Features: Power to the Party People – Flagpole Magazine: Colorbearer of Athens, GA.
I haven’t had this much attention paid to one of my pieces since the Tofu Baby article last spring. The furor this time, never really about my work, started over the perennial anonymous commenter debate – it’s freeing vs. it’s weak. Unfortunately, it’s devolved into name calling. Rusk and Lewis, featured in the story, dove into the fray and are holding their own. I love it. Not that it means people are reading my work or anything, but attention is attention, right. The back and forth has reached 72 comments as of Saturday morning, and at this point it seems the name calling has stopped (it turns out many anonymous posters have issues with homosexuality) and the discussion has returned, for the moment, to debating online comments vs. signed letters.
What’s sad is the usual lack of discussion in City Pages, where another of my stories, a good bit newsier affair about zoning and Jittery Joe’s, has but one comment. Look for a one-graf follow up in the City Dope next week. Pete McCommons and I picked up on a few things the ABH didn’t. While the big paper might understand the futility of hope in the face of government bureaucracy, I like the underdog fight, even when I see both sides of the argument.
2 Comments
February 6, 2010 at 11:27 pm
The commenting on ABH (and Flagpole too, apparently) drives me nuts. Some people are so hostile without being in any way constructive (and it’s usually the same serial commenters). I know it depends on your view of what purpose the paper/websites serve, but I think it takes away what could be a decent community forum/resource and replaces it with more anonymous internet crap that has already replaced the majority of real social interaction anyway.
February 6, 2010 at 11:51 pm
I’m of the mind to require signed comments, at least in the ABH setting. For an online news site, the extension of a printed brand, the comments are the civic conversation that’s supposed to be the basis of a free press. Traditional papers missed the boat transitioning to the online world, and now they’re playing catch-up. They weren’t able to set the rules, for better or worse, in this free information/opinion flow, so there’s pressure on them to stay anonymous. I understand the comfort anonymity gives people – a strength to raise their voice. It’s just that the voice is usually just snarky. As for Flagpole, there’s a credibility difference, maybe it’s mainstream vs. street, and a drive to be sarcastic that’s embedded in a music driven magazine. In the end, the voices that matter sign their names; the racists, homophobes and haters can stay anonymous. I think that living in a community, real or online, and taking serious part in that community, will always require you to turn the cheek, have thick skin, etc. It’s perfectly okay to get pissed in a comment forum – posting weak jeers just seems pointless to me.
Wow, I haven’t rambled like that in a while.