Digital Ethics

Rhetoric and Responsibility in Online Aggression

Jessica Reyman, Erika Sparby, Jessica Reyman, Erika M. Sparby, Jessica Reyman, Erika M. Sparby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367217952
• eBook ISBN: 9780429561115
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Digital Ethics delves into the shifting legal and ethical landscape in digital spaces and explores productive approaches for theorizing, understanding, and navigating through difficult ethical issues online.

Contributions from leading scholars address how changing technologies and media over the last decade have both created new ethical quandaries and reinforced old ones in rhetoric and writing studies. Through discussions of rhetorical theory, case studies and examples, research methods and methodologies, and pedagogical approaches and practical applications, this collection will further digital rhetoric scholars' inquiry into digital ethics and writing instructors' approaches to teaching ethics in the current technological moment.

A key contribution to the literature on ethical practices in digital spaces, this book will be of interest to researchers and teachers in the fields of digital rhetoric, composition, and writing studies.

Chapter 9 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

1 Introduction

Toward an Ethic of Responsibility in Digital Aggression

Jessica Reyman and Erika M. Sparby

Digital aggression in today’s digital world is widespread, lacking easily traceable sources and causes and without clear paths for accountability and resolution. In July 2017, the Pew Research Center reported that four in ten U.S. adults (41%) have experienced online harassment and many more have witnessed it. From name calling and public shaming to physical threats and stalking, much of this activity targets women, transpeople, and members of racial or ethnic minority groups. Research shows that one in four Black people has been the target of harassment, and women are twice as likely as men to be harassed online (Duggan, 2017). In addition, religious views and political views and affiliations have also been the basis for aggression. In 2014, GamerGate brought the gendered tensions and gatekeeping practices present in some gaming communities to the attention of the mainstream public. The 2017 white nationalist demonstration in Charlottesville, VA (which was organized largely through Discord, a voice and text chat app), and the online political and public responses following it gave renewed visibility to hate groups. Automation and algorithmic technologies present their own ethical quandaries surrounding digital data. The initial release of Apple Watch was unable to work properly on heavily tattooed or darkly pigmented skin (Profis, 2014), and Fitbit data has been used to catch cheating spouses (Pilon, 2015) and reveal pregnancy (Jackson, 2016). Twitter bots have been credited with influencing the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal revealed how the extent of the personal information and data collected through Facebook can be mismanaged and subject to abuse (Granville, 2018).

Within the current context, questions arise about response, responsibility, and accountability that the field of digital rhetoric is uniquely poised to address. The chapters in this collection, as a whole, build on what Porter (1998) has called “rhetorical ethics,” which do not constitute a moral code or a set of laws but rather a “set of implicit understandings between writer and audience about their relationship” (p. 68). While Porter’s work appeared before the rise of social media, automation, widespread digital data collection, and other contemporary web contexts, we have more recently seen how these implicit agreements extend beyond writer and reader (who often occupy both roles) to also include the individuals, communities, and institutions that build and manage technological spaces for discourse and engagement. Furthermore, as Brown (2015) argues, digital platforms, networks, and technologies themselves carry ethical programs with rhetorical implications.

Following the Association of Internet Researchers’ “Ethical Decision-Making and Internet Research” (Markham & Buchanan, 2012), this collection considers digital ethics as deeply embedded within rhetorical contexts. Approaches from our authors take into account Markham and Buchanan’s (2012) questions:

• Does the research definition of context match the way owners, users, or members might define it? …
• Are there distinctions between local contextual norms for how a venue is conceptualized and jurisdictional frameworks (e.g. Terms of Service, other regulations)? …
• What are the ethical expectations users attach to the venue in which they are interacting? (p. 8)

In doing so, the chapters in this collection seek to understand ethics within dynamic digital ecosystems and ecologies. The authors demonstrate the value of casuistic approaches to studying digital ethics, considering complex ethical issues by analyzing the tensions among regulation-driven and context-driven considerations.

In a time when more people are on Facebook than live in the country of China, when people wear social media in their watches and carry it in their pockets, and when the U.S. president uses Twitter as a political platform, attention to digital ethics is more important than ever. How users participate online and through digital media and how researchers and scholars theorize about ethical participation have the potential to shape the norms, laws, and practices that will determine the future of the social web and digital data. This edited collection provides a discussion of what principles, based on research and theory in rhetoric and composition, should guide our thinking about responsibility, accountability, and ethics. Through examinations of unethical practices in digital spaces and through digital technologies, this collection contributes to the field’s research and theorizing about ethical participation by providing contextualized, case-based analyses of varying forms of digital aggression and exploring the tensions inherent in minimizing harm in a digital age.

Ethics and Digital Aggression in Rhetoric and Writing Studies

Ethical issues have captured the attention of rhetoric and composition scholars from early iterations of the web to present day. Foregrounding Ethical Awareness in Composition and English Studies (Fontaine & Hunter, 1998) offered a collection of essays on ethical issues relevant to teaching and administrating composition classes and programs at a time when the field was reportedly taking an “ethical turn.” In a review essay titled “The Ethical Turn in English Studies” (1999), Harrington asserted a rise in interest in ethics at the time. While she observed that “current discussions vary considerably in approach as well as well as how ethics relates to what we do as teachers and scholars,” she located its roots in the connections developing at the time between administrative practices and pedagogical choices to the social, cultural, and political.

At that same time, the web was emerging as a force for communication, civic discourse, public activity, and education, leading rhetoric and composition researchers to define and theorize the concept of “rhetorical ethics” for online rhetoric (Porter, 1998) and later a “digital ethic” (DeVoss & Porter, 2006) for new online environments. New environments for reading and writing presented new ethical issues for consideration by rhetoric and composition scholars. Privacy online was identified early as an ethical issue of rhetorical import by Gurak in Persuasion and Privacy in Cyberspace (1999), and has since been examined by Beck et al. (2016). Digital copyright and authorship have been widely examined as contentious legal issues rife with ethical implications (Herrington, 2010; Logie, 2006; Reyman, 2010; Rife, Slattery, & DeVoss, 2011; Westbrook, 2009). Johnson-Eilola (2010) has written about the implications of “spimes” and user data for writers and readers in “Among Texts,” where he concludes with “an incomplete list of concerns” that includes issues of privacy and ethics. A 2011 special issue of Computers and Composition Online titled “Ethics in Digital Age: Ethics and Digital Media in the Writing Classroom” (Coley, 2011) presents discussion of “ethical literacy” for a digital age, which includes discussions about ethical issues presented by both student composing activities such as photo manipulation and remix and instructor activities such as adopting course management systems. These particular ethical issues—of privacy, of copyright, of remix and attribution—have attracted the interest of scholars interrogating ethics within digital ecosystems and ecologies for composing, communication, participation, and engagement.

As far back as Selfe and Selfe’s “Politics of the Interface” (1994), digital rhetoric has been concerned with the ways technologies and interfaces reinscribe dominant ideologies and power structures by their very design, and equally important are explorations of how humans can perpetuate these dynamics through discourse and participation in online spaces. More recently, digital ethics scholarship within rhetoric and composition studies has examined these concerns within the context of human–machine collaborations. Brown’s Ethical Programs (2015) offers a compelling and extended analysis of the ethics of networked software, showing how software promotes particular arguments and advances an ethical agenda, thus contributing to the complexities of locating responsibility and accountability within and across digital ecologies. Automated systems and algorithms have been addressed as an ethical quandary for rhetoricians studying rhetorical agency (Kennedy, 2016; Miller, 2007; Reyman, 2010).

Other recent work addresses digital aggression through examinations of case studies, analysis of examples, and observations of user activity in online communities. Warnick and Heineman’s Rhetoric Online (2012) examines cyberterrorism to contribute to an understanding of why and how digital aggression can be so persuasive, revealing the global and political implications for damaging digital discourses (Warnick & Heineman, 2012). Several scholars have observed gendered aggression in online spaces (Cloud, 2009; Jane, 2014; Milner, 2013; Phillips, 2015), including Poland (2016), who provides a first-person exploration of cybersexism and harassment in Haters: Harassment, Abuse, and Violence Online. She follows Phillips’s (2015) nuanced treatment of the topic, examining different types of trolls and aggressors and acknowledging the intersectionality of harassment and abuse. Clinnin and Manthey (2019), Gruwell (2017), and Sparby (2017) connect what we know (and can learn) about digital aggression to practical applications for teaching writing. They urge writing teachers to engage students in becoming more civically engaged in the digital spaces they occupy.

The field of rhetoric and composition is only just beginning to grapple with and untangle the implications of the widespread abuse and harassment distributed across the social web, the ethical dilemmas presented to us in the writing and rhetoric classroom or through our research, and the complex questions surrounding automation, wearable technologies, and issues of privacy and surveillance. Poland (2016) offers a call to action: “Those of us with the power to do research, educate others, enforce consequences, and build safer spaces have a responsibility to do so” (p. 252). The authors in this collection aim to meet this challenge, offering new frameworks for digital ethics from a uniquely rhetorical perspective.

Toward an Ethic of Responsibility in Digital Aggression: From Not Feeding the Trolls to an Ecology of Response

Typical advice and calls for civility amidst aggression, hate speech, and harassment are frequently too-optimistic, misguided, and ineffectual. Phillips and Milner (2018) critique sentiments such as, “[i]f only people would lower their voices, stop posting rude memes, and quit with the name-calling, we could start having meaningful conversations. We could unite around our shared experiences. We could come together as a nation.” Poland (2016) brings attention to the problematic nature of a similar adage for responding to digital harassment: “don’t feed the trolls.” The idea behind these approaches is that because those who spew hate and harass others online feed on attention, if users simply ignore the comments and behaviors, aggressors will get bored, cease their behavior, and go elsewhere. However well-intentioned, this urging toward civility is inadequate because it flattens contexts, puts an emphasis on intentionality over effect, and can silence the targets of aggression, including already marginalized voices.

Put simply, existing approaches to address digital aggression fail today’s digital media users. In contemporary digital contexts, the number of users has risen so dramatically and the boundaries between digital communities are more fluid and diverse than ever before. In The Internet of Garbage, Jeon...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword: Interacting with Friends, Enemies, and Strangers
• List of Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Toward an Ethic of Responsibility in Digital Aggression
• Part I Ethics of Interfaces and Platforms
• Part II Academic Labor in Digital Publics
• Part III Cultural Narratives in Hostile Discourses
• Part IV Circulation and Amplification of Digital Aggression
• Index