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Introduction: Incivility in Today’s World

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Online Incivility and Public Debate

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Abstract

This chapter introduces the topic of incivility, exploring its role in a variety of contexts, including workplace bullying, attacks on female gamers, and the 2016 presidential election. The roots of incivility are addressed, along with the casualties of incivility, which can harm people’s self-esteem and relationships or chill public debate. This overview shows how incivility has seeped into almost all aspects of human life. This sets the stage for the main focus of this book, which is how online incivility in news site comment streams influences public debate and political participation. This chapter provides a roadmap for the rest of the book and argues that comment streams have the potential to offer the type of discussions across disagreement vital in a democracy.

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  1. School of Journalism, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

    Gina Masullo Chen

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Chen, G.M. (2017). Introduction: Incivility in Today’s World. In: Online Incivility and Public Debate. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56273-5_1

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