In one of those not very remarkable co-incidences I was one of the genuine fresher newbies that joined the online world during 1993 when the Eternal September started.
Now in 2007 I am a bitter and twisted old hand and I am seeing a similar wave of effluent wash over the blogging community. Washing at the feet of the few remaining pillars of reasoned intelligent comment is a sea of small minded NIMBYs, luddites and other flavours of self-centred yahoos.
So let us put up our memorial to the time when this neighbourhood was an extension of debate away from the bastions of old media and out into the wider online community. Now that community is being taken over by reactionaries shouting across their points, probably about how X topic is effecting the price of their house, why Y politician can't be trusted because he did or didn't change his mind on a topic burning them like a case of the pox or why organization Z is lying about climate change to con money out of them.
It is getting harder and harder to try and read vast swathes of the internet, more and more sites have commenting systems attached to their stories and it is more and more difficult to avoid reading the bile appearing at the bottom of perfectly reasonably pieces of writing of all political flavour.
This is one of the factors demotivating me as far as writing for this blog, but I want to continue, so I am trying to work out strategies to seed this blog. I am even thinking of pulling headlines out of the RSS feeds for news sites and throwing them at me in a random order as a starting point.
3 comments:
Not a problem dude, you don't have any comments. ;)
R.
It isn't just about comments it is posts as well, the thing with comments is that even "real" journalism, online, is now infected.
Mmm. I still shudder when I recall the IMDB message boards, but the standard of debate is often just as bad wherever you go.
R.
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