A reporter called me this morning to ask me about the collective morality of the internet.

The impetus for the question came from the uproar over a TMZ item last week that compared gold medal gymnast Shawn Johnson to Topo Gigio, the mouse puppet from the Ed Sullivan show.

It got me thinking about whether we can talk about a morality of the net.  Is the participatory capability of the internet providing a platform for what Seth Godin calls “monkeys with megaphones”?

Now that everyone has their own channel, their own newspaper, their own station, it’s pretty shocking how low the average has sunk. The question is: will it be so noisy and offensive that the rest of us just tune it out completely?

This is a huge question to unpack.  In traditional media, there tended to be a filtering mechanism called editors before people’s comments were published. By contrast, the net allows for much of this content to appear unfiltered and unedited.

But more importantly, this may be creating an environment where people have power without responsibility. After all, it is easy to leave anonymous comments or hide behind a pseudonym, so an individual does not have to take responsibility for the malicious or spiteful comments.

The wider issue here is whether the social norms we have developed over the years in our physical world can or should be transferred to the virtual world of the web.  The web is very young so it is hardly surprising that we are still working out what is acceptable and what isn’t.

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