{"id":3734,"date":"2010-07-28T08:08:31","date_gmt":"2010-07-28T08:08:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zmetro.com\/?p=3734"},"modified":"2010-07-28T08:08:31","modified_gmt":"2010-07-28T08:08:31","slug":"on_blog_comment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=3734","title":{"rendered":"On Blog Comments"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/moreintelligentlife.com\/blog\/commenting\">A More Intelligent Life<\/a>: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>\t<\/p>\n<p>A colleague over at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.economist.com\/blogs\/democracyinamerica\">Democracy in America<\/a> (DiA), <em>The Economist<\/em>&#8216;s blog about American politics, has written <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.economist.com\/blogs\/democracyinamerica\/2010\/07\/online_comments#comments\">a very interesting post<\/a> on the nature of online commenters. While the formality of composing a letter to the editor continues to generate considered and often polite prose by even the most aggrieved readers, the immediacy and anonymity of online commenting seems to encourage a tendency to insult and attack. &quot;Faceless communication leads to disinhibition, whether it&#8217;s online, in a car or on the phone with a customer-service representative&#8230; Psychologists even have a name for the online phenomenon: &#8216;<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Online_disinhibition_effect\">online disinhibition effect<\/a>&#8216;.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Publishers keen on a solution to nasty commenters will follow what happens at the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.buffalonews.com\/2010\/07\/18\/1116204\/end-of-anonymous-commenting-stirs.html\"><em>Buffalo News<\/em><\/a>. The paper has just proposed requiring readers to supply accurate identification if they want to weigh in, which is promising. (As <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.economist.com\/comment\/601439#comment-601439\">one of the 65 commenters<\/a> on the DiA post wrote, &quot;I used to think anonymity was a good thing&#8230; However, over time my view has changed to the opposite. For every unique voice, there are thousands of mindless, thuggish screams.&quot;)<\/p>\n<p><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A More Intelligent Life: A colleague over at Democracy in America (DiA), The Economist&#8216;s blog about American politics, has written a very interesting post on the nature of online commenters. While the formality of composing a letter to the editor continues to generate considered and often polite prose by even the most aggrieved readers, the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,23,9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3734"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3734"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3734\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}