Local Resolutions Part 14 of 29
This is the fourteenth in a series of 29 ways to help your local community online in 2010. If you missed it, you may wish to read the introductory post.
In this post, I suggest that leaving intelligent comments in response to articles on local news sites is a great way to help others from behind the comfort of your keyboard. This series has included recent posts about appearing as a guest on local blogs and podcasts, bookmarking others’ content, and cataloging your community on FourSquare.
Tomorrow morning the wackos come out.
I’m not talking about church-goers. I’m talking about the haunters of the LancasterOnline TalkBack forums. Despite the fact that its editorial staff was downsized again this week (by ten people), the Sunday News is still the biggest and broadest news source in this county. And big news sites draw online wannabe pundits like moths to a flame.
On the TalkBack forums, community members hide behind pseudonyms, beat long-dead horses, and attack each other ad hominem with glee.
The forums are frequently unfriendly, irrational, and maddening. Reporters famously either hate or ignore them.
For all that the people behind the Lancaster Newspapers drone on wistfully about the importance of an independent press in our society (just listen to the pie-in-the-sky brainwashing that loops for pedestrians at the South Queen Street “Newseum” window display), they have done a preposterously inept job managing the sorry excuse for discourse taking place around the articles they publish online.
And yet, here I am, about to suggest you join them.
Yes, in 2010, consider walking into the lions den on occasion to say something intelligent.
Don’t get your hopes up: the TalkBack forums are broken beyond repair. Still, even though Lancaster Newspapers has gone to lengths to block their website’s traffic on information services like Quantcast (where this blog’s traffic is verified and available for all to see), we know that enough people visit the site to make it an important place for public input.
So that you don’t get pulled into the quicksand of the uglier sorts of conversations, I suggest following these three guidelines:
1. Speak your mind. Don’t react or respond to other posters. Instead, write with regard to the article itself, not any comments that may have already been left.
2. Don’t watch the replies like a hawk. Leave your comment then close the tab in your browser.
3. Point to intelligent resources like articles, blogs, and data sources. It will raise the level of discourse beyond conjecture, and break a hole in “the TalkBack forum bubble.”
I’ve observed this as well. The quality of discourse in LOL’s TalkBack forum is lol’able. I’ve often wondered what demographic the contributors represent. Are they active and well-traveled Internet users, or are they a pocket of local individuals who do not hold their online identities in high-regard, and who sling non-objective opinions and criticism behind a veil of anonymity as if doing so is a novelty?
It doesn’t matter if you’re a casual user, or if you exist predominantly online. It is my opinion that people should present themselves on the Internet just as they might present themselves in person – because the more the digital medium evolves, the more it will define us.
Interesting, Daniel. As we’ve talked about in person, the TalkBackers are indeed an ugly, bleeding, vomit-inducing part of our Lancaster County neighborhood that infuriate me to no end, and yet I still read their comments. However – I take a bit of issue with your suggestion not to interact with them (to comment and close the tab), as I believe the interaction is what makes Social Media – well, social.
I think the true hope for restoration, heck, even call it redemption, of the TalkBack community is for rational individuals to interact with the current TalkBackers and with other rational folks on the forum. To borrow from a biblical idea, to be in the world yet not of it. The more we post intelligent, well-thought out comments, the more hope there is that their own comments may become more rounded.
What are your thoughts?
It’s fascinating to me, Jeremy, that you brought up “in the world but not of it.” I wrote this post while waiting to be seated at El Rodeo (Amanda was even OK with it), and it didn’t save a part in which I wrote that I think intelligent users of TalkBack should strive to be “in the forums but not of them.” And I think we agree that that’s the crux here–how to impact the discussions that take place there (which people do read, including people like us who know it will just make us mad.
You’re a more patient, calm person that I am, and I think you’d be able to pull off what you suggest–intelligent, even peaceful interaction. For me, it’s too high a challenge–I get sucked in to online debates like a piece of Romaine into a guinea pig’s mouth. It’s kind of like why not everyone could help directly in a ministry for prostitutes. The protection of distance is sometimes good.
Even without the interaction, I think the presence of intelligent comments will make a difference.
Chris, I couldn’t agree with you more on your last paragraph. It’s the reason I choose to use my real name almost all the time on social sites, and I suspect the same is true for you and Jeremy. If I wouldn’t say it in a town call meeting where everyone could see me and where I would have to take responsibility for my words, then I shouldn’t be saying it in TalkBack. Anonymity rules out the possibility of community.