owning your web presence/history?

I can't remember, does dissensus have a terms of use agreement? Wouldn't that say that anything posted is subject to the moderators or something - basically you agree that you are participating in a public arena?

slothrop said:

And it gives the place a weirdly Kafkaesque feel at times...

Click to expand...

lol.. well do you remember when one of the moderators on dubstepforum posted as the omnipotent, omnipresent dystopian figure of THE MODERATOR, referred to himself in the third person, and was generally attempting to portray himself as a benevolent inhuman presence? Unintentionally Orwellian, and completely hilarious

It's to the credit of dubstepforum that this was pointed out as being totally ridiculous and patronising by more or less the entire user base at the time, and THE MODERATOR ceased to exist.

Pestario said:

I can't remember, does dissensus have a terms of use agreement? Wouldn't that say that anything posted is subject to the moderators or something - basically you agree that you are participating in a public arena?

Click to expand...

Everyone signs up to this when they register:

Forum Rules

Registration to this forum is free! We do insist that you abide by the rules and policies detailed below. If you agree to the terms, please check the 'I agree' checkbox and press the 'Register' button below. If you would like to cancel the registration, click here to return to the forums index.

Although the administrators and moderators of Dissensus will attempt to keep all objectionable messages off this forum, it is impossible for us to review all messages. All messages express the views of the author, and neither the owners of Dissensus, nor Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd. (developers of vBulletin) will be held responsible for the content of any message.

By agreeing to these rules, you warrant that you will not post any messages that are obscene, vulgar, sexually-oriented, hateful, threatening, or otherwise violative of any laws.

The owners of Dissensus reserve the right to remove, edit, move or close any thread for any reason.

Click to expand...

ripley said:

In the light of a few recent developments, which led to someone wanting their entire history of participation removed from the board... I'm struck by what an interesting idea that is.

I understand removing your current presence. But removing your past presence, that's something else again.

I'm curious what people think of the idea (NOT OF THE INDIVIDUAL WHO CHOSE THIS) - what rights do you have or want to have over your web presence in various forms?

Especially things like this - voluntary participation in group discussion?

I'm curious because I think in genuine interpersonal exchange, the whole is more than the sum of the parts, but also that means removal of the part (i.e. one voice) after the fact kind of destroys the whole. In some cases, that's a shame (it depends on how valuable you think the whole/discussion is)

I realized that I just assumed if I didn't like participating in dissensus any more (enough to quit), it would not have occurred to me to try to remove my past posts. Then again, I did go through an old weblog/online journal and make "friends-only" a lot of my more explicit posts I wrote 10 years ago when the Web was smaller and less searchable.

What about y'all? if you decided you wanted to leave, would you take your past with you? would it be different for a blog than for a board?

Click to expand...

martin said:

Anyway, isn't Dissensus google-proof?

Click to expand...

doubtful. it's how i found the place... googling some grime song and... BAM!

ripley said:

I agree, but I also feel slightly different about that control depending on what you're talking about. I think criminal, job-related, or insurance-related judgments should be prevented, but social judgments.. It's hard, because we are judged on lots of things we can't control. THis may be a new set (our past acts online), but is it really so different?

Click to expand...

yeah I see what you mean.. maybe the difference is that in the case of people making social judgements about you based on an archived form of yourself, even if you don't have control over that archive now, you did at some point or other. In real life obviously people do make judgements based on past actions too, but generally for someone to make a negative character judgement based on a past action that they never saw at the time, that action would have to be pretty serious in order for it to take precedence over how they see you in the present.

On the internet, you read something incredibly petty that someone wrote a year ago, and make a judgement about who they are in the present based on that, whereas in real life if it really was that petty, a year later in would be totally forgotten about, and certainly wouldn't affect any social judgement of your present self.

I think ideally we could compensate for this somehow, but at the moment I don't think people are generally aware enough of the implicit social differences between real and virtual..

blahblahblah..

UFO over easy said:

From my own experience I reckon people really do treat the internet as an outlet for who they imagine themselves to be truly, without social constraint, and maybe that develops slowly into the exaggerated personas you find on message boards and blogs.

I don't think the fact that it's all public is really something that factors into peoples actions on the web - it may even lead them to exaggerate their personalities more if anything.. like screaming who you really are off the rooftops to anyone that'll listen

Click to expand...

Something which I increasingly feel a tendency towards is misinformation, and misrepresentation (something I have seen develop in particular on facebook). The trend towards this massive availability of personal information and personal representation (and our strong tendency towards fora of which this very public surrender is an integral part) stokes something which not only wants to retain some kind of restricted understanding, but wants to subvert these means of understanding. Ultimately I do not want places like the public realm of facebook to be a place where someone can feel comfortable making judgements, and if they do then I want those judgements to be misinformed, although I don’t know what that says about me. Also I think that there are significant implications for what I am saying created by me articulating it somewhere as public as this. But consciously at least the reason I engage with and read dissensus is to gain the insight of people with interesting and different minds on issues I want to better understand, not because I want to broadcast myself.

I also don’t think that necessarily who someone ‘really’ is comes across at all in online discourse, especially in the form of forums, blogs etc… firstly text is an incredibly impersonal form of communication, and I for one struggle to assert any real personality over it. But also I think that people use online space to explore possibilities of being someone they feel that they are not. But then how do we define who someone ‘really’ is in any case…

I was using the really thing to be more like who they'd really like to be I guess.

elgato said:

Also I think that there are significant implications for what I am saying created by me articulating it somewhere as public as this. But consciously at least the reason I engage with and read dissensus is to gain the insight of people with interesting and different minds on issues I want to better understand, not because I want to broadcast myself.

Click to expand...

I think at some point or other I was desperate to broadcast myself. It's very likely anyway, although at this point where doing stuff like this has become just an everyday habit more than anything else it's quite difficult to tell.

yeh to be fair i got drawn into posting rather than reading by being so incensed by various things being said that i felt compulsed to respond, so that probably is about broadcasting myself, or at least my thoughts. and that still plays a part elsewhere. but my relationship with dissensus is definitely distinct from elsewhere on the web

I'm very interested in the misinformation angle. It's perhaps the opposite of what wikipedia is trying to achieve.

"...although at this point where doing stuff like this has become just an everyday habit more than anything else it's quite difficult to tell."

Click to expand...

I think that that's an important point, my guess is that once something becomes habitual people tend to slip back to being themselves. I suspect that even if it's not difficult to maintain a persona constantly boredom is likely to set in and the norm reassert itself.

"But then how do we define who someone ‘really’ is in any case…"

Click to expand...

Also very important obviously, the only way we can judge someone really is on how they behave and presumably someone could deliberately perform contrary to their personality in actual interactions with people (although obviously it's harder than when separated by the internet).

john eden said:

I'm very interested in the misinformation angle. It's perhaps the opposite of what wikipedia is trying to achieve.

Click to expand...

kind of yeh, if applied in a different area. i was thinking more in terms of personal information and profiling though

there's a nice tension between people for whom the net is more 'real' than others as well, especially on forums, where sometimes it feels like a battle - eg trolls trying to draw people into sharing some ridiculous virtual unreality

idlerich said:

I suspect that even if it's not difficult to maintain a persona constantly boredom is likely to set in and the norm reassert itself.

Click to expand...

that's what I tend to think as well it's still problematic though - although whilst people tell me I am fairly similar on the net and in person I don't think the net gives a particularly accurate picture even if I am attempting to get one across.

I think that what I'm assuming is that the more you go on a board the more normal it becomes to you and the temptation to pretend decreases just as the effort necessary to maintain a facade would increase.

"it's still problematic though - although whilst people tell me I am fairly similar on the net and in person I don't think the net gives a particularly accurate picture even if I am attempting to get one across"

Click to expand...

I feel that on this board my lack of linguistic dexterity and lightness of touch means that I come across as slightly more stiff than I do in real life but I also think that I come across as quite similar in a way although that sounds like a contradiction. I've got a feeling that that's something like what you're saying isn't it?

martin said:

Anyway, isn't Dissensus google-proof?

Click to expand...

How does one make something "google-proof"?

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35301

It's actually an interesting question because it's really down to the 'good will' of google to allow sites to opt-out of being indexed.

Chef Napalm said:

How does one make something "google-proof"?

Click to expand...

Not a clue, but look

Your search - chef napalm how does make google-proof? dissensus - did not match any documents.

Your search - stelfox nando's middle class dissensus - did not match any documents.

Your search - dissensus nomadologist devil mask rapist - did not match any documents.
Did you mean: dissensus nematologist devil mask rapist

While a search for - 'dissensus john eden giraffe tall dalston' generates:

Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus
An online thesaurus and dictionary of over 145000 words that you explore using an interactive map. It's a tool for people who think visually.
www.visualthesaurus.com/?ad=about.com - Similar pages

martin said:

Your search - dissensus nomadologist devil mask rapist - did not match any documents.
Did you mean: dissensus nematologist devil mask rapist

Click to expand...

jesus, i remember the devil mask rapist... all my roommates were freaked out...