I haven’t had a chance to post about Marcotte’s resignation from the Edwards campaign, though it has been a topic of conversation at home and in the classroom.
For the record, I feel bad for Amanda. Sounds like she was all packed up and ready to relocate when she was impelled to quit. Some serious bottom dwellers have been filling her inbox with crap. I also don’t know whether bloggers or others should held be held accountable for every word written on the Internet.
Interesting discussions are coming out of all this.
From TPMCafe:
…there appears to be a deep division between the wide open debate culture of the emerging blogosphere and the high-stakes, tightly controlled world of electoral politics. Must every writer tamp down the free flow of thoughts and ideas to have a future in politics? Or maybe our politics can be more accepting of the occasional controversial idea. Is there a middle ground in which the blogosphere and electoral politics can meet, or are we beginning to see a division within the public debate?
In her first post on this topic, Amanda writes,
Blogging is a real counterpoint to the thoughtless, elitist, soundbite-driven mainstream media, where we’re supposed to absorb an endless stream of soundbites and photo ops and our participation is limited mostly to a vote every couple of years. Blogs are bringing back the 19th century debate culture, where people would attend real debates and political rallies and listen to speeches for hours at a time.
Apt. 11d 
But doesn’t that 19th century debate culture bring with along with it the equally 19th century phenomena of lynch mobs, blood feuds, vigilanteeism, dueling, tarring and feathering, and running out of town on a rail? (Apologies to the specialists on 19th century American history out there–it’s not my area.)
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I read/taught Chester Himes’ “Lunching at the Ritzmore” for the first time a few weeks ago, and in prepping, I read about Pershing Square (LA), where the story is set. I hadn’t realized that there was a debate culture in the square. Check out the first part of this article.
The particular debate the story describes is whether racism exists. The student who claims racism doesn’t exist could very well be the type of person posting on LGF today.
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Amanda: “Blogs are bringing back the 19th century debate culture, where people would attend real debates and political rallies and listen to speeches for hours at a time.”
And I heard that, back then, students edited their essays before handing them in, and walked six miles through blizzards to get to class (and liked it).
Laura, did you read Diana Mutz’s Hearing the Other Side? Thoughts? Lessons for political blogging?
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heh.
I haven’t read Mutz yet, but from the little I know of the book, she would be an excellent rebuttal to Cass Sunstein. Sunstein argues that public debate is crushed in the blogosphere, because all hang out with like-minded folks. Cyberbalkinization or cocooning. Then, as we hang out with our political clones, we get more extreme in our thought.
I thought that the TPM Cafe discussion was interesting because my media class and I just read a speech by Bill Moyers whining about the state of American journalism. At one point, he writes that the media needs to write in a style that appeals to the masses. Fit in well with Amanda’s post from today.
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Like the blog. I’ve added a link on my own which is a fictional diary of a pupil barrister in England (see http://babybarista.blogspot.com). Cross links much appreciated though no worries if not. Best wishes, BabyBarista
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Based on this post by Marcotte, I’d suggest that there are definitely occasions when any sane person would “tamp down the free flow of thoughts and ideas.”
And based on the idiotic post here (lamenting Rehnquist’s death as if it meant Roe v. Wade were in jeopardy, when Rehnquist was actually one of the original dissenters in Roe), as well as Marcotte’s first comment under that post, it’s rather rich of Marcotte to pretend that she’s part of a movement to bring back the Lincoln-Douglas debates or something.
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RE: “I also don’t know whether bloggers or others should held be held accountable for every word written on the Internet.”
I beleive they should. Without accountability then bloggers can simply spew whatever they want to. You have to think of the internet as not your own litle connection of people but as a millions of peopel with the capacity to view what you write.
If you post, blog, comment, vlog, or whatever you need to think of what the impact would be if the article or comment were otnhe cover of the NYT or WSJ.
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John Doe: “Based on this post by Marcotte, I’d suggest that there are definitely occasions when any sane person would ‘tamp down the free flow of thoughts and ideas’.”
Marcotte would get weak marks in my political philosophy seminar if she turned in work like this, but just so we’re clear: you take her analysis of Santorum’s (rather silly fluff) piece as grounds for suppressing free speech? That’s really a position you want to defend?
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IMHO when the overall volume of what you’re saying on the record goes up, you should expect that some of it will end up to be embarrassing. I personally temper my judgments of blog posts and comments to account for the short time span during which a blogger typically formulates an opinion, and the fact that hey, it’s not the New York Times for chrissakes. The higher-profile a site becomes, the less patience I have for idiotic rants dashed off in middle of the night.
Bloggers have to be ready to apologize or clarify when they’re wrong. But I would hope we would not find ourselves in a world where one bad posting forever bars a blogger from participating in the political process. Sounds boring, doesn’t it?
That said, Amanda’s words at Pandagon were pretty regularly pretty harsh. There are other thoughtful bloggers out there with much less to, ahem, clarify. Do I still feel sorry for her? Yes. But I am not surprised.
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Who’s “suppressing free speech”? Not me. Amanda is perfectly free to write whatever she wants, without legal compulsion or penalty. Just as I and many others also have a free speech right to point out that she is an intemperate and ill-educated person who actually thought that the loss of Rehnquist meant that Roe was in danger.
What I was suggesting, instead, is that Marcotte herself should “tamp down” her own thoughts and ideas at some point, just out of common sense. And my link went to a post where she seems to recognize that, at least in some settings, such “tamping down” is appropriate:
“The problem with Rick Santorum is that every time he talks about sex, that little part of all of us that wants to run into a preschool and yell ‘f**kslut’ or go to a born-again church and scream about how God loves to come in our backyards for our milkshakes, well, it just grows a hundredfold, and the restraint that most of us show just flies out the window.”
I’m not sure what it means about Marcotte that she has such urges with regard to a preschool, but suffice it to say that I’ve never heard of anyone else having such an “urge.”
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Tim Burke has a good post on this topic. I want to consolidate my ideas into a better post and respond to Tim, but in the meantime, let me add a few more remarks.
Kip, my husband often makes the same point that you did. He said that we should be very, very conscious that everthing we write on the web can be read by all for eternity and that we could be forced to account for every comment. You both come from the business world where the fear of civil lawsuits has made everyone very conscious about stepping over the line. That’s why my husband has never left a comment on a blog, even though he’s been reading them for longer than I have.
That’s a problem. I love blogs for many reasons, but one reason I love ’em is for the political debate. I love to see people bat an idea back and forth. I even like it when people make off the wall comments, because it’s somewhat refreshing to read something new, even if it is stupid, and it’s good for everyone to sharpen their debate skills. JS Mill said that by allowing all kinds of speech to exist, even bad speech, everyone benefits. People are forced to hone their arguments. I think I benefit from reading the full spectrum of blogs from mainstream to extreme.
I’m not sure if the blogosphere really works the way that Mill would like. Marcotte isn’t really engaged in a debate with Jonah Goldberg. Mostly bloggers write for their readers who never really hold their feet to the fire. The back and forth between bloggers never feels like a proper debate to me. There’s too many cheap shots and purposeful misunderstandings.
Like Jen, I think it’s too bad that blogging bars one from a political life. But that’s the way it is. Amanda mentioned in her comments at TMCafe that she was naive. She never expected that her blog would be used against her when she got into real world politics.
Rather scary. I feel like this experience is a large bucket of cold water on blogging, which has such potential for great, open debate.
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I think that there are definite differences in commenting culture on different blogs (perhaps largely because of the bloghost’s editorial policy). 1. Some blogs have commenters who do nothing but fawn on the bloghost, agree with him on everything, and carry on auto da fes of anyone so unlucky or so stupid as to venture in and disagree. 2. Other blogs have large numbers of commenters who are hostile and abusive to the hosting blogger. 3. A third category of blog fosters civil, thoughtful and spirited discussion. It is unfortunately in constant peril of turning into either the first or the second kind of blog, or even both at the same time.
Generalizing a bit, type three blogs tend to have relatively short comment threads, and a 100 or 200 comment thread generally signals the presence of eye-gouging, hair pulling, and chair throwing.
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One of the Nielsen Haydens (Teresa, I think) has a very good post regarding online discussion and community. The gist of it, though, is that to foster good discussion, a host must be active in comments. To expect a productive back and forth to emerge on its own is to expect a meadow to turn into a garden without any tending.
Ah, here’s the URL:
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006036.html
Making Light has epic-length threads that are also very informative. Unfogged is another example.
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The need for host-involvement seems correct. Do Making Light and Unfogged have aggressive editorial policies?
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Even when the blogger is super involved (and not totally overworked, like I am now), it doesn’t always make for discussions with good back and forths. Highly involved bloggers still have cheerleader commenters. Highly involved bloggers do have longer threads and perhaps rich discussions of a different kind, but it doesn’t guarentee wide ranging debate.
I think that Amanda was partially a victim of blogs. She was given the false impression that America is more lefty and more tolerant of criticism to religion than I think it is. And the few people who do criticize her posts are from the far right wing and are slightly deranged. One can get the picture of America as vastly polarized between good and evil. An occasional reminder from more sane readers might have been a good reality check.
We (blog junkies) can all fall victim to those misconceptions in different ways. Sometimes I forget that average Americans aren’t worked up about work-place rights and aren’t all that well informed about politics in general. Bloggers and blog readers are not mainstream America.
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Those are some very good points, Laura. It’s definitely a balancing act–there needs to be both freedom and some measure of civility. I’ve occasionally gone over to pandagon.net, but never lingered. It’s not my side of town, and I’m not going to regularly go someplace where I feel that everybody hates me and thinks that I’m either evil or stupid or maybe both. Only a very messed-up person is going to sign up for that sort of treatment. And that fact, as you point out, is going to create a lot of misapprehensions about the nature of the opposition.
One of the things I keep hearing over the AM controversy is “don’t pay attention–those people weren’t going to vote for Edwards anyway.” This is certainly true of someone like Michelle Malkin. However, if you added up everyone that AM has insulted and reviled over the years, it probably adds up to around 150% of the population (men, socially conservative women, Southerners, people who think that the Duke lacrosse case is a travesty, etc). The past few elections, every vote has mattered. Under the circumstances, one can’t be gratuitously offending swing voters. While everyone knows that there are liberal Catholics who are both socially and economically liberal, in my social circle and on the internet I know many Catholics who are socially conservative and economically liberal. Were it not for the “life issues” they would be voting enthusiastically Democratic 100% of the time, which would help quite a lot in a state like Ohio (which I believe Kerry lost). If AM didn’t know this sort of stuff, she wasn’t qualified for the job.
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I think you raise a very good point about the feedback loops between audience and blogwriter, Laura. A blog that starts out with very strong rhetorical and political tone is going to attract very strong loyalists who agree with that tone and a small group of extremely negative, hostile, somewhat lunatic critics. Anyone who has a modest objection is going to go elsewhere, because what’s the point of a modest objection? It’s like trying to whisper in the middle of a fire drill. That’s fine, again, for a blog–but it may leave the blog writer with an exaggerated sense of what the overall space of the public sphere is really like.
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Yes, web posts hang on for eternity. I had a freaky experience googling my own name last week. My name is unique, and I often use googling it as a way to find things like my own home page. When I googled this time, for some reason, google-indexed versions of my old usenet posts from graduate school come up. These are 15 year old — Arrgh, can it really have been that long — posts. I actually spent some time reading through all of them to see if any of them bar me from working in politics. I don’t think I found any that do. But, you sure can find out a lot about a much younger me from reading through those posts.
bj
PS: I think AM wrote things in her blog that she wouldn’t say to people directly, especially folks who disagreed with her. Laura (here at this blog), I think doesn’t. She voices opinions (some of which I disagree with, and in politics it appears that it’s often dangerous to voice any opinion). So, I don’t think Laura’s blog should disqualify her from real world politics. I’ll reserve my angst and frustration for when (or more hopefully if) that were to happen.
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Do Making Light and Unfogged have aggressive editorial policies?
For Unfogged, no. We’ve banned a couple of people (three, maybe? and one was a personal squabble that got made up) but we certainly don’t do it often. But we’ve got a very committed group of commenters that’s hard to troll, so we can usually bore the trolls into wandering away unsatisfied.
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I do admire the comment threads that you guys get going at Unfogged. I skim through them, but I don’t have the reflexes to participate. By the time I think of something witty to say, twenty other comments have been made, and the moment is gone.
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Lindsay Beyerstein said ‘no’ to blogging for Edwards – as she describes it now, she could see a train wreck coming down the track.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/02/26/beyerstein/
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