Viral or Downward Spiral

What color is this dress?

Chances are, some of you see white and gold and some of you seem blue and black.

Last night, this dress hit the internet and online forums (Tumblr, Twitter, Reddit, etc.) went berserk debating the color of the dress. "Blue and black Camps" and "Team White and gold" started popping up, usually accompanied by #thedress. I first noticed the epidemic on twitter, where the only two trending topics were escaped llamas and the dress pictured above. I had been working for about five hours, during which time both dilemmas had risen to internet fame. The tweets at the beginning were fairly innocuous, most people were just weighing in. Did they think the dress was blue? How many iterations of "llow speed chase" could the active, tweeting community really come up with? But as I scrolled closer and closer to real time, comments posted became increasingly caustic. People spent less time defending what they saw in order to cut down whoever saw the other colors.

Ultimately the dress story will die down, but it illustrates a nice point and made my internet discussions with strangers a bit easier. In my last post I argued that we are too easily fueled by our passions and confirmation bias online, but after participating in a few Reddit threads and Twitter conversations I would like to amend my claim. We are likely fueled by the same bias concentrations in person and online, however, the platform of the internet facilitates fiery-er responses. Either anonymity or that degree of separation we are allowed online removes the human aspect of whomever we are talking to. Even as I was scrolling through different feeds to try and find a good place to begin conversation I cringed at most of the material I was sorting through.

My argument here is not any sort of regulation of anonymous comments, rather a call for ideas. How can we fundamentally change the way we think? How can we, in the future, look at comments online and see the person who wrote the comment before we see the potential argument?

Professor Burton also took part in the conversation after class on Wednesday, at my request, and provided an interesting suggestion: rather than regulate content, write "codes of conduct" into literal codes (and I'm paraphrasing). But what if we actually wrote into the codes of programs that would... say... bring a comment that got more likes to the top of a feed? That way most of the filthy comments could sink to the bottom and be ignored. Of course there are problems with a model this simple, but isn't it an intriguing idea? In one of my discussions I brought this up, and the user cited the app YikYak. For those unfamiliar with the app, it is essentially an anonymous Twitter for your geographic area. All user posts are anonymous, but if any post gets five "down" votes, it is deleted from the site and those with more "up" votes can be found on popular pages.

Even this has its problems, and after a few days of trying out the app I deleted it for wont of content worth scrolling through.

Perhaps as the internet continues to develop and we as individuals become more "programmed" into our profiles and as we become more comfortable with relationships that are strictly digital, we will be able to recognize the humanity of those we interact with on the internet. And perhaps when they are more human, we will maintain a decorum more similar to that which we carry on in physical debates and will blog with the understanding somebody thinks that the opposite side of your argument is valid, and maybe even consider not typing that thing at all if it isn't nice. 

In the meantime, the next time you are tempted to write a disparaging blog post that has the potential to go viral, or tweet an insult that tells the white and gold team that they must see white and gold because they are depressed, remember who the other side is and ask yourself if you would start that conversation face–to–face.