I’ve never been a very good blogger.  I’ve had a couple blogs in my time, mostly things related to travel or change, when I wanted to keep people updated on specific things going on in my life, but they never really panned out because, as it was with my failed childhood diaries, I tended to just forget they existed.

Though I am not very good at keeping to a blogging schedule, nor do I avidly read very many blogs, I am fascinated by the concept.  A blog, a Facebook status, and a tweet are all pieces of a conversation that happen solely on the internet, and as such are relatively recent developments in human social interaction, but they’ve become so ubiquitous that we can easily forget how new they really are.  They are the online equivalent of one person’s firing a thought out into the silence with or without the intention of another person firing back. But without the established history that we have with other social interactions, we don’t have the same communal understanding of etiquette that we do with things like, for instance, face-to-face conversations.

I was pondering this thought a couple of weeks ago while I sat on my porch with my uncles, cousins, aunts, parents, and siblings.  Ours is a family that talks constantly and, every once in a while, manages to say something.  Because we are spread around the country—from Washington state to Colorado to Missouri to Illinois to Pennsylvania to Washington D.C. to New York to Rhode Island—we get together something like three times a year and chew a considerable amount of fat.  My brother, my cousin, and I have, for two years, been having an ongoing conversation about gay marriage and LGBTQ rights in America, but we’re just amateurs.  My uncles are the pros: they can go for hours, days, months, years talking about the Singularity, the Federalist Papers, and what the world would be like if Rome had fallen either earlier or later than it actually did.

As I sit listening to them have this conversation, my mind, so accustomed to being disembodied, begins to picture what my parents’ porch would look like as a blog post or a Facebook status or a tweet.  In the past, all people had were places like that porch.  Discussions, arguments, and most other forms of social and intellectual interaction happened primarily in public spaces like bus stops, libraries, school cafeterias, parks, and parking lots.  If you weren’t a part of the conversation, you still probably heard it, and you probably formed your own opinions about it, whether consciously or not.  And if you were part of the conversation, you had to face your fellow participants as human beings: emotions, thoughts, histories, and futures, all with flesh and blood just like yours.  If you didn’t respect them, everyone around you would know, and you would have to justify that disrespect somehow, or you would have to face the social consequences.

This system of public forums was, like every other human system, flawed.  Marginalized people could not enter it with the same safety or power as the majority, the “public spaces” were not always equal access, and “respect” did not have a universal definition.  But it was an embodied system, and thought was given to the “public” and the “respect.” The surrounding society had a chance to be onlookers and judges who could declare the value and integrity of the conversation.

The internet has none of this.  There is no place like a bus stop or a public park on the internet where people who don’t want to be a part of the conversation cannot easily leave, where people who view the disrespect of others are held accountable as much as those who disrespect others.  There is no way, on the internet, to look into the face of your fellow conversation participant and be forced to acknowledge his or her humanity.

In and of itself, this lack might not be a problem.  Worthy topics are given great keyboard service on the internet every day; people often engage with others and their expertise and come out wiser and more enriched on the other side.  I’ve seen that happen and it is a blessing, but I have also been to any given video on YouTube and seen the counterexamples in the comment section, where, if there is anything constructive happening, it is buried so far beneath a clutter of disembodied disrespect that we would make ourselves cry just trying to find it.

The easy explanation for all of this is that we are humans.  The flawed system of public discourse has mixed with the flawed system of the internet and the flawed system of human society and the flaws have been maximized right along with the perfections.  Every December, YouTube and a community of thousands of its users participate in the Project for Awesome, where content creators and content consumers join together to raise money for charities worldwide.  Every day, Cyberbullying destroys lives in ways that the law has not yet found a way to process.  As great as we all know the internet is, it is simultaneously terrible.

What I find most frightening about the internet, the blogosphere, and social media is, fascinatingly enough, the subject of one of those Federalist papers my uncles love so much.  In Federalist No. 10, James Madison talks about factions and how they are a dangerous side effect of a free society, but that a large republic, like the United States, is better fit to keep them at bay than a smaller republic or democracy.  A faction, by Madison’s definition is “a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community,” or, basically, any group of people who actively want something that is not within the best interests of any other group of people or the entire community—in this case, a country.

Madison says that a large republic is less likely to be controlled by factions because a majority faction would be nearly impossible to sustain with such a large population of people, and even if one were to come into existence, it would not be able to act because the government is controlled by representatives, not directly by the people.

But the internet isn’t a republic.  There are no representatives that make decisions on our behalf about what disembodied actions are best for everyone or for the group as a whole.  We all “vote” for certain corners of the internet with our time—our clicks, our hyperlinks, our comments, our Facebook-shares, and our Google +1s.  And more and more frequently, our online votes become embodied realities: look at flash mobs, the Occupy movement, even, arguably, the Tea Party.  With the internet, we are not only able to create huge factions of people, but these factions are able to act synchronously around the globe.  With the power of the internet, our large republic that Madison was so proud of for its safety in unity could quickly become a dystopia that more closely resembles Panem than God’s coming Kingdom.

So why talk about it?  What is there to do?  We can’t put the online toothpaste back into the series of tubes; the internet is already out there and popular, and we can’t change the fact that it calls the shots in a large way.  We can’t get rid of the blogs, the tweets, and the Facebook statuses, and I would argue that we shouldn’t want to.  These things connect us and allow us access to parts of the world we might never have seen otherwise.

However, real positive progress toward making the disembodied internet a safer, healthier, and even more productive place comes with awareness.  It was a big day for me when I realized that “trolls”—users who make comments on things just to get passionate reactions out of people—are not an “other.”  Anyone can become a troll, but only on the internet.  What are the embodied equivalents of trolls, and for what are they trolling?  The more important question is, do they succeed?

I have a theory that if more people treated the internet like they do an embodied public place, a lot of things would change for the better.  It would be hard, and it would take a lot of extra work and imagination, so it’s a theory that might never actually be tested, but even so, I believe it could work.  YouTube users might check out the profiles of the people they reply to, remembering just in time that they have feelings, too.  Facebook friends would have a comment-thread conversation and yet refrain from simultaneously laughing derisively about it with their friends looking over their shoulder.  People could respond to other Tumblr users’ text posts without turning the discussion into a war between two armies of followers.

But perhaps the idea of pseudo-embodied public spaces on the internet is a pointless fantasy: the internet and the outernet are too different to be treated so similarly, and instead what we need is to refurbish the human consciousness so that it can withstand flame wars and cyberbulling, make do with communities where people are “users” instead of “members,” and ignore their fingertip-to-fingertip connection with the world.  I honestly don’t know which strategy would work better, or if there’s any chance for either of them to happen.  In the end, though, I like to think my original theory sounded easier.

Mary Margaret Healy

Mary Margaret is a 2013 English, history, and secondary education grad who went rogue and became a Social Worker in Pennsylvania’s Child Welfare system. Specifically, she works as a caseworker in the Statewide Adoption and Permanency Network finding families for children and educating the masses about foster care, adoption, and permanency planning. She made it over the grad-school hurdle with gold stars and warm fuzzies and is on to the next big adventure: the unknown of adulthood. Her major writing dream right now is to finish her science fiction novel that explores the concurrent futures of child welfare and artificial intelligence.