Comments and TalkBack
Bradley Burston writes for the Haaretz:
It may be nothing more than human nature, that takes a blessing and processes it into a curse. Or maybe it’s technology.
Take the talkback feature. We had great hopes for it. We believed that it would offer readers a chance to respond to the news and the columns published in this newspaper and on this Website, that they would feel encouraged to express opinions, exchange views, engage in rational debate and perhaps forge bonds of understanding based on mutual respect and an openness to the thoughts of others.
What we discovered, was the propensity of respondents to curse each other, denigrate each other, dismiss, excoriate, and sling mud in terms that would make a bathroom wall blush.
To be sure, there was a perverse silver lining in the fact that the bald racism, the vulgarities, the pettiness, and the extraordinary torrents of venom, came from both left and right, from the pro-Palestinian camp no less and no more than from the pro-Israeli.
There will be those who argue that these lines are ingenuous at best and flagrantly hypocritical at worst, and they’ll have a point. Talkbacks are good for business. They engage readers. In the language of the business manager, they generate traffic.
But they also repel. They repel the serious reader, the sincere reader, the person who is open and interested and curious and sane. These, the readers who should be most attracted to the feature, who have the most to contribute, are the most likely to be disgusted.
Read the whole thing.
One can witness the same thing happening at most blogs: those who are most passionate about a certain subject post a comment and, because they feel so passionately about it, those comments are often aggressive / unreasonable / partisan.
8 Responses to “Comments and TalkBack”
What are you talking about?! Are you #$%^&* crazy?!
Damned stingy Dutchman!
MvdG–
When it comes to getting, um, strongly worded comments of disagreement, you are the reigning champion here at TMV!!
I imagine–hope?–I speak for many commenters when I say thanks for your grace under pressure!
Ha! I had that honor for a long time, but other contributors face some serious, umh, criticism as well these days. Perhaps more so than I do.
Or I just don’t care about it anymore. That could be it as well
MvdG–
Ha indeed. Since you’re a literary kind of guy, here’s some A. E. Housman in your honor:
He gathered all the springs to birth
From the many-venomed earth;
First a little, thence to more,
He sampled all her killing store;
And easy, smiling, seasoned sound,
Sate the king when healths went round.
They put arsenic in his meat
And stared aghast to watch him eat;
They poured strychnine in his cup
And shook to see him drink it up:
They shook, they stared as white’s their shirt:
Them it was their poison hurt.
—I tell the tale that I heard told.
Mithridates, he died old.
Here’s the whole thing.
PS Be back to bash you later!
Hey if you don’t get a passionate response and a lively dialogue, it was probably not worth writing in the first place!
I like the controversial topics-
lol, thank you George.
Kim: true of course, but there’s a fine line between a lively dialogue and people insulting each other.
Oddly enough, the most surprising for this to me are the big media blogs….USA Today, WaPo, MSNBC…….where you would think it would be both very affordable and worth their image to pay someone $15/hr. to censor the postings.
And it really isn’t passion/sarcasm gone overboard as much as it is just foul-mouthed romper room. There seems to be just an awful lot of latent hostility in people that is uncorked through anonymity.
Quite honestly it seems like a reflection of the shoutfests on cable, where people with opposing viewpoints are no longer worthy opponents, but open enemies. Hot button issues have replaced any kind of reasoned debate in the media.
Our culture is filled with influences that highlight our differences- without any respect for anyone else’s opinion if it is too different.