Please see http://uxdesign.smashingmagazine.com/2012/09/14/make-better-internet-story-three-acts/ for the accompanying article. In this talk I weave together a story about the current state of Internet discourse. At the end I'll tell you how I think we can make it better. And then we'll most likely all go back to what we were doing and forget about it. Despite the likely futility of this exercise I'm going to do it anyway. Because I love the web and I really don't want us to destroy it.

1. Making a better Internet
a story in three acts

3. Computer tycoon Sir Clive Sinclair, 69,
weds his 33-year-old lap dancer

5. WWIC

6. “IOL has closed comments on this
story due to the high volume of racist
and/or derogatory comments.”

8. Never read
the bottom half of the Internet

9. What surprises me the most about the bottom
half of the internet, that place where all the
angry comments go, is that so many of the
people writing them turn out not to be rabid
murderers but ordinary mild people who
casually fire off drive-by verbal shootings in
their lunch breaks.
Sophie Heawood

10. “
There’s a rule in the Council that no
resolution can be debated on the day
that it’s first proposed. Otherwise
someone’s liable to say the first thing
that comes into his head, and then
start thinking up arguments to justify
what he has said, instead of trying to
decide what’s best for the community.
Thomas Moore, Utopia

14. The web is a technology, but more importantly, it is
People all the way down
People constitute and maintain the network.
It is widespread and distributed, but it is very delicate.
Like a real web, it needs constant maintenance to keep from tearing.
Frank Chimero

17. Don’t be
part of WWIC culture

18. “
Remember not only to say the right
thing in the right place, but far more
difficult still, to leave unsaid the
wrong thing at the tempting moment.
Benjamin Franklin

20. Amplify
the top half of the Internet

22. Make
a better Internet

24. If we are going to ask people, in the form
of our products, in the form of the things
we make, to spend their heartbeats on
us, on our ideas, how can we be sure, far
more sure than we are now, that they
spend those heartbeats wisely?
Paul Ford

25. Making a better Internet
is not someone else’s job

26. References
http://xkcd.com/386/
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1269050/Computer-tycoon-Sir-Clive-Sinclair-69-weds-33-year-old-lap-dancer.html
http://www.ftrain.com/wwic.html
http://www.iol.co.za/news/crime-courts/how-ancyl-plans-to-shut-down-cape-1.1357173
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/sophie-heawood-save-dappy-from-the-venom-of-the-anonymous-1870283.html
http://alwaysreadthemanual.com/
http://www.buzzfeed.com/expresident/pictures-that-will-restore-your-faith-in-humanity
http://wallblog.co.uk/2012/08/02/the-best-social-media-policy-every-written/
http://blog.jackcheng.com/post/25160553986/the-slow-web
http://contentsmagazine.com/articles/10-timeframes/
Feedback? I’m @RianVDM on Twitter