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A Guide to Civil and Productive Online Discussions

by Steven S. Vrooman

 This guide has taken on special relevance now that so much education has been moved online in the wake of COVID-19. This guide is is not an intro. It is designed to help you manage discussions that work better and more productively to achieve your pedagogical aims. Threaded discussion, either in courseware or a social media platform, can be a great substitute for face-to-face interactions. And for student whose class was just converted to online, who didn't choose it and thus might not have the bandwidth or data availability at their homes to process a video-heavy synchronous class experience, building richer text-based discussions is a key tool in your educator's toolbox.
Last week I was invited to speak to a middle school class via Zoom about how to have great discussions via social media.

It was a very fun experience, but the week that followed was eerie. It seemed like all sorts of things were synergistically converging around this topic for me. It felt like this:
The space "virtual background" on Zoom. When you click it the software immediately warns you against using it, and I can see why. But the week did feel a lot like this, as my brain merged with the expanding universe.

 It all made me want to write this blog post to present a few key takeaways for you.

 To be sure, this was not the first time this has come up. I have published and presented on this question of social media in education before. And I have been talking about and writing about social media strategy in keynotes and workshops since I did my TEDx talk on Twitter (the 5-year anniversary of which was the exact day that I spoke to the students -- like I said, a lot of stuff all piling on at the same time!).

 But it became clear, within days, that I needed to take the lessons that these middle schoolers were learning to prepare for taking their class to a Twitter conversation that included their parents (!), to adults (perhaps also their parents?!?).

 First, when I shared this on Instagram, one of the comments was: "I am glad someone is addressing this. Will you be talking to adults next?😂😂 and then our politicians?😂." 

 Second, almost the exact hour that I got that comment, one of my posts on LinkedIn became the top post on a LinkedIn News feature, where they take popular articles that are shared from the news that day and drop some posts they select to give a kind of crowdsourced LinkedIn community reaction to the news. I didn't even know this was a feature of LinkedIn! Well, that was yesterday morning, and I am still getting a flood of reactions and comments, which has never really happened for me on that platform. 

 Needless to say, I was unprepared for the comments. Some are what I'd expect from the platform, you know, the sort of shameless self-promotion hijacking of other peoples' posts? But there were some clear moments of pure trolling, and the debate, which was about the need for more Liberal Arts majors, devolved for quite a few commenters into the kind of angry, blustery, evidence-free screeds that I associate with gun control fights on Facebook. 

 I was a bit shocked by this. I probably shouldn't have been, but, you know, LinkedIn is about work right? Some of these people are hunting for contacts or jobs? What are people thinking?

 I told myself not to feed the trolls, which is part of the reason I do little with Facebook these days, but I couldn't help one last dip into the pool of old habits. I commented: "I confess to being a bit disappointed in the quality of discourse on LinkedIn today (in many comments below). Perhaps evidence, argument and civility have gone out of fashion in favor of bluster, trolling, and generalities? If only there were a group of majors that taught such much-needed skills! Let me think.... 😉"

 Let me give you the tips I developed for the students, and you can tell me if I violated any of them.

1. Always Add Value


I have taught summer courses online for years, but for the past 5 summers, I have started using Facebook as the place for class discussion. This allows me to loop in alumni who have an interest (and perhaps a bit of nostalgia for Dr. Vrooman's courses), colleagues, friends and other interested contacts, and even, in a few cases, the authors of books or articles we are reading for the class. In my research on this, I've concluded that public discussions like these are generally more civil and helpful than private conversations locked behind courseware.

 But one of the key things participants need to have in mind is this first rule. Add value. This means that some classic, semi-lurky social media behavior has to stop when we are trying to build effective civil discourse in a social media setting.

 So no click level reactions can replace a valuable comment. In other words. No simple likes or upvotes or hearts or angry faces or whatever. Giving a comment only that small bit of public acclaim does nothing to move the conversation forward.

In fact, that social proof of a comment's popularity has a bit of chilling effect for people who think about posting, just like creepy cool kids lurking along the row of lockers in middle school. Nerds like me might just take another hallway.

I've seen it dozens of times before in my courses and in everyday non-course social media interaction. The first comment gets 20 likes. Very few comments come later. It's as if we all decided that comment was good enough to stand for our perspective and so we liked it, and we then groupthink signaled that the conversation was over.

 But if those first "likers" instead did something else, "like and" to adapt the improv mantra of "yes and," and then gave a real comment of some kind, well, when I see that kind of behavior, it generally produces a lot more comments all around.

 The other idea here is that comments that are likes in disguise are also part of the same problem. A like in disguise is a comment of this kind: "I totally agree. Good idea." or "Thanks for posting that." 

 None of those comments add any value to the conversation. As such, they also chill real comments and a more robust debate. 

 Is a social media like an anti-democratic act? 

 Sounds silly at first glance, I know, but let's try an experiment. 

 What if that statement/question, "Is a social media like an anti-democratic act?" dropped into the comments on a share of this blog post to Facebook (assuming I never used the phrase here in the blog post itself) and then had, say, 3x more likes than comments normally get on the page or profile that shared this (which you'd kind of know if you were dedicated reader of a certain person or page's stuff), as well as three or four likes in disguise: "Yep!", "I never thought of that, but yes.", and "I think that could be right."

 There. That's what you see. Do you bother to comment?

2. Avoid Drive-By Linking


 This is a phrase I previously borrowed from my colleague Dr. Margaret Gonzales for thechapter on citations in speeches in my public speaking textbook. A drive-by quoter, for Gonzales, is a person who just drops a block quote into a paper and then "elaborates" on it by just paraphrasing it pointlessly, sometimes even with the tone deaf "What this quote is saying . . . " as a lead in. You quote and move on as fast as possible. This is bad writing, but it is often a good way to pass high school level writing assessments because it is easy for exhausted, overcaffeinated teachers crammed into a room for 8 hours two weeks after the school year is over to mark as "meets expectations."

 You all know the drive-by linker. Often this happens in the throes of a political debate that has gone a bit too far. Someone gives up and comments with something like, "Look, you are just not reading enough outside of your own, sad, narrow, pathetic echo chamber politics, so here's some truth I'm gonna drop on you!" And then you see a blizzard of links to content that supports their views.

 Look, I will admit that I have done this before. I feel bad about it now, but to be honest, I usually only had two reasons for this, both of which are antithethical to developing good discussion online.

 First, sometimes I had, you know, work or life or a pot boiling over and I just needed to get off the social media time suck train wreck. I was purposefully trying to end the conversation by dropping a lot of mics in link form. Then, if the person continued the conversation that I wanted stopped (but apparently had too much invested in to just walk away like the adult I usually try hard to be!), I could drop one more mic with "If you are not going to read the evidence, we can't really continue this productively, so I'm going to sign out of this conversation."

 I know, right? What a jerk!

 The second reason I'd do this is because I actually wanted to make the conversation so muddy and horrible and painful that everyone would want to leave it because someone I was arguing with was a troll or such an extreme true-believer that I knew the conversation would go nowhere. And I was pretty sure they thought the same of me. 

 So dropping a pile of links was a face-saving move which signaled I was giving up on a person but still wanted them to know I still thought I was right. It also meant I was trying to punish a person who was annoying me by giving them a bunch of unwanted homework.

 Again, what a jerk!

 Evidence is useful in a debate, for sure. It can elevate discourse and help us all to learn and connect. But if you are going to use a link in a discussion of this kind, it is important for you to explain why you are linking to it and how and why you expect us to go and click on it. Ideally you will make the arguments yourself in a comment and then use that link as maybe a sub level comment where people can go if they want more context for what you are saying, but they don't need to.

3. Tone Is a Collective Responsibility


 My very first published academic article was on the ways that an online community preserved tone in its discussion (on a listserv, just so you know how old that article is!).

 This idea is a key finding of that study. The only way to shut down negativity, aggression, flaming, trolling and the like in your online community is if people besides the victims speak out. Kind of like real life, eh?

 Letting a terrible comment just sit there in the feed, even for an hour, is poisonous to the group and to the overall experience of the discussion. Sometimes the comment was a mistake or a typo or something that wasn't meant in that particular way. Whatever the story behind the comment, marking it as a problem quickly helps the commenter and others move forward. 

 The longer the person who feels victimized by a comment must sit and feel it without any word from the rest of the group, the longer the idea that there is no real group here and you just have to fend for yourself sinks in. And that is bad for everything. 

 So what do we do? The lessons I observed in that community 20 years ago still hold true. 

 First, what I called "restrained group-invoking admonition" is a great tool for a first responder. "Hey, I don't think those kinds of comments are really what this group is about." Highlighting the needs of the group helps take the pressure off continuing to treat the attacked person as a victim, which is a problem.

 Second, highlighting one's own emotional response. "If this group is going to have this kind of comment show up here, I'm going to have to bail out. I don't like reddit, and I don't want that here." Someone besides the victim of an online attack needs to bring up some emotional context as soon as possible in order to avoid the classic trolling (or, to use the language of 20 years ago, "warlording") tactic of labeling yourself as just a truth-teller and the other people as just too emotional, too sensitive, maybe not able to handle and adult world where difficult things are said. It's best that such a move has to be directed at the group, not the victim.

 Third, overtures of forgiveness are important. Crushing offenders to silence rhetorically is not a help. From a troll's perspective, that is a goal, to reduce the discourse of the group to incoherent anger. And for an innocent mistake, you don't want a person to feel attacked forever. After some comments of the first two types show up, a bit of "Hey, I think Steve gets the point. We've all done something like that before in other places online, and now we all know we don't want to be that kind of place, so maybe we can move on?"

 These kinds of comments sometimes happen accidentally, but if you are a leader of a discussion group or have a lot invested in the quality of the discussion, you have to have a plan for what to do when this kind of thing comes up. Groups with moderators have guidelines and procedures. I made sure to tell the middle schoolers that they could not just rely on their teachers to do this for them. It doesn't feel the same.

 If you've read this far, perhaps you could use some this this time-tested wisdom to think about developing your own response repertoire? It might seem weird to prepare like that, but it works. 

Conclusion


 Online discussion can be better than face to face discussion if it is well-developed and if people who know what they are doing help model and monitor for others. Online education is only increasing its footprint across all of our experiences, and we all spend, for better or worse, more time on social media than we would like. Managing that environment is imperative.

 As to my comment on LinkedIn, now that you've read all of this, what do you think? Old habits or a good idea?


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