Peggy Morscheck, manager of the Quaker Information Center, is busiest whenever there’s an outbreak of violence.
No wonder. Threats of war invariably prompt more people to reach out to join others working for peace.
During the 1991gulf war, Morscheck scrambled to add telephone lines at her Philadelphia office. Now, people are as likely to fire up an Internet search engine for information as to pick up a telephone. So Morscheck is recruiting volunteers to scan the outpouring of e-mail and postings at online forums sponsored by organizations listed on the Web site www.quaker.org.
“The flood of talk,” she says, “is enormous.”
At one online Quaker group, participants exchanged an average of 88 messages monthly through August. Since Sept. 11, they’ve posted 150 messages.
A national debate about how to respond to terror attacks is raging everywhere–in forums where parents meet to talk about raising children, on message boards where techies congregate and sites where Muslims discuss religion.
People aren’t just talking. They’re also lurking, a flip term for the online equivalent of sitting quietly at the back of a room while others chatter.
Lurkers are listening in on conversations that couldn’t have taken place without the Internet’s ability to transcend the physical world, which is fraught with a newly acknowledged sense of danger.
The Net still takes us safely almost anywhere, offering more information and points of view than we can process or comprehend.
For the faint-hearted, the cacophony of voices–hateful, paranoid, hopeful, frightened–can be dismaying. People feel freer online to lash out, provoke, swagger or invent fake identities. No doubt, there’s an instance somewhere of a Midwest teenager signing on as a 30-year-old Pakistani.
But for the most part, virtual talk is simply a freer-wheeling version of offline conversation. As people move through grief and anger to deliberation, they’re using the Net to proselytize, conduct fact-finding missions and send up trial balloons.
Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, is struck by the wide range of views within forums that function during national debates as “echo chambers”–places where like-minded people congregate to confirm one another’s opinions.
Since the attack, he says, people are throwing out ideas, then sticking around to see how others respond. “There’s a lot of flaming going on. There isn’t yet that uniformity.”
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People are talking. More important, they’re also listening.
In the 48 hours after the attacks, according to Pew research, the percentage of Internet users who visited online forums tripled that of an ordinary day. An estimated 14 million people visited chat rooms, online bulletin boards or e-mail list servers to post messages–or to lurk.
Among them was Joe Cothrel, research director for online community manager Participate.com in Chicago. He visited his favorite online tech community at http://slashdot.org. But he also wanted to find out how Europeans were responding, so he went to a discussion board at French newspaper Le Monde.
Back at Slashdot, a recent conversational thread reveals members censoring someone who refers to an online 3-D map of structural damage in Lower Manhattan as “nifty.”
Yet another member chimes in to lighten up: “The sappy uber-solemn milking of our `national grief’ by the media,” he posts, is “to manipulate us into going out and killing a bunch more people.”
Dave Yung, a data-entry clerk for the State of Oregon, wanted a Muslim viewpoint, so he visited forums at English-language Arab newspapers. A week ago, he joined a Yahoo club–Call to Islam, which has links from such sites as www.thetruereligion.com.
A self-described former dove who’s turned “hawkish” and now supports military action, Yung says his Web forays haven’t changed that view.
Has he learned anything? Definitely. For starters, he says, “the (Muslim and Christian) religions share a lot in common.”
There’s seldom been a more important time to talk–or to listen.