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.
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