Danah: “One thing that we're missing as disconnected souls reading each other's words is a shared social structure where we can intuitively understand when to critique and when to support. The blog world too easily lends itself to a forum for attacking each other, purportedly to critique ideas. How often are anonymous critiques truly constructive? How easy is it to tear apart someone you don't know? [...] if you feel like your responsibility is to critique, you can do so infinitely, regardless of how another might feel. And the further removed you are from witnessing the horrific reactions, the more you can continue on.”

In the comments, Danah writes: “The crap people say here would never go down in RL [real life] because there are social norms that prevent people from saying things that would be so blatantly insulting.”