Bloggers Behaving Badly

There seems to be a lot of bitchery and backbiting around in the blogosphere right now. As far as I can tell, this varies from full-on stalking and harassment, through temporary obsessiveness, to the occasional misguided post or comment. Of course these are also features of the wider Internet – this is an astonishing example – but they're here in blogland too.

Some of the stalking is strangely fascinating to read about. I’ve heard it described as ‘car crash blogging’ and it feels like that: I don’t want to see, but I find it hard not to look. There are no blog-related links in this post because I don’t want to draw attention to this blog, but if you want to join the traffic jam on the other carriageway, a little judicious Googling will set you on the right route.

But I bet it’s anything but fascinating if you’re on the receiving end. Given what some of my blogfriends are going through, I’m glad I’m still fairly anonymous in blogland. Even then I know it’s pure luck that I haven’t attracted the attention of a blogger with some kind of compulsion or fixation. However interesting it may be for outsiders to read about, stalking and harassing are criminal offences and have no place on the Internet or anywhere else.

The temporary obsessives are another matter: those who get a bee in their bonnet about another blogger, write a vitriolic post or two, scatter some comments around and then lose interest. Nasty for the subject while it’s happening, but hey, blogland is in a sense part of the media, so it goes with the territory. Those of us working on books can use the experience to thicken our skins ahead of the inevitable rejections, negative reviews etc. And all emotional experience is fuel to the writer. Without it, we’d have nothing to say.

Those who have made the occasional misguided post or comment – well, who amongst us has not? I know I have. Not so much posts (I don’t think) but certainly comments. Not often – but there have been one or two occasions where something I’ve read has made me so angry that I’ve left a fairly vicious comment, only to go back and delete it a few hours later when I’d calmed down. Emails, too: there are times I’ve hit ‘send’ and then regretted it.

Humour is a tricky one, as well. I know I’ve offended people by leaving a comment I thought was funny but they didn’t. I’ve laughed at sallies in comments boxes that I later discovered had upset others. It can be hard to tease some people effectively in writing, no matter how many emoticons you use.

It seems to me that one of the greatest principles of the Internet is freedom of speech. Of course this isn’t accessible to everyone (people in certain countries (although even then, there is progress), those who can’t afford a computer, etc) but for those of us who can blog freely, well, we can say what we like. The trouble with freedom of speech, though, is that it enables other people to say things we don’t like. That outfit has never suited you, the spot on your nose makes you look like Coco the Clown, and haven’t you put on weight? The knee-jerk reaction is ‘you shouldn’t say that’. It’s hard to read things that hurt, that feel like personal attacks, that ARE personal attacks in some cases. The old adage that ‘sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me’ is simply untrue. And one of the downsides of the Internet, in this context, is that it’s almost permanent. Even deleted posts and blogs can be recovered from caches by the technically expert (to which elite group, as we all know, I do not belong).

People saying things we don’t agree with, to us or to one of our blogfriends, is bound to happen. So far, so manageable: a click of a mouse and on we surf, to find someone whose views are more in accord with our own. But bitching and backbiting? Taking bits of blogs or comments out of context? Making personal attacks? Bad manners, for sure, but not actually illegal, however hurtful it is. The question is, what to do when it happens to us.

It seems there are a few options:

1. Ignore it completely. Probably the most dignified response, but not necessarily easy.

2. Respond once on your own blog, in a careful and well thought out way, then ignore it. Could be useful: you have had your ‘right of reply’ and all your loyal commenters will zoom off in a gratifying rush to defend you in the attacker’s comments box.

3. Respond once in the attacker’s comments box, in a careful and well thought out way, then ignore it. Much less useful as all their loyal commenters will take whatever you say as proof that their beloved blogger was right all along.

4. Try to enter into a dialogue with the attacker, to convert her/him to your point of view. Which is almost certainly pointless.

5. Attack back. Definitely pointless, although the resulting posts and comments may well make amusing reading for others.

One reason I’m thinking this through now is that if I ever manage to get a publishing deal, I’ll be much more likely to find myself in the firing line. In which case, I hope I’ll be able to take my own advice. No promises, though!