The question arrived from a reporter working on the fallout from a TMZ item that had compared the gold medal gymnast Shawn Johnson to Topo Gigio, the mouse puppet from the Ed Sullivan show: does the internet have a collective morality?
Seth Godin had already put the pessimistic version of the same worry as “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,” he wrote. “The question is: will it be so noisy and offensive that the rest of us just tune it out completely?”
Two mechanisms sit behind that complaint. One is filtering: in print and broadcast an editor stood between a reader’s opinion and its publication, and online most of that material appears unfiltered and unedited. The other, harder to design around, is that anonymity and pseudonyms separate speech from consequence, so a malicious comment costs its author nothing.
Framing it as a morality question at all assumes that the social norms worked out over a long time in the physical world are the ones that should carry over to a networked one. In 2008 that was an open question, and the honest answer offered was that the web was young enough for its norms to still be under negotiation.