Island Life: Who's laughing?
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My pleasure. Any time my (Canadian) boss comments on my bitchy Machiavelianism I just tell her it's a cultural thing and all Kiwi women are like that.
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I think that blogs are a bit like the British newspapers. Kiwiblog is The Sun (largest circulation, right leaning tabloid and a bit of titillation) whereas PA is The Guardian (smaller circulation, left leaning, and generally longer, more serious articles).
This is also a reflection on the authors styles - DPF blogs about anything and everything and goes for quantity, whereas PA has longer, more considered posts.
Each to their own - there's obviously space for both blogs.
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If you want to see objectionable behaviour check out the political debate channels on Efnet/Dalnet/Undernet. While they can be great for realtime discussion of events, they are also incredibly vulnerable to all sorts of abuse and require pretty active moderation (such as one can do on IRC).
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I don't think having fixed identities and reputations to protect is enough on its own. The worst bit of abusive language I've ever seen on a forum (directed at an absent figure rather than a fellow participant) was posted by a guy using his own first name, and whose profile linked to his staff profile on his publicly funded employer's webpage. And the post was made during work hours. One phone call could have lost him his job.
The key thing was that the culture of the forum was such that nobody questioned his manners (or sense of self-preservation). There was a rule of no death threats against other members, but that was it. The abuse stopped short of a threat, and no sanction was applied.
When deranged people ring up MPs offices and threaten them, the police get onto it real fast and trace the phone call. It's apparently much harder to apply that level of sanction to IP addresses, judging by the difficulty in shutting down the "post the addresses of people we don't like" school of internet users. Being able to respond to real-life threats is a far more serious issue than dealing with simple electronic vandalism like trolling.
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Salon article on the Sierra episode and online misogyny.
"Ever since Salon automated its letters, it's been hard to ignore that the criticisms of women writers are much more brutal and vicious than those about men -- sometimes nakedly sexist, sometimes less obviously so; sometimes sexually and/or personally degrading. But I've never admitted the toll our letters can sometimes take on women writers at Salon, myself included, because admitting it would be giving misogynist losers -- and these are the posters I'm talking about -- power. Still, I've come to think that denying it gives them another kind of power, and I'm trying to sort that out by thinking about the Kathy Sierra mess in all its complexity."
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Sue,
What constantly surprises me (even though by now from experience it possibly shouldn't) is how much effort people put into being nasty online. But then how simply they dismiss their words as nothing.
Sometimes, just sometimes the internet makes a few things far too easy.
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I might have missed the boat on this thread, but I was checking out Megite being an algorithm based topic reccommendation site which is not a million miles from Metafilter that Stephen Judd mentioned. Actually much of the reccommended links are common between the 2 sites and found (finally bringing this back onto topic- phew!) Tim O'Reilly's call for a bloggers code of conduct, which covers much of the ground that was discussed above.
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