These journos who don’t like the interwebs and our tendency for robust comment are queuing up to denounce anonymity. Today it is Mic Wright in the Tellytubbygiraffe.
In one sense, the source of the rage that flows through the comment sections is simply explained. Psychologists explored theories of deindividuation – the slaking off of self-awareness and responsibility through anonymity – long before the web was a gleam in Tim Berners-Lee’s eye. In his 1895 work, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, Gustave Le Bon suggests crowd behaviour becomes “unanimous, emotional and intellectually weak” and that anonymity leads to primitive and hedonistic behaviour.
Um, bollocks, frankly. Anonymous comments that break the rules of the site in question get zapped. It’s a fairly easy thing to do – the admin presses a button labeled “delete” and the nasty comment just goes away. In the meantime, most of the commentary I come across is robust, but hardly primitive or hedonistic. And even if it was, so what? No one is forcing anyone to read it. And, besides, as we have already discussed; given the propensity for sanctions for unauthorised opinions, anonymity is an essential safeguard against ostracising, loss of jobs or worse.
The assumption of many regular commenters is that they could do better than anyone who plies their trade as a writer;
Yup, seems fair to me…
The DT comment threads do seem to have a higher than average troll content; but to try and make the case for censorship at source is kind of elitist. The mindset that “You haven’t got a degree, so how dare you have an opinion” viewpoint. As for the ‘writer’ – never heard of him before.
Regretably the quality of many newspaper journalists is so poor that the comments are the most interesting bit, if not the only interesting bit. Frequently I turn to the comments before reading the article.
Ditto!
I do the odd post on ‘cats and after all the comments have been made, I am often better informed than when I was writing the thing and sometimes slightly moved.
It must be a bit worrying when you are being paid to ply a skill that, as it turns out, millions of ordinary plebs can do, not only just as well, but actually better than you can. Yes, anonymity can result in certain people acting like total morons, but intelligent people just ignore them. A much bigger problem, for Mr. Wright, is that intelligent people use anonymity to speak their minds and they tend not to sing from the establishment hymn sheet.
I’m not sure he is attacking people being anonymous, so much as questioning the value of comment threads. Personally, I can’t stand the threads on newspaper sites most of the time, can’t be bothered to register to leave a comment myself, and due to the volume of them, I don’t think it’s possible to conduct much of a debate. However, a blog is different. If a blog doesn’t allow comments, in my view, it’s not a proper blog, more a vanity publication. This doesn’t mean a blogger need leave an abusive or annoying comment on his site – ‘my gaff, my rules’ applies.
The problem for many “professional journalists” is that they had decades of working in an industry with very little competition. Number of new national newspapers between 1970 and 2000? 1? Maybe 2?
On top of that, there weren’t many places that people could write up their own fiskings. Write to an editor and they could throw it in the bin. So, they could get away with being average or crap.
Along comes the net and this small clique that haven’t had competition for decades suddenly faces a huge amount of competition.
And one thing is that it’s flipped things over. Journalists are generally writers first, subject experts a distinct second. Didn’t matter much when they were just reporters, perhaps covering a war. You go out, observe, write, report. But most of them are innumerate, unscientific and have no idea about economics. Get a journalist on these areas and finding holes in their writing is like shooting fish in a barrel.
Bloggers on the other hand are typically subject experts first. They may write more clumsily, but they will get things right. You’ll find it much harder to find holes in what Don Boudreaux writes than what someone at the Daily Telegraph does.