A thought: What if incivility is partially caused by our inability to see life in grayscale?
Take a situation where someone does something that could possible offend you. Now, do you you think in terms of "take offense"/ "do not take offense" or do you think in terms of a sliding scale? If you think in terms of "take offense"/ "do not take offense" then you have two choices, thus you have a better chance of just deciding without further input. On the other hand, a sliding scale may encourage you to think about a response longer, possibly even encouraging you to gather more information.
Children, at least to me, seem to start-off life by looking at the world in binary terms--yes/no, black/white, thick/thin. Eventually, many will grow up and see that the world is actually a palette of grays, perhaps even colors, and that no answer is absolute. There is good answers and not-so-good answers and sometimes the best you can do is OK.
Think about it: we are social animals that, prior to the invention of writing, communicated primarily face-to-face so that we could see/hear/touch/smell/and maybe even taste the person we are communicating with. Writing changed all that. Now, we can communicate through a proxy called writing. This proxy lacks the subtle nuances that allow us to see life and each other in a spectrum. Perhaps Web 2.0 needs a bit more humanity on our part?
Just thinking out loud, folks.
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