Commenting Freedom

                 In “Race, Identity, and Digital Games”, Professor Nakamura discusses the impact that virtual communities have upon social life and the media landscape.  She uses social networking sites, virtual worlds and video sharing websites such as Facebook, MySpace, Second Life, World of Warcraft and Youtube as examples to support her argument that these spaces create a sense of communities amongst users.  “These sites and worlds are becoming part of a public sphere, where ideas and intimacies are exchanges, relationships formed and maintained, and identities are constructed and sometimes policed.”  I would like to explore the issue of governing blogged content.  By this, I mean to what extent should comments made to others in World of Warcraft or Youtube be controlled?  People are led to believe that they are free to say whatever they want.  Yet, some comments are hidden or removed by moderators.  In my opinion, there is an intrinsic problem with this system; that is, offensiveness is subjective.  Every individual has their own judgment that gauges how offensive comments are.  Let’s explore this issue with Youtube, for example.  Often, the comments removed are blatantly, verbally abusive responses to other posters.  They typically contain lots of strong language and do not serve any purpose than to attack another individual.  The term trolling has been created to identify this type of behavior.  “In Internet slang, a troll is someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking other users into a desired emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.” (Wikipedia).  However, some comments that are not censored can be just as offensive to other individuals.

                In addition, in virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft, certain terms are censored from being typed in a message to other users.  This does not prove to be effective.  Instead of typing the full word, one could simply separate the first letter of the offensive word with a space from the rest of the letters.  This is a simple trick that I have personally seen used.

                Although there is a freedom of speech, do you think that the manner of censorship in virtual communities is currently appropriate or is it something that requires further enhancements?