in their own cases, but they either are unable or refuse to recognize that they aren’t in a private chat group but “out in public,” where speaking and opining is everyone’s prerogative, not just theirs. As for the DIY pornographers, while I never get the impression of malicious or otherwise antisocial intent, it would seem that they are so wrapped up with their fixations, whatever these may be, that any capacity they may once have had for common courtesy (or embarrassment) has been lost and the question of norms never even arises.
