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Internet veterans have long complained about the steady erosion of civility -- and worse, intelligence -- in online discourse. Initially the phenomenon seemed to be a seasonal disorder. It occurred every September when freshmen showed up for college and went online. Tasting for the first time the freedom and power of the Internet, the newbies would behave like a bunch of drunken fraternity pledges, filling electronic bulletin boards with puerile remarks until the upperclassmen could whip them into shape.
But there's still hope for intelligent life on the Internet. A team of software developers is hard at work on a "stupid filter" that promises to do to idiotic online comments what a spam filter does to junk and unwanted e-mail: put it in a place where it can't hurt anyone anymore.
But there's still hope for intelligent life on the Internet. A team of software developers is hard at work on a "stupid filter" that promises to do to idiotic online comments what a spam filter does to junk and unwanted e-mail: put it in a place where it can't hurt anyone anymore.
Such a filter would scan a post and flash an alert to the author, "This comment is more or less unintelligible. Please try to restate it."
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The writer would get another crack at it, and another, until at last he was able to muster a few words of intelligence, or in frustration wandered off to inflict those LOL!!!s and OMG!!!s on some more tolerant site.
But: What to do with seemingly stupid posts that contain important message or opinions clad in robes dripping with irony or spraying sarcasm?
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"Smart people are often ironic," says Ortiz, noting that irony, to a computer anyway, can sound stupid. Writers who are otherwise intelligent will intentionally misspell words or break the ironclad rules of grammar to make a point.
Here is where linguistics become important. Clueless newbies and enthusiastic semi-drunks tend to repeat consonants, while the drawn-out repetition of a vowel generally indicates sarcasm: 'Yeaaaaaah.'
Ortiz and his team are requesting your help, though. Please visit their site, http://stupidfilter.org/main/, where you can help them rate on a scale of one to five a selection of potentially dumb posts culled from -- where else? -- YouTube. Personally, I think we as a close-knit community should draw their attention to some of the "help the helpless" posts on our very own forum and the often sarcastic responses.
