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RE: Self monitoring, Dramaturgy, Microsociology, and Morality
It’s interesting to note how environmental/cultural conditions can be conducive to the degree which individuals practice such self-monitoring...
For example: compare Steemit to YouTube or Facebook.
We’ve all seen the horrendous comments people post on YouTube/FB threads, not giving a fuck how disrespectful, rude, arrogant, etc they are. Where here, such trolling behaviour is far less common.
Of course, “self-monitoring” is a skill set, which some have developed more than others - though it’s also fascinating to consider how the development of innovative spaces/ecosystems/cultures - such as has occurred here on Steemit - may provide the systematic conditions to foster the development and exercising of such skills...
You are providing an example of self censorship. The question is whether it's more important to avoid hurting feelings and thus be required to be dishonest most of the time or is it better to be honest?
It would seem it's better to be dishonest if it avoids hurting feelings if you want to receive the maximum rewards whether it be on Youtube, Steemit, etc. The public self is really the mask that people wear to fit in, or as some call it the mask of sanity. The reason we need privacy is because actual sentiment cannot be captured if every member of a community is coerced indirectly into wearing a mask (either play nice or be demonetized).
So we cannot know what the true consensus of the community is without what you refer to as the trolling behavior. There is a way around this. We have to be able to capture sentiment pseudo-anonymously without the risk of coercion. Steem and DPOS does not offer this, so we have no way to know if the upvotes are real when we receive them or if people upvote us merely because we are an old member, or a whale, or connected, or whatever reason.
And this could be solved if the votes were masked so that no one can see who votes for who. This in my opinion would allow Steem votes to actually mean something, to actually reflect some legitimate sentiment. Right now the votes don't really reflect honest sentiment in all cases. For example someone can upvote something as a virtue signal because they know everyone else is watching and judging them. It also means someone could be pressured into voting for something they don't agree with because if these votes don't show on the blockchain there could be some negative consequence (demonetization).
These are the problems which come with the zero privacy full transparency ideology we see on Steem. While Facebook has and Youtube have a different set of problems where it's a central group of shareholders of the company who basically determine who is in charge of filtering all the content and this is almost never done in an unbiased way. So we don't really know for sure how skilled the censors are or if those censors are biased in some way, but because they own the company (shareholders own it) then it's up to them, sort of like how on Steemit the holders of SP are the owners.
The skill of self monitoring does not scale. The skill of self censoring does not scale. Sooner or later it reaches a point where the brain cannot keep up with it and either the person says controversial statements or they just stop speaking. This is why so many CEOs do not have a Twitter, a Facebook account, or a big social media presence. They often pay someone to act as their social media person, to post on their behalf, so in a way these groups of people are using the proxy method to lessen the load on themselves by paying a company to manage their social media presence. The majority of us cannot afford to do this, so we have to look stupid posting stuff we might not mean, and take on the risk of someone spinning something we post out of context deliberately in order to discredit us.