There are two main categories of blogs I read these days: Skeptical blogs and tech blogs. For the last two weeks it seems that both circles of blogs have been big on hype and low on substance. Page views seem to be the metric of choice to judge success, not on whether or not anything of value was added. In most cases, something of real value was overwhelmed by wild speculation, ad hominem attacks, and logical fallacies. The rest of this post is aimed at the tech and skeptic blogs I’ve been reading for the last year, and is not meant to be aimed at any one specific blog, as I’ve seen these issues all over the place.
Am I making a “tone” argument? Yes, I think I am. I sincerely believe tone matters. Articles that take on the tone of attack pieces or fluff pieces lower the quality of dialog for everyone. Internet comments are notorious for being terribly <insert your own>-ist and it’s a reputation that’s well deserved. Another kind of comment that is becoming pervasive is the sycophantic comment. It’s a comment that adds little to no value to the discussion, no new information, and is usually an attempt by the commenter to ingratiate themselves with the author. So we end up with two kind of comments: vile and vapid. I’m probably guilty of this myself, but after this week, I’m going to take a long look and see what I can do to avoid the “vile or vapid” paradigm.
To some, my complaints might sound like I think everyone should be nice and fuzzy, and never have a dissenting word. This is very much untrue. I’ve been in multi-hour arguments with people who I vehemently disagree with without ever needing to raise my voice or resort to ad hominem attacks. I did it many times on my podcast. I have a very rare confluence of political and moral beliefs so it’s very rare that I’d ever come across someone else who agrees with me on everything. I’m almost always in disagreement with whoever I’m speaking to on something, whether it’s my lack of religion, my belief in small government, my veganism, or cavalier attitude about what people should be able to do in the privacy of their own homes. I’m not against conflict, I’m against bad dialog caused by the desire for page views and aggrandizement.
So what are my preferences and suggestions? The simplest one is stick to facts, things you know. All to many times in blogging and in “response post” blogging, authors assume and extrapolate facts that can’t be determined, without stating the speculation in the post. The next suggestion would be, if you read a blog post and you have some violent disagreement with it, email or call the person for a deeper explanation if possible. Countless times over the last year, I’ve seen response posts attacking people without ever taking the time contact the author over the offending post. Response blogging is perhaps one of the worst forms of communication, just barely above not communicating at all. And my last suggestion is simple: keep blogging. I don’t think people should stop blogging, I think they should get better.
At various times over the last month, I’ve thought about deleting all my tech and skeptic blogs out of my reader, and uncircling them all on Google+. The skeptic blogs have almost had me decide to not go to TAM2012 this year, an event I never thought I’d ever miss again. Well, I’ve stepped back off the edge from that one, and will go again, but I hope TAM 2012 can improve upon last year. We’ll see. Also, there are so many wonderful bloggers out there, some of my favorite ones are Steven Novella, Barbara Drescher, Mike Elgan amongst others, that I don’t want to sound like a blogger hater. Just something I wanted to say, since two of my “worlds” have been having the same problems for a while.
Am I making a “tone” argument? Yes, I think I am. I sincerely believe tone matters. Articles that take on the tone of attack pieces or fluff pieces lower the quality of dialog for everyone. Internet comments are notorious for being terribly <insert your own>-ist and it’s a reputation that’s well deserved. Another kind of comment that is becoming pervasive is the sycophantic comment. It’s a comment that adds little to no value to the discussion, no new information, and is usually an attempt by the commenter to ingratiate themselves with the author. So we end up with two kind of comments: vile and vapid. I’m probably guilty of this myself, but after this week, I’m going to take a long look and see what I can do to avoid the “vile or vapid” paradigm.
To some, my complaints might sound like I think everyone should be nice and fuzzy, and never have a dissenting word. This is very much untrue. I’ve been in multi-hour arguments with people who I vehemently disagree with without ever needing to raise my voice or resort to ad hominem attacks. I did it many times on my podcast. I have a very rare confluence of political and moral beliefs so it’s very rare that I’d ever come across someone else who agrees with me on everything. I’m almost always in disagreement with whoever I’m speaking to on something, whether it’s my lack of religion, my belief in small government, my veganism, or cavalier attitude about what people should be able to do in the privacy of their own homes. I’m not against conflict, I’m against bad dialog caused by the desire for page views and aggrandizement.
So what are my preferences and suggestions? The simplest one is stick to facts, things you know. All to many times in blogging and in “response post” blogging, authors assume and extrapolate facts that can’t be determined, without stating the speculation in the post. The next suggestion would be, if you read a blog post and you have some violent disagreement with it, email or call the person for a deeper explanation if possible. Countless times over the last year, I’ve seen response posts attacking people without ever taking the time contact the author over the offending post. Response blogging is perhaps one of the worst forms of communication, just barely above not communicating at all. And my last suggestion is simple: keep blogging. I don’t think people should stop blogging, I think they should get better.
At various times over the last month, I’ve thought about deleting all my tech and skeptic blogs out of my reader, and uncircling them all on Google+. The skeptic blogs have almost had me decide to not go to TAM2012 this year, an event I never thought I’d ever miss again. Well, I’ve stepped back off the edge from that one, and will go again, but I hope TAM 2012 can improve upon last year. We’ll see. Also, there are so many wonderful bloggers out there, some of my favorite ones are Steven Novella, Barbara Drescher, Mike Elgan amongst others, that I don’t want to sound like a blogger hater. Just something I wanted to say, since two of my “worlds” have been having the same problems for a while.
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