JournalTOCs

Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities
Number of Followers: 9

This is an Open Access Journal

Open Access journal
ISSN (Print) 1041-6374
Published by Yale University

[7 journals]

Fostering the Intellectual Virtue of Civility in Online Contexts
- Abstract: Fostering the Intellectual Virtue of Civility in Online ContextsMower, Deborah S.Civility provides norms for engaging in discourse on topics that yield harm or benefit to others, affect the conditions of our lives, and drive public policy—in short, on topics that matter, morally and politically. While discourse on moral and political matters is already difficult in face-to-face and interpersonal conversations, online interactions through social media pose unique challenges for interactions and exchanges. Using research from philosophy, psychology, behavioral economics, and computer science, I explain how the intellectual virtue of civility can be fostered within individuals as a developed trait of internalized norms to guide how one engages with others when evaluating beliefs and contentious issues. Like the development of any virtue, the development of civility takes time, practice, and effort, but it can be fostered even in online contexts through the careful contextualization of experience and practiced behaviors. Altering tech design through the use of goal setting, nudges, gamification, and in-group priming allows for repeatable behaviors to be practiced and modified. Shifting from a focus on policies for content moderation to a focus on users’ choices within online interactions—and deeper consideration for how designs affect users’ options, choices, and agency—allows us to capitalize on insights from moral psychology and education to see new ways forward in combatting incivility in online contexts.
  PubDate: 2023-01-01T00:00:00Z
In the American Tempest: Democracy, Conspiracy, and Machine
- Abstract: In the American Tempest: Democracy, Conspiracy, and MachineBiagetti, SamuelNo one can be certain precisely what “democracy” is, but everyone seems to agree that it is in danger. Since the beginning of the pandemic, warnings of “toxicity,” “vitriol,” and other ill humors infecting the body politic have invaded mass media and political discourse, while the foundations of our civic order—“truth,” “facts,” and “civility”—have been seen to erode to the point of collapse. Although the exact cause of the present rupture in the social and epistemic fabric is hard to pinpoint, many observers seem to agree that the internet is to blame. Online algorithms are found to spread “misinformation” and “disinformation,” while anointed experts attribute unexpected outcomes of public events, from election results to the verdicts in defamation suits, to online campaigns by malicious “bots.” A New York Times opinion piece from June 2021 warned readers against examining or analyzing claims found online, since the impulse towards curiosity “allows grifters, conspiracy theorists, trolls and savvy attention hijackers to take advantage of us.” The atmosphere of confusion and distrust not only pervades public discourse in the English-speaking world, but increasingly spills beyond it; the phrase “fake news” has entered, untranslated, into political discourse in France, where a law criminalizing false statements online fuels an acrimonious debate.Vol. 34:3
  PubDate: 2023-01-01T00:00:00Z
The Case for Designing Tech for Social Cohesion: The Limits of Content
Moderation and Tech Regulation
- Abstract: The Case for Designing Tech for Social Cohesion: The Limits of Content Moderation and Tech RegulationSchirch, LisaBased on nearly 60 interviews with staff at tech companies, critics of big tech, civil society groups impacted by tech-amplified social media, and new tech startups, research revealed three distinct but complementary narratives or approaches to thinking about polarization and social cohesion in digital spaces. The “User-Centered” Narrative describes harmful content online as generated by users, with social media products and search engines acting as a mirror of society. Several interviewees described the defeating feeling of playing “whack a mole” against the growing tide of individual and state-sponsored industrialized harmful digital content. This narrative points to the need for content moderation on user-generated content and digital media literacy to help the public navigate information and communication on the internet. The “Tech Design Regulation” Narrative describes harmful content as amplified by tech product designs including the affordances and algorithms that are optimized for user engagement, advertising, and shareholder profit. Many social media companies optimize their product designs for user engagement to maximize their ad-based profits. Machine learning algorithms promote emotionally alarming and divisive content which tends to garner more attention, just as cars slow down driving past a car accident and as news outlets use the “if it bleeds, it leads” principle to prioritize alarming news. From this point of view, some tech products incentivize harmful content that drives toxic polarization. This narrative presses for government regulation to extend beyond privacy to regulating tech profit models, algorithms, affordances, and designs that amplify toxic content. The “Social Cohesion by Design” Narrative describes tech products that amplify and scale social cohesion by designing affordances and algorithms optimized for these purposes. These digital products can support human agency to participate in civic action, bridge divided communities, and build trust between the public and institutions. The first half of this article provides explores the complex relationship between toxic polarization and digital spaces and analyzes these three frames or paradigms for understanding the role of digital spaces in toxic polarization. The second half of the paper focuses on examples and case studies of “social cohesion by design” also known as "peacetech."Vol. 34:3
  PubDate: 2023-01-01T00:00:00Z
Work Disguised as Leisure, Leisure Disguised as Work: The Roots and
Consequences of the Bifurcated Economy
- Abstract: Work Disguised as Leisure, Leisure Disguised as Work: The Roots and Consequences of the Bifurcated EconomyHull, SamuelThis Article argues that the framework laid out in the post-Marxist scholar André Gorz’s 1989 book on the alienation inherent in a system focused on efficiency, Critique of Economic Reason, provides a valuable approach for understanding the alienation that inheres in the unequal modern economy, as well as the roots of the legal-political structure that undergirds that inequality. The Article first describes Gorz’s understanding of how the rise of quantification and economic reason left modern work patterns deeply alienating, and how incentivizing long hours of unfulfilling work through “compensatory consumption” and an “ideology of work” led to the bifurcation of society into elite and “servile” classes. The Article then updates Gorz’s model to analyze the rise of several phenomena that represent a fuller extension of this bifurcation: the gig economy, which embodies Gorz’s notion of “disguising private activities and leisure activities themselves as work and jobs”; and what this Article terms “totalizing firms,” which conversely disguise work as leisure. The Article next discusses how economic reason has reinforced its hegemony, both by undermining the potential for political solidarity and through its entrenchment in the legal apparatus. Finally, the Article turns to how reorienting the labor movement and economic policy toward a focus on free time could challenge economic reason.Vol. 34:2
  PubDate: 2023-01-01T00:00:00Z

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