"Soapboxes in Cyberspace"

Went to a panel discussion organised by Nico MacDonald and the Innovation Forum on political discussion on  the net (with the deliberately clunky title above).
Andrew Calcutt from the University of East London said there were a lot of lazy assumptions around the virtures of online debate. He suggested social change was running far ahead of politics - which led to some people seeking "media representation" rather than "political representation". He was scathing about media organisations surrendering their editorial values to buy into interactivity for its own sake.

Meg Pickard from the Guardian talked about how online discussion was not the same thing as online community. How comments are often poor quality or abusive and she suggested three possible solutions.
1) Human (ie moderation)
2) Technology (Recommendation, flagging etc)
3) Editorial (Framing of the debate, reward for high quality contribution)

A useful quote from Kevin Anderson of the Guardian - "News stories should answer questions and tie up loose ends. Blogs should pose questions and leave some ends dangling to encourage debate."

Lee Bryant of Headshift believed the best communities and debates were those where limitations were applied - constraints, walls were needed for quality debate. He said the online world could learn from TV where there was high quality discussion and interaction on programmes like Question Time - because it was a controlled format and space.

Olivier Creiche of the blogging platform Six APart talked about the use of blogs and political discussion in the recent French Elections.

And the BBC's Daniel Mermelstein talked about the Have Your Say site and some of the issues regarding moderation in particular.

My take - community is something different from online comments and few are yet good at it. Big media organisations can't force community but we can nurture and feed it where it seems to grow naturally (606 on BBC Sport would be a good example of this). ie Instead of insisting people come and have a good time at our place, we need to find out where they are gathering anyway and buy the drinks....

Kevin Anderson blogged the session extensively at Corante

Comments

[ploop]

your closing comment was a fine one Richard. My feeling is that, if the framework for discussion is set up, then the comments and discussions that follow often follow suit. Whre comments are over moderated it can get very clumbsy - as you say, it's like a pub conversation. And in a pub you get the odd absurd remark which is often simply ignored but never erased