This is what's made me so very uncomfortable in all the discussions of derailing and "if you didn't want it linked it shouldn't be public" -- because this has changed the rules of discussion. Move the goalposts, as it were. We've been puttering along with one sort of general consensus of where the boundaries are, and then all of a sudden that consensus has begun to shift, and the folks who haven't been paying attention are left saying, "Wait what?" about it.
Yes, it's a public web, hypertextual and interlaced, and yes, of course users who post public content should be aware that anyone can access it, but that doesn't mean we haven't evolved these general sorts of implicit understandings about that public content and how to read its context. And I wish people would allow for those older understandings of how this all works when making their judgments about what posts are 'derailing'.
no subject
Date: 12 Feb 2010 01:42 pm (UTC)This is what's made me so very uncomfortable in all the discussions of derailing and "if you didn't want it linked it shouldn't be public" -- because this has changed the rules of discussion. Move the goalposts, as it were. We've been puttering along with one sort of general consensus of where the boundaries are, and then all of a sudden that consensus has begun to shift, and the folks who haven't been paying attention are left saying, "Wait what?" about it.
Yes, it's a public web, hypertextual and interlaced, and yes, of course users who post public content should be aware that anyone can access it, but that doesn't mean we haven't evolved these general sorts of implicit understandings about that public content and how to read its context. And I wish people would allow for those older understandings of how this all works when making their judgments about what posts are 'derailing'.