Quote:
Originally Posted by Worldwalker
Remember, though, that the 307th poster wasn't looking at the previous 300 or so posts expressing the same opinion; they were looking at the first few .....
That's one of the problems with the Internet that is going to take a while to sort itself out socially. We have millions of people giving speeches with nobody listening.
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These are valid points and insightful, WW. I was tempted to throw in a one-liner comment on that blog (about perhaps the author also had a misspelling in the title) that
might have been funny, but would have done nothing to help the situation; it would have made me think I was being witty. That I even had that inclination makes me feel callous and self-serving.
WW hit the nail on the head. We are thinking narrowly and within normal human (non web) interactive parameters that have change significantly from the face-to-face days when a "snub" to a man on the street is a slight that only HE notices, to internet life today, where off-hand, insensitive posts are "enjoyed" by the world.
It's the same engenderment of mob mentality that anonymity allows, especially as evinced by those anonymous authors who secret their identities on the pretext that revealing their "secret identity" would endanger their safety. Like Batman, I suppose.
Summing up, I agree that the author was dead wrong. There were many who gave her good advice to clam up. She did. Eventually. And I know there were probably many others who responded without seeing the tsunami of hate mail that was already posted. I was almost such as poster. Maybe we just need to think twice before we posted cruel messages because we read news reports of disturbed people who feel the attack(s) was/were too much to bear and seek the terrible safety of suicide.