You probably noticed it before I did--the vanishing of comment threads from about the web. News sites, Youtube videos--places where you once took it for granted that there would have been a space for public feedback since foreclosing the possibility.
This seems to have happened quietly for the most part, the press not talking about it very much, and such discussion as I can find generally appearing not in the major mainstream media outlets but smaller, more specialized web sites (Techdirt, for instance, having long had its eye on the matter).
The standard explanation is that this was a response to the reality that such threads so often contained more spam, trolling and abuse than real dialogue about the item at hand. However, another more critical view is that this was a matter of heading off reaction to the extreme views and content the media promulgates, which the media know full well would offend many, but "shove down their throat" anyway. (Some of those espousing this view, for example, hold that the reason for, for example, turning off comments in response to "woke" content is that they do not want to deal with the inevitable criticism.)
I suspect that both are right, not least because each in its way confirms the other (the woke content, of course, bringing on a reaction not always civil). Yet it also seems to me that while the media, strictly speaking, has no obligation to make a space available for comment its withdrawing that space after users had become accustomed to the opportunity to "talk back" to the press has a whiff of repression about it--the more in as the press organ is recognizably powerful and influential, and in as this has at least in part because of the political content of that comment. I can hardly deny that spammers and trolls befouled many a scene--but it is not only the spammers and trolls who get shut out this way, with all that implies for even the pretense of there being a conversation in this society.
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2 comments:
Hello Nader, I too am worried by not only the decline of critical discussion, but the increasing inability to tolerate it, or to see its usefulness, or to envision it as anything other than bad publicity for one's product (even when the only "product" is one's self or one's opinions). From the viewpoint of neo-liberalism criticism is "bad for sales", and that's all.
I have been wanting to comment on this post and to share it on twitter, but I have only now found the right catalyst for doing so. I cannot find you on twitter any more, but I share the link to the discussion thread here: https://twitter.com/TPBlake/status/1536041584432668672
Keep up the good work!
Hi Terence! It's good to hear from you again! (The more in as I haven't seen XenoSwarm updated in over half a year.)
I departed Twitter back in 2020. I realized I was spending too much time on it and thought it best to take a good, long break, which eventually ended up being permanent, like so much else these two crisis-filled years.
Thanks for your interest in the piece, and the kind words, as well as the notice about the link, which I have read-and the remarks in which certainly seem to me relevant to the issue. I don't know if you're familiar with the term "poptimism," but it has often seemed to me to be a major factor in the discussion of popular culture and the arts, with the phenomenon first noticed in music, but since quite evident everywhere, publishing included. (And of course, mentioning the fact, as those who pointed out the existence of poptimism did, got one attacked by other, more conformist critics and commentators.)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/at-the-top-of-the-pop-music-heap-theres-no-criticizing-the-view/2015/04/16/d98d53a8-e1f2-11e4-b510-962fcfabc310_story.html
I have also had the impression of "inflation" when it comes to critical praises. I remember how, for example, the extreme critical praises for The Sopranos were seen as so overblown that the show Saturday Night Live did a sketch specifically mocking the hyperbole:
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-jan-21-ca-56036-story.html
Since then such hyperbolic praises seem to have been normalized. It seems to me the flip side of the tendency--the intolerance of criticism going along with an ever more extreme demand for praise that feeds on itself, with the sheer fulsomeness of the hype forcing everyone to try and out-hype the competition.
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