More on Paul Staines’ blogosphere of hate
Posted on Apr 28th by William in Faith & practice, IdealGov stuff
Further to the “Blogosphere of hate” thought, Paul Staines puts it as plain as day (in the Times, commenting on Gordon Brown’s lamentable performances on YouTube)
All interaction is another way of people saying they hate you.
Staines (aka Guido Fawkes) is effective at what he does, now quite powerful, and is in a way admirably self-aware. But I just don’t see what this endless rehearsal of hate has to offer us. There’s plenty I’m steamed up about. But it seems to me we want the country half-decently run, and can support Gordon Brown in the dying days of his awful job – in a spirit of “let’s get the best out of him – or anything for that matter – while we can”. Then we can vote for someone else as a positive choice, without hatred. Not just because it’s more Jesus H Christ and 1960s-spirit, but because loving compasionate empathy is a better frame of mind in which to make good and wise decisions.
All this loathing clouds your judgement. This whole Guido, Daily Mail/Express McBride-Campbell political Punch & Judy hate thing is just childish, indulgent but habit-forming. And blog comments often help cultivate the habit. Is there a catharsis here? Is there anything worthwhile? I just don’t see it.
Some of this ‘hate’ does seem to work well with the medium of blogging itself. Blogs which are adversarial tend to generate lots of comments, especially from those who have ’strong opinions’ of their own. Because our brains are wired to see a high comment count as better than a low comment count, we assume that these blogs represent some great trend of popular thinking when, in fact, they only really represent the angriest and most vocal. Guido has done a very good job of turning his angry mob into a legitimating force.
Normal, rational people generally don’t go in for the slightly cultish spectacle of lots of people all vehemently agreeing with each other (whether it’s about how UFOs will save them from global warming, or whether it’s about how much they hate the PM). We’re programmed to see it as a bad thing to unquestioningly agree with something like that. As a result, we never generate the ‘counter-surge’ of hundreds of people all commenting in mild agreement to a post that we broadly (say, 90%) agree with; we’d think it was downright weird if people started doing that. So, even if you’re right, Guido will get more responses and it will appear that he is cultivating a mass movement, but Guido and his followers are a self-selecting sample and one that is not representative of the population as a whole. The mistake the Labour party made was to forget this, and act as if Guido matters a lot more than he does.
It is fun to vent. Let your hair down a bit.
Of course it’s fun, I must say you do it well, and it’s fun to read.
But I’m intrigued by Rob’s challenge to create thoughtful, constructive blog posts which create a wave of gentle agreement.
Enough. I’m off to do some venting at Orange.