Letters to the Editor
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Drunken E-Mails Are Part Of This
Even on beloved Salon, I have written dopey things when I was drunk. And then, the following mornings, I have remembered and have cringed.
We need to learn how to post, and when not to post. Now, I will sign off, and have a glass of Chardonnay. Cheers!
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Arrows Sharp and Otherwise
The social acuity needed to navigate the "real" world is also required online to sift the politely argumentative from the merely abusive. Just as one avoids (or not) the thuggish in real life so there are websites and cable channels that wear their thuggery so obviously, so proudly, that the reader/viewer knows insult and demagoguery, not enlightenment, are--by design--the honey that draws those flies.
Interestingly, it seems that readers typically take their cues from the tone of the piece. Most articles inviting posts signal the nature of the response expected by construction and choice of words/phrasing, if not by topic. It's therefore not surprising to see the nastiest posts attached to a mean spirited article. Happily, the more interesting interactions take place on sites where, editorially, such interaction (if not polite at least not bullying) is clearly the intended purpose.
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Etiquette in public discourse -- or lack thereof
In our egalitarian, largely classless and ritualless society, we only need to learn the most general rules of social conduct.
Miss Manners might disagree, with Gary Kamiya's implication if not his actual statement. One of her themes (which she's always able to put so much better) is the great amount of effort required to teach, and learn, politeness; and that all the specific rules of etiquette flow naturally from that arduous but rewarding general education.
But that aside, and given that we can all agree that people with nothing but obscene ad hominem slurs to offer are dead weight in any conversation (a premise with which they themselves might even agree, if pressed), let's look a little more closely at the nature of online discussion. Fundamentally, is anything really new under the sun?
Online discourse is nothing more than simply a particular form of public discourse in general. People have been discussing things in public, sometimes heatedly, for a very long time.
Are the more obstreperous of us really any different from the so-polite English, whose Parliamentarians occasionally assault each other physically with the antique legislative mace? Or the 19th century American legislators whose disagreements sometimes turned into duels on the floor of the US Congress? Socrates pissed the Athenians off so much that they banned him rather more severely than anything we do to web forum trolls today.
Public figures were subject to pamphleteering (the term "broadside" was hardly intended to denote subtlety or gentility), censure, slander, and the slings and arrows of outraged editorial long before there was the web.
Could it be that online discussion is simply taking the form that public criticism of public figures (including journalists and magazine editors) has always taken? That the ideal of genteel disagreement between modest proposals is the historical exception rather than the rule? Could the difference with online media simply be a lower barrier to entry (as Kamiya implies with his contrast between Salon and the New York Times)?
As for classlessness, it would be rude not to give Kamiya the benefit of the doubt, and read him as meaning "formally classless," since surely he knows how class-based, even if fluidly so, American society has in practice always been and remains. Right?
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Imaginative Repositioning
"In our egalitarian, largely classless and ritualless society, we only need to learn the most general rules of social conduct. Peasants do not have to tug their forelocks when the lord rides past, because we don't have peasants and lords anymore."
Um, I'll echo a few others in saying, "Wha?" Are you living in the same America we are, where the richest .1% have taken/are taking most of the accumulated increase in wealth the last decade or so, while working people earn less and less? The one that's now primarily a "service" economy? Who's getting serviced, and who's doing the servicing? This is sort of a non sequitir as to the rest of the article, but let's not pretend our society is either "largely" or any other kind of classless.
"Haaretz is a superb newspaper, and there are always intelligent and thoughtful postings somewhere in the discussion threads after its stories. But the threads tend to be so nasty that I've mostly given up reading them. Even if you're just a bystander, you feel battered and spattered."
Unfortunate analogy to end that anecdote with, given the fact that Israel is engaged in an ongoing conflict that includes the "spattering" of, well, blood on many actual bystanders from both sides. But I suppose that they really all ought to just clean up their language - what could anyone in Israel or Palestine possibly have to be angry about?
The larger point to all of this is a case of who is allowed (by you, I suppose, in this case) to say what and be considered "serious." Limiting discourse to some notion of decency is, inevitably, a manner of control. The question here is, what's the goal of this control? And honestly, I can't tell - what, really, the point of this article; to point out that people say bad words, and that that's bad, and that it'd be "better" in some way if they didn't? Is that it?
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It's your monster, you burn it in the windmill
Salon, or any other self professed Vanguard of right and righteous opinion simply doesn't have discussions. It has cherry picked tomes which reflect The One True Shape Of Things In General. So the readership is that, it reflects that and cannot wrap its collective heads around anything that differs from that. Of course everyone is a poo flinging primate. It's the power of the mob and the bigger the mob gets in relation to a threat the more hysterical the mob becomes. You laugh at the perceived oppression of the 84% Protestant Americans have of themselves. Yet you and any mob are no different. It's all of US who are the problem, we dissidents who you think pee in your pool, dirty the china and probably feel up the help too. How dare we. How dare we intrude on you and tell you you're full of shit. Of course people are rude and self centered. Any group is automatically populated with personalities who think they're a better cut of person than all they people they want kept out.
No Jews No Dogs No Irish: Smithers, release the hounds.