The articleabout the surreptitious taping of sexual acts that led to this tragedy in the N.Y. Times recieved 888 comments, including mine that I will copy below.
I'll use this occasion to discuss the online comment feature of the Times, one of the most popular and advanced on the web.
The article was posted on line at around 7:30 PM, and the first batch of comments were screened with a time date of 7:55. . Like dailykos, comments on Times articles get recommends, with a strong correlation with early time posting. To evaluate your receptivity, the proportion of readers that believed your comment is meaningful, it is necessary to compare it to others in your time group.
Perhaps this shouldn't mean anything, but it does to me. I enjoy the feedback, the reward that what I think, and struggle to express cogently, is valued by readers. The Times makes a major investment in this comment threads, first by having each one approved, and then having editors choosing a small number 5-15 to be highlighted, with sorting also by recommends and highlights.
While the comments on this subject were mostly personal reactions, other comments, especially on opinion pieces, can give cogent alternate perspectives. It is amazing how many people get satisfaction out of expressing their observations to large numbers of anonymous readers. And these comments are not one line exclamations, but well thought out carefully written mini essays.
Marshal McLuhan described a new global village that he saw emerging, but he was a half century too early. TV, being only passive reception of information didn't do it, but the internet does provide the village experience, not unlike, speaking to a vast audience, where although none of the faces are distinguishable, there is still the feeling of personal connection with each member.
Here's my comment, online at this site posted with 9:02 batch, comment number 230--with 71 people letting me know that they valued my observation.
Hey, can't anyone take a joke. It's was funny, a goof on the guy, a laugh. Isn't that really all that counts?
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The above mentality has been growing for decades now, as clear as the difference between Johny Carson and Jay Leno. Carson, and those of his era purveyed a gentle type of ribbing, which was enough to keep him in demand for decades. Leno, and his colleagues, have no internal censors, and I'm not talking about explicit references to sex, but for protecting their targets from emotional injury.
I still remember the Monica Lewinski events. Sure, she gave them the material, but week after week there were variations of jokes on her given oral sex to Clinton. There was never the slightest acknowledgment that she was a young women, a fellow human being, who was more than a punch line for a repetitious joke.
This has become the norm, with the recent example of Sasha Barron Cohen's in "Borat", who set up his targets to be humiliated, as if they were actors, or cartoons, but who actually had to go on with their lives. The general consensus is that it is harmless fun, and we laugh since we don't want to be considered "dull, humorless scolds."
So these two fellow students followed this norm, saw a rare opportunity to be known as an edgy witty person with a caustic cutting sense of humor. And now, these two will pay the price for taking what has become a new norm of our society just a bit too far. They never guessed that their victim would take it seriously. Monica Lewinski didn't take it seriously, and those rubes ridiculed by Borat didn't ....well who cares about them.
Sure, those kids did something reprehensible. But let's not ignore how our society, from late night TV to reality shows, have coarsened our empathy for those whom we deem objects of ridicule. Sadly, this time there was no editor or laugh track to make it all turn out right.
Community is everything. We all have to belong to something, a profession, a family, a religion, a status, and economic group. Dailykos is a community, as is readers of the N.Y. Times or viewers of Fox News. We in this community have little compunction ridiculing those in the Fox News community, and we enjoy it. Gays enjoy ragging on up tight straights, and a large subgroup of males still bond by ridiculing gays.
Tyler Clementi's tragedy is that he was not solidly in one group, so exposure of his secret pleasure was beyond his bearing. Actually, in earlier times this was even more common, the best selling book of the 1950s "Advise and Consent" depicting in excruciating detail the devestation of "outing" in this earlier more rigid age.
I strongly suspect that some of the toxic divisiveness we are now experiencing is the transition of sexual mores, call it homophobia for lack of a better word, but it's more the threat to the rules of belonging that had been internalized over generations.
I recently met someone who is one of the main benefactors of the Creationist movement. Educated and wildly successful in business, he espouses the most fundamentalist literal biblical explanation of all areas of knowledge.
In our long conversation he described unbearable guilt for sexual "sins" of his teenage years, beyond the ministrations of psychiatry. His suffering was only assuaged by the "lamb of God" a belief that he not only holds dear, but spends millions of dollars a year on promulgating. He has found his community, and this need is so strong that rationality is easily sacrificed to ensure his belonging.
I do ramble. So pick anything I've covered and comment. There's a rare thunderstorm approaching my house here along the coast of Southern California, so I'm not going anywhere for a while.