gatewatching

John Birmingham isn’t the first, and won’t be the last blogger to try to take the heat out of the discussions that take place on his threads. I do like the way he does it, though, today on his Brisbane Times blog. He says that contempt is…

…poison in any kind of relationship, and in the end that’s what a blog is. A developing relationship, not just between the writer and his or her correspondents, but between the correspondents themselves. A flourishing blog becomes a small village or even a town, and like any human society it also becomes complicated in very short order… Yes, I am responsible for the tone of the header and when I’m writing about certain issues that will be harsh… But as to whether Brisbanetimes doesn’t pay me enough to run a civil discussion, I’d simply remind you that you’re all grown ups, and I don’t ‘run’ anything. The discussion is yours, not mine.

Sometimes the participants in these conversations turn up on across a number of blogs, but the village metaphor lights on the fact that each blog, and sometimes even each thread, has its own character, and what that character is is as much up to the community as it is to blog authors.

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