Conflict Systems

= "zine from the Media Economies Design Lab at CU Boulder."

URL = https://www.colorado.edu/lab/medlab/media/260

Description

Nathan Schneider:

"The zine contends that many recent sites of community building, especially online, have lacked the tools and norms for the practice of conflict. Many reasonable expectations that go by names like due process, justice, accountability, or mediation are unavailable or not even considered in emerging communities. The platforms that communities rely on treat conflict as a corporate liability, not a chance to strengthen relationships.

​Conflict Systems offers an invitation for design, for skill-building, and for tool-sharing. We gather here the ideas of people with experience and expertise that ranges from social-movement facilitation to digital court systems, from user-experience design to family law. Where these perspectives meet, there is the chance to cultivate far healthier systems for supporting conflict in the spaces where people find each other today. Drawing together many lineages of knowledge and the lessons of recent research, this gap is an opportunity."

Excerpt

In support of Cancel Culture

"Online spaces are notoriously bad at conflict, and the usual response has been to blame the victims. Users, particularly those from marginalized backgrounds, have been accused of being overly censorious or reactive. The term “cancel culture” emerged from Black Twitter as a practice of self-defense, only to become co-opted by cultural elites as a caricature against attempts to hold them accountable. Calls to remove offenders from online spaces, or even jobs and institutional recognition, might seem extreme as a consequence of a single statement or action. But what other options are there?"

(https://www.colorado.edu/lab/medlab/media/260)

For the counter-arguments and documentation, see [1]