Comments on: J’accuse: the Blogosphere of Hate

By: William Heath’s blog » Blog Archive » More on Paul Staines’ blogosphere of hate

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 08:23:51 +0000

[...] to the “Blogosphere of hate” thought, Paul Staines puts it as plain as day (in the Times, commenting on Gordon [...]

By: Public Strategist

Public Strategist — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 17:12:43 +0000

Part of the challenge is that civilised discourse requires sustained hard work. The blogs which support civilised conversation on any significant scale – places such as Making Light or Whatever – do so on the basis of pretty fierce moderation. The style and rules of those two sites are quite different – but they share the absence of any ambiguity about what counts as socially acceptable behaviour. There’s a guide on how to do it here – http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006036.html – and like any other kind of weeding, the challenge is persistence, rather than any inherent difficulty. It’s the absence of that which makes following the debate on almost any political blog I can think of a fairly repellent experience.

That doesn’t, of course, help with the problem of when a blog is mean minded to start with. But it does help explain what is going on: in the absence of socially enforced boundaries, there will be a shortfall in socially mediated behaviour.

All of which makes me think tangentially of this recent post by William Davies – http://potlatch.typepad.com/weblog/2008/12/the-illusory-reality-of-government.html – how many coppers does it take to maintain order in Hackney is not completely unrelated to the question of how many of what it takes to maintain order in this more ethereal world.

By: NotaSheep

NotaSheep — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 19:09:08 +0000

You are entitled to your views, just as I am entitled to mine. My blog is not about hate, but that article was about some of the people that I hate. I think to say that you cannot learn from people motivated by hate is rather simplistic, but hey, it’s your blog.

By: Ruth

Ruth — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 17:56:01 +0000

Hmmm good food for thought.

At the top (though probably least profound) this makes me think of the distinction Clay Shirky draws between the internet as a major publishing tool, and the internet as a place where you can listen into private conversations. Ranting about hating people feels like the latter, which is less commentable-on, less productive and constructive, and above all, it seems to me massively less likely to lead to creative thinking about problems we all share.

Will think on… whilst I chop my leeks