One of the problems with the kind of anonymous vicious commentary I'm talking about is that it does nothing to further intellectual debate or balance arguments. As Ulin says in the The Lost Art of Reading:
This is how we interact now, by mouthing off, steering every conversation back to our agendas, skimming the surface of each subject looking for an opportunity to spew.
David Ulin's books is thought-provoking and well worth reading, by the way.
There is no greater example of this kind of distracted, self-absorbed, ephemeral and self-referential stream of trivia than Twitter. My son, The Biker, put me on to this. Enjoy.
I no longer allow anonymous comments on my blog.
ReplyDeletePeople put much more thought into their comments if they have to sign a name to it and if they truly stand by any negative feedback, they shouldn't have a problem putting a name to it.
It's so easy to shoot off at the mouth and hide behind anonymous and it happens too often these days.
I think that's a fairly one-sided view of Twitter - I'd be interested to know if you've tried it yourself for any length of time. My experience has been that, given enough time to tailor an intelligent feed, you get out of it what you put in. Through Twitter I've had some remarkable conversations on a range of topics: feminism, childrearing, religion, current events and politics. The word limit forces people to get to the point, generally preventing the kind of opinionated, thoughtless 'spewing' that takes place on Facebook and in some blogs.
ReplyDeleteWhen I moved to Tasmania, where social circles are tight-knit and difficult to break into, it was Twitter that allowed me to find interesting locals and form friendships that quickly spilled over into the real world. Through Twitter I've been able to keep in touch with friends I left behind in QLD in a far more immediate way than email or Facebook would allow, and a far less expensive way than phone calls could deliver.
Through Twitter, I follow most of the major Australian publisher's feeds along with Varuna and various state writer's associations. Through Twitter, I'm personally in touch with about a dozen published Australian authors and professional editors, have met and talked shop with a few of them, and often turned to them as a resource when I want to increase my understanding of grammatical rules. Through Twitter I've also had the chance to exchange thoughts with authors like Neil Gaiman, Stephen Fry and John Birmingham. Through Twitter I've learned about issues like the 99% protests in America from people on the scene - in their own words, not those filtered through the fine journalists over at News.com.au.
But that's just my experience with Twitter - I'm sorry to hear yours was negative!