Blawg Review #154 is up at the Health Blawg, which covers health care law.  The Review’s theme this week is World Health Day, but it also points to an interesting story related to anonymous blog comments.  SCOTUS Blog eliminated its comments feature — click here for the SCOTUS post explaining their reasoning.  This is especially interesting because in October 2006, SCOTUS began requiring that commenters provide their full names before posting.  They hoped that this would stop "silly sniping" by anonymous commenters.  Unfortunately, after eighteen months, the sniping had not stopped.  So, they closed comments completely, although you can still email them comments and they will consider adding the best directly to the posts.

Unfortunately, the SCOTUS experiment suggests that civility may not be enforceable on the internet.  Perhaps the social constructs that maintain civility in real world conversations — knowing that you will have to work with the target of your words the next day, watching your target’s reaction in real time, or bystanders acting as civility referees — cannot be duplicated online. 

Below is Crime & Consequences’ take on the SCOTUS comments decision:

I, for one, enjoy exchanging ideas with people who can remain civil while disagreeing. Regrettably, commenting on blogs too often involves opening oneself to ad hominem attacks and choosing between letting a public attack go unanswered or wasting time responding. The choices for a blog that has this problem are to (1) let it go uncorrected; (2) police the comments, an expenditure of time that few sponsors wish to make; or (3) turn off the comments, as SCOTUSblog has now done. If the sponsor chooses to let the problem go uncorrected, what typically happens is that thoughtful people stop or greatly reduce commenting, and the insult slingers come to dominate the comments. Choices (1) and (3) lead to the same result, then, that a useful medium is eliminated either de facto or de jure.

So the decline in civility of our society claims another victim. The SCOTUSblog experiment shows that uncivil behavior is reduced when people have to show themselves in public, but it is not eliminated. I suppose the result was to be expected, but it is sad nonetheless.

Below is Crime & Consequences’ take on the SCOTUS comments decision:

I, for one, enjoy exchanging ideas with people who can remain civil while disagreeing. Regrettably, commenting on blogs too often involves opening oneself to ad hominem attacks and choosing between letting a public attack go unanswered or wasting time responding. The choices for a blog that has this problem are to (1) let it go uncorrected; (2) police the comments, an expenditure of time that few sponsors wish to make; or (3) turn off the comments, as SCOTUSblog has now done. If the sponsor chooses to let the problem go uncorrected, what typically happens is that thoughtful people stop or greatly reduce commenting, and the insult slingers come to dominate the comments. Choices (1) and (3) lead to the same result, then, that a useful medium is eliminated either de facto or de jure.

So the decline in civility of our society claims another victim. The SCOTUSblog experiment shows that uncivil behavior is reduced when people have to show themselves in public, but it is not eliminated. I suppose the result was to be expected, but it is sad nonetheless.