One of the issues that came up in yesterday's brainstorming about community (right) was the degree to which the journalists we employ should switch their behaviour patterns and engage with the communities on our sites and elsewhere. Regular readers will know exactly where I stand on the issue, but it's worth bearing in mind that the biggest single barrier to journalists becoming part of the community isn't arrogance: it's fear.
I got into a brief discussion on TigerTwoTiger yesterday about the fact that negative reactions to the idea of social media are often rooted in fear. Toby Young illustrates vividly in The Spectator why this might be so:
I got into a brief discussion on TigerTwoTiger yesterday about the fact that negative reactions to the idea of social media are often rooted in fear. Toby Young illustrates vividly in The Spectator why this might be so:
What takes your breath away is the sheer scale of their anger. The people who submit 'comments' to my pieces are not mildly annoyed by the articles in question, but in the grip of an all-consuming rage. In my mind I can see this army of furious readers, eyes popping out of their skulls, knuckles white with strain as their fingers fly across their keyboards.And who wants to expose their finely-crafted prose to that? However, these screeching howler monkey commenters seem to be far more prevalent on national titles than the sort of niche publishing we do. And there may be some illuminating reasons for that.
I'm inclined to believe that these reactions are born of three things:
- The lack of defined community around national newspapers. This leads to a lack of consequences. You aren't discussing with your peers or neighbours, but with random strangers. Misbehaviour has no particular social consequence. The worse possible consequence here is being banned from that particular community - but usually it's pretty trivial to return under a different name.
- The relative novelty of freely-available commenting on news. It will take years for a set of standard behaviours for authors and commenters to emerge. As those behavioural norms emerge more things will be seen as unacceptable.
- Anonymity. It's been a long-treasured part of internet culture that you can craft new identities for yourself which have little or no relationship to your real-world identity. Could it be that, in some parts of the internet, that boon is, in fact, a bane? And that injecting consequence into the debate is the only way to improve its standards?
