In the American pioneering era, settlers hitched up wagons to conquer what they saw as the vast, lawless and untamed areas west of the Mississippi River. As the white settlers moved in, they established new communities and sought their fortunes. This picture of the āWild Westā depicted in popular culture is often used as an analogy for the digital landscape in which we carry out our personal and professional relationships. Indeed, Howard Rheingoldās (2000) seminal book Virtual Communities: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier invokes this imagery.
Typically, the analogy is used to correlate the lawlessness associated with the gunslingers of the Wild West with the anti-social behaviours that concern us most in our online interactions: incivility, hostility, ātrollingā, online harassment and abuse. Increasingly it is these aspects of the internet which are causing us the most unease and concern. Of course, uncivil and hostile behaviour is not unique to the online space, but the persistent and ubiquitous nature of online communications enhances the social implications of these anti-social behaviours.
In seeking to address the question āHow can we create harmonious and inclusive communities online?ā, we must first chart the landscape in which we are commenting to determine what can be adjusted and influenced. This chapter sets out to chart the Wild West of the online commenting landscape by defining the platforms where we comment and exploring how and why we comment. Next, it will draw on the concept of the online community to investigate the unique circumstances that influence our relationships online and the social implications of those relationshipsāin other words, how people behave online and how that behaviour impacts on others. The use of the online community is a central pillar to the argument outlined in this book, as understanding our online interactions as taking part in a community is vital if we are to adjust our expectations of acceptable behaviours online.
The chapter will conclude by outlining the factors that influence how we as individuals and collectively can affect the climate of the online domain and the role the institutions that own the online commenting platforms have in forming normative online behaviours through their policies and technological interventions. Overall, an examination of the research available on online commenting finds it either focuses solely on defining our online behaviours or takes a narrow approach to examining motivations behind this behaviour. Instead it will be argued here that a more holistic approach, which considers the myriad of factors that contribute to the type and quality of online interaction, must be used if we are truly going to understand online commenting behaviour.
Mapping the Boundaries
Just as intense attention was paid to establishing the boundaries of emerging territories in the pioneering era, much attention has been paid to defining the various platforms on which we encounter each other online. The terms used to describe social media or social networking sites, in particular, have been contentious.
boyd and Ellison (2007, p. 11) argue we should refer to these platforms as āsocial network sitesā as opposed to āsocial networking sitesā because
[n]etworking emphasizes relationship initiation, often between strangers. While networking is possible on these sites, it is not the primary practice on many of them, nor is it what differentiates them from other forms of computer-mediated communication (CMC).
However, this specificity has been criticised because it is, in fact, too broad: āgiven these rapid cultural shifts and the dynamic and disjointed nature of much contemporary online culture there is a pressing need to classify in order to work toward a more descriptive analysisā (Beer 2008, p. 518; emphasis in original). Despite this, āsocial networking sitesā, āsocial network sitesā and āsocial mediaā tend to be used interchangeably in the literature.
Kaplan and Haenlein (2010, p. 61) use the term āsocial mediaā and define it as a group of internet-based applications that evolved from Web 2.0, āa platform whereby content and applications are continuously modified by all users in a participatory and collaborative fashionā. The term āsocial mediaā can be further parsed into collaborative projects, blogs, content communities and virtual worlds. Collaborative projects involve the joint and simultaneous creation of content by many end-users and include sites such as Wikipedia (Kaplan and Haenlein 2010). Blogs are usually managed by one person only, but are conversational and collaborative and provide the possibility of interaction with others through the addition of comments (Lowrey 2006; Kaplan and Haenlein 2010). Content communities exist to share content between users and include sites such as Flickr and YouTube (Kaplan and Haenlein 2010; Barker et al. 2015). These sites facilitate commentary in response to the content posted. Finally, virtual worlds are platforms that replicate the ārealā world, allowing users to appear as personalised avatars and interact with each other. They come in the form of games (for example, World of Warcraft) or social worlds such as Second Life (Kaplan and Haenlein 2010).
This book is concerned with comments, as they remain the primary method in which we engage with and react to each other in the online space. It is therefore focused on the spaces that facilitate the making of comments. These include social networking sites, collaborative projects, blogs and content communities, as outlined above. They also include other participatory websites that enable commenting, such as specialist forums (for example, Lonely Planetās Thorn Tree travel forum), e-commerce sites (for example, Amazon) , news websites and user-review sites (for example, TripAdvisor).
Defining the platforms where we interact via comments is important as different environments will offer different controls on sociality. The space in which we comment is one of the many factors that influence our commenting behaviour. So, if we first understand where it is that we are commenting, then we can determine what measures can be taken to enhance or alter commenting behaviour.
Understanding Online Discussion
Within these spaces, previous research has focused on comments as a vehicle that enables deliberation and interaction. Deliberation occurs when people āengage in reasoned opinion expression on a social or political issue in an attempt to identify solutions to a common problem and to evaluate those solutionsā (Habermas 1984) . Elements of deliberation are most likely to occur in our everyday discussions with individuals whose views differ from our own (see Hutchens et al. 2015). Deliberation is enabled by both the observation of a debate (comment reading ) and engagement with a debate (commenting) (Springer et al. 2015).
While all of the outlined platforms are participatory environments that enable deliberation through comments, how we build relationships on them and therefore how we comment does differ from individual to individual. Springer et al. (2015) have argued that people who comment either do so in a unidirectional fashion, to publish their own opinions, or in an interpersonal fashion, to react to other commenters. This interper...