Taking responsibility for our actions

Having just finished reading The Anarchist in the Library and having watched a bit of tenstion on some boards I am responsible for recently I have been worrying about the risks associated with all of these empowering technologies - blogs, wikis, boards etc.

Normally I am so convinced of the opportunities that I tend to belittle the risks but there is a mob menatlity that can so easily be genertated by the high degree of connectivity available to us. Smart mobs can also be dumb mobs.

I guess the point is that we have been trained not to take responsibility for our thoughts for centuries. Someone else tells us stories in the media and we just winge back, someone else runs the country and we stop voting and give up and winge from the sidelines. Our winging is relatively powerless and we have learned to indulge ourselves in venting emotions rather than dealing responsibly with our thoughts.

As Bernie Goldbach points out this morning in a great post, bloggers are linking to the video of Paul Marshall Johnson being beheaded.

The major broadcasters are exercising their responsibility by not showing the gruesome video - some of us now have that responsibility placed in our own control.

Comments

[Chris Corrigan]

Euan...this is exaclty why I use Open Space Technology as a meeting process. It works with all of the self-organizing dynamics that we are familiar with and it demands responsibility if anything is to be done.

Passion bounded by responsibility is what true empowerment is all about. A technology that just gives us another opportunity to whinge is not a democratic technology. A technology that allows us to participate is a democratic one.

It is the difference between voting and working for change. People who become disenchanted with democracy, I find, rarely do anything opther than vote. Voting is not the great legacy of democracy. being free to create change is the great legacy. Or as we say in Open Space, with the law of Two Feet: "If you find yourself in a place where you are neither learning or contributing, go somewhere where you can."

passion bounded by responsibility.

[Suw]

Yeah, this distancing effect that the net has can be terribly detrimental. I've been on a heap load of web communities and those that do not at some point descend into bitchy bickering are definitely in the minority. I've been on the receiving end of the flak more than once, and usually the problems are down to people publishing kneejerk reactions. It's so very easy to forget that there's a human on the otherside of the monitor, one with thoughts and feelings.

But, on the whole, I do think that the benefits of these interactive media outweigh the risks quite substantially, and that the vast majority of interactions are positive. But maybe i'm just an optimist. ;-)

[Siva Vaidhyanathan]

Wonderful post. Thanks for putting the book in context. And thanks for getting it!

Siva

[skarlet]

Splendidly thought-provoking post (which i found via Siva's blog). I plan to adopt Siva's book for a digital culture course and you've given me yet another interesting angle to view the work. And a great new blog for the roll, to boot :-)

peace