0 comment Wednesday, June 4, 2014 | admin
In this article from the not-too-distant past, a blogger comments on a news story about -- what a coincidence -- blog wars.
...the kind of exchange that regularly lights up the blogosphere in varying degrees of nastiness. Feuds spill into vast corners of typo-ridden cyberspace as bloggers post and repost passages for paint-by-number demolition and incendiary comments fan the flames.
You can't help but think that Thomas Jefferson himself would be pleased to know that out there in the awesome equalizing social force that is the Internet, people armed with the power of free-flowing ideas are busy pummeling the crap out of each other.
More than that, they're doing it in public, with an often participatory audience. Blog fights are verbal steel-cage smackdowns with a revolving door. Says Ariel Meadow Stallings, a Seattle writer who posts her random musings at Electrolicious.com: "Bloggers are an inflammatory bunch."
It seems that even the innocuous topics, like parenting, often lead to ugly exchanges on the Internet. It isn't just politics that sparks this kind of thing. I was once on a message board discussion about a TV show that erupted into an ugly flame war.
So how does a blogger avoid being embroiled in this kind of thing, or defuse it once it's started?
Is it possible to unilaterally opt out of a blog war? Is it ended when one side stops fighting back?
...the kind of exchange that regularly lights up the blogosphere in varying degrees of nastiness. Feuds spill into vast corners of typo-ridden cyberspace as bloggers post and repost passages for paint-by-number demolition and incendiary comments fan the flames.
You can't help but think that Thomas Jefferson himself would be pleased to know that out there in the awesome equalizing social force that is the Internet, people armed with the power of free-flowing ideas are busy pummeling the crap out of each other.
More than that, they're doing it in public, with an often participatory audience. Blog fights are verbal steel-cage smackdowns with a revolving door. Says Ariel Meadow Stallings, a Seattle writer who posts her random musings at Electrolicious.com: "Bloggers are an inflammatory bunch."
It seems that even the innocuous topics, like parenting, often lead to ugly exchanges on the Internet. It isn't just politics that sparks this kind of thing. I was once on a message board discussion about a TV show that erupted into an ugly flame war.
So how does a blogger avoid being embroiled in this kind of thing, or defuse it once it's started?
Is it possible to unilaterally opt out of a blog war? Is it ended when one side stops fighting back?
Labels: Blogging, Blogosphere, Civility, Internet