A very nice case study of a social media brouhaha has been developing over on ASAE's blog, Acronym. Scott Briscoe wrote what I thought was a nice post about some tricky issues related to how consultants and association executives work together, but the title of the post was "Consultant wasteland" and the first sentence said that consultants "suck." (I had to laugh a bit, since I wrote a post with the title "Consultants Suck" just two years ago without so much as a comment. Of course, I'm not ASAE!) 

Obviously this offended some members of ASAE because ASAE pulled the post down saying it was "blatantly direspectful to an entire group of ASAE members." Pulling the post, however, was then upsetting to many of community's digital extroverts (including me), because it is counter to the underlying principles of social media and smacks of censorship. It feels disrespectful when you forcibly remove part of my community's conversation.

So there is plenty of disrespect to go around, and very little of it is being handled well, if you ask me. Here's what's happening in a nutshell:

Scott wrote a post.

Some people (with influence apparently) said (apparently)
“Hey, you shouldn’t have written that post. It offends me.”

ASAE staff got together and said “We shouldn’t write posts that offend like that. Take it down.”

This angered some others. “You shouldn’t remove posts. It’s
censorship and violates my expectations of how our blogging community works.
And besides, those people shouldn’t have been offended by that post. It was
fine.”

Then we’ve got some people saying “You shouldn’t be
overreacting. It’s not Nazi Germany for Pete’s sake. You shouldn’t demand that
this blog be like your blog. ASAE should listen to its members.”

I am not sure this series of competing “shoulds” is getting
us where we want to go. 

Here’s a different type of should: we should get
clearer about what our “shoulds” really are. How about these?

• We should create a space where people can speak up when they
  feel disrespected.
• We should each own it and apologize when someone feels
  disrespected by our actions or statements, even if it was not our intention to
  be disrespectful. Apologize for the impact and THEN move to problem solving.
• We should not cover up transgressions—we should confront
  them. Really, it makes it worse in the long run. Every time.
• We should be curious and open to the fact that others will
  experience the same comment or event in very different ways. Expect diversity.
• We should err on the side of conversation, but we should
  hold ourselves accountable to a higher quality of conversation.

 It is very difficult to manage "respect" in a community with rules, exclusions, and controls. Respect (and disrespect) is inherently relational, not objective. It is managed through conversations, not statements.