Poorboys and Pilgrims

They were talking about this article on the radio this morning. You know it's something pretty good when one deejay will actually mention another deejay, much less another deejay on a competing station. I have no clue who Gordon Keith is as I only listen to the oldies station when I do listen to the radio, but if he's a talk radio deejay chances are he works for the station that just fired Russ Martin for beating his girlfriend (well, the second time).

Anyway, he has a lot of good points about "user generated content" in the social media world. This is a struggle we deal with daily at my job, as we have a very heavily trafficked blog and all of our comments are moderated. So I get to spend a good portion of my day reading the most inane stuff (it's the official blog of the owner of my company, who is a well-known Christian evangelist) and deciding whether we want to deal with the fall-out if I allow it to be published. As time has gone on I find myself much more likely to hit the "delete" button vs. the "post." I used to be all HOORAH about letting the people's voices be heard and not censoring comments, but jesus y'all - after a while you can only read so many comments like this (verbatim, copy/pasted form a comment I just deleted), "How DARE you publicly congratulate Obama on his victory! He's a baby killing socialist and you are a MAN OF GOD and should be ASHAMED of yourself and I'm never buying another one of your books!"

This article goes very well with another I read yesterday (someone on my f'list posted a link, and if you can remember who please tell me so I can credit them with being awesome!) The Narcissism Epidemic...

So you take "Generation Me" and add in social networking and you end up with a bunch of jackholes who don't care about being jackholes on the Internet. We've all seen this in fandom, time and time again. People who honestly don't care about the stuff they post being hurtful to others, or are so clueless that they don't understand how the things they "say" on the Internet can make other people so angry we want to Hulk Smash.

I commented on an entry that thefourthvine posted about commenting habits that I have a really bad tendency to start writing a reply to someone's post or fic or whatever, and 99% of the time I will talk myself out of posting it. Obviously the Internet would be a very boring place if that was the norm, but it would be awesome if folks would actually take a few seconds to consider what they're putting out there when they hit that post button. I don't see that happening anytime soon, though. Because "Generation Me" users ARE the norm on the web these days, and I only see that getting worse as time goes on.