… and how it might be changed and how that solution might be nasty.

Nick Bilton wrote a post called Can We Change the Web’s culture of Nastiness? on the NYT’s blog Bits recently (01/14). He ended it by saying:

“The question becomes, how do we drive people to understand that these online conversations are not just a place to vent and that humanity is still in play in a digital world?”

The best way is education in the Real World.

Given that isn’t going to happen all the time I think there’s a second route being laid down ready for action.

First, all Cloud-based digital communities will require real identities and completion of User Profiles (with the person’s real name, photograph, contact information and About Me section) such that failure to provide this information will be a breach of the Terms of Service (TOS) and may result in a penalty, such as, in the extreme case, expulsion. In essence it will require people to become Digital Inhabitants.

Second, in the end, to prevent flat-out lying, a physical connection between our Real World identities and our online identities is required. One way that could happen is through fingerprint recognition software/hardware, which already exists in the consumer market (e.g. digitalPersona) – see also my post from 11/09 called border control.

This is a key step and not one, to my knowledge, that has been suggested. I hope that’s because there is another solution. See below.

Third, those who run the digital communities will then start to police communications between members (there is no help for it). The immediate question arises then Who Will Guard The Guardians? That’s a subject for another post.

Once that has happened digital communities will have a choice between allowing people outside the community to leave comments or not. At the moment people can leave comments with a particular “passport” – twitter, Facebook etc., but there is no guarantee that those accounts belong to Real People, unless verified (as Twitter does for some of its important people or organizations). So some digital communities will demand absolute verification from other digital communities before allowing their members to leave comments.

This also goes for Cloud-based email, which is mostly email from a member of a Cloud-based digital community like  Google or Yahoo.

At the high end, these other communities are large - e.g. those who blog on Blogger form one community, those who use Gmail form another (signing up for Gmail creates a Google account with a profile attached) and of course those who use Facebook.

So those other communities will adopt a similar fingerprint identity approach and so it goes.

The downside to this approach, this absolute verification using a physical connection between the physical world via fingerprints and the online world (actually cldwrld), is obvious. The bad guys could use it to find the good guys who cause them trouble, as well as the other way about and yet I am not sure we can avoid the approach.

But if you can think of or know of something else let me know.

That is, at some point, because of the natural wish to reduce anonymous nastiness someone will propose this approach and then we will be well down the way to increasing the lumens of the spotlight in the crowd.