American Pie: To Blog Or Not To Blog
John Merchant has discovered that blogging seems to require a strong stomach for abusive and foul language.
"Why do these “writers” feel the need for the kind of unfettered self-expression that the rest of us find unsavory and even alarming? Is it that unspiced English is suddenly inadequate to forcefully express one’s true feelings, or is it that the inclusion of a heavy dose of expletives somehow makes the writing more persuasive?''
After pondering on the Internet equivalent of road rage John reaches a startling conclusion.
For more of his lively common-sense words please click on American Pie in the menu on this page.
Unless you’re living in a cave in the Himalayas, or a like place, it’s difficult not to be aware of the “Blogasphere,” that amorphous collection of “writers” and commentators that daily scoops the established media with articles published on the Internet. Though I’m very much aware of that community, I must confess to having little understanding of how it functions, which is a mite frustrating because I like to be up on the latest trends.
How do people become bloggers, and once having become one, how do they function? It’s not as if you can submit a resume and get hired. As far as I know they work for free, so how do they support themselves? I read the other day that four bloggers and a couple of lawyers were sharing a rented apartment in Washington while they give round-the-clock coverage to the Scooter Libby trial. What are they living on, and who is paying the rent?
The only other thing I know about blogging is that it seems to require a strong stomach for abusive and foul language. So why do these “writers” feel the need for the kind of unfettered self-expression that the rest of us find unsavory and even alarming? Is it that unspiced English is suddenly inadequate to forcefully express one’s true feelings, or is it that the inclusion of a heavy dose of expletives somehow makes the writing more persuasive?
I started to get a clue about this unfortunate phenomenon when I read an article sub-titled “New Clues to E-Mail Behavior,” in the New York Times. The author, Daniel Goleman quotes a 14-year-old friend who stated, “Kids will say things to each other in their text messages that are too embarrassing to say in person.” The article goes on to talk about “flaming,” or sending a message that is taken as offensive, embarrassing or downright rude.
“Flaming” has been with us since the early days of the Internet, and wouldn’t you know, the psychologists have a name for it, “The online disinhibition effect.” According to Mr. Goleman, the emerging field of social neuroscience , which studies the mental and physical responses of two interacting people, offers clues to the neural mechanics behind “flaming.”
The studies indicate that in a face-to-face encounter, the brain reads a continual cascade of emotional signs and social clues, and instantly uses them to guide the next move, so that the encounter goes well. This mechanism of social guidance takes place mainly in the brain’s center for empathy, the orbitofrontal cortex. Research by Jennifer Beer, a psychologist at the University of California, Davis, finds that this face-to-face guidance system inhibits impulses for actions that would upset the other person or otherwise throw the interaction off.
But the cortex needs input, like tone of voice, facial expression or body language to know how to channel our impulses, and these are all absent in emailing – or blogging. Now, the online equivalent of road rage has been added to the list of Internet perils.
Last October, the Times of London reported what they called “Britain’s first ‘web rage’ attack.” A 47 year old Londoner was convicted of an assault on a man with whom he had traded insults in an Internet chat room. He and a friend tracked down the man and attacked him with a pickaxe handle and a knife!
But getting back to blogging, I read recently that the future of print newspapers is in doubt. In fact there’s a strong belief that their demise is certain. At he same time, the TV news programs in America are also struggling to retain their audiences. If one channel is doing better than the others, its success is automatically attributed to the current anchor person, who then is lured away by astronomical salary to another channel.
This generally doesn’t make any difference to the ratings, and you have to wonder why anyone would believe that the person reading the news would exert more influence on the audience than content, reportage or even political bias. So does all this attrition mean that our only source of “news” is going to be the bloggers? It’s a frightening prospect.
There have always been social and political gadflies, but their acidic prose and cartoons reached a limited audience in the past, a factor that provided its own form of restraint. Now, with no advertisers to please, or editors to temper their bellicose outpourings, we can expect a deluge of profanity and attack-dog reporting. I think I’ll start a newspaper.
# # #
