Guiding the Audience

I haven’t yet opened my blog up to public discussion by creating a comment section, thus I haven’t written up any Community Guidelines. I have some contact information linked on my homepage and About page (just my email and Letterboxd account), because I don’t consider my Instagram to be relevant to the platform I’m creating with my blog, and I would like to keep that very personal platform separate from my mostly anonymized blog persona (my Letterboxd is much better suited to be linked with the blog because it’s another mostly anonymous, movie-based platform). So while engagement with me personally is available, albeit in a limited and not very publicized capacity, I haven’t created a space for engagement among readers of the blog. With building a platform and opening the capacity for engagement comes the need for Community Guidelines- currently I’m just providing my limited contact info in good faith that any messages I would receive would be respectful. If I were to start developing Community Guidelines for interacting with myself and other users of my blog through a comments section on my blog posts about movies, I think it would be based on three general expectations for comments; that they be 1) Respectful 2) Thoughtful 3) Verified.

These principles encompass the tone of comments and their openness to ideas, the meaningfulness and discursive value of their content, and their truthfulness and validity regarding information shared. Konnikova’s article explains the concern that Internet comments can “lead to a culture of aggression and mockery that hinders substantive discourse.” Though my blog is only hosting movie discussions, the tendencies of Internet comment spaces that I’ve observed do require at least guidelines for behaviour, if not explicitly stated consequences for violation of guidelines. There is also a debate, discussed in the Konnikova article, about whether allowing commenters to remain anonymous is more likely to incentivise incivility or comfortable participation. I would like to base my approach to open discussion on Letterboxd, a platform where most people share little about their identity but treat it as a very personalized space in terms of their media opinions. I wouldn’t strictly enforce anonymity or full disclosure, but try to encourage users to choose where on that spectrum they would prefer to be. In terms of enforcing my Community Guidelines, I believe that I reserve the right to decide whether comments should be removed, which I would express in the Guidelines.