One of the more interesting online pieces making its way around the blogosphere these days is an article written by Jeff Pearlman, a sportswriter for SI.com. Entitled Tracking Down My Online Haters and originally posted at CNN.com, it describes what happened when Pearlman actually went to the trouble of locating and contacting two respondents to his own blog who attacked his pretty average post about a former MLB player named Jeff Bagwell by attacking him (Pearlman) personally and venomously. You can read the article here:
One of the notable distinctions between writing vitriol and speaking it is that writers have less excuse for saying the things they do. Verbalizing vile things, which is generally something done on the spur of the moment and without much forethought at all, eliminates the middle step of transferring the thought to paper (or screen) before it’s sent out into the public domain. As a result, we can be slightly (although maybe only slightly) forgiving of the speaker who lets the garbage fly in a thoughtless moment, whereas the writer is more difficult to overlook precisely because he has to go the extra mile to get his venom out…and then actually does it.
Count me as one of those who does not write what he would not say in person to the face of the individual he’s addressing on paper. I am a passionate, opinionated person, but one who’s also quite willing to be ruled by a measure of decency and decorum. I will admit to occasions when some particularly nasty thoughts of mine actually made it into the form of the written word…but before I shot those words out into cyberspace, I made the changes that the aforementioned measures of decency and decorum dictate that I make. All in all, my internal “thermostat” seems to work pretty well, I guess.
I suppose it’s nice to read that when writer Pearlman tracked down his unfortunate critics, each caved and apologized and seemed to come across, ultimately, as pretty nice guys. Still, it should be worrisome to all of us that there are so many people who are able to make it past whatever safeguards they ostensibly possess and project that venom out there in the first place – worrisome not just because those people are doing it…but also because they are doing it against other people who themselves, like Pearlman, may be inspired to track them down for a reckoning of one sort or another. I know that I, like every other reasonable person, heartily dislike being insulted in a particularly obscene or similarly mean-spirited way, and the fact that the person who may be doing it is unknown to me doesn’t necessarily allow me to handle the abuse any better; indeed, there have been a couple of instances where if I could have come to know the identities of those who had provided me with their own obscenity-laced criticisms, I’m certain that I would have tried to engage them directly myself, and this becomes the second part of the problem here. As one person said about Pearlman’s article, the surprising phone call today to a venomous commenter from an aggrieved party like Pearlman himself may be a knock on the door tomorrow…and what will happen then?
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Bob Yetman, Editor-at-Large at Christian Money.com (www.christianmoney.com), is an author of a variety of materials on personal finance and investing, as well as on topics of fitness and self defense, to include the book Investor's Passport to Hedge Fund Profits (John Wiley & Sons, Inc; www.investorspassport.com) and the unarmed combat training DVD Thunderstrikes - How to Develop One Shot, One Kill Striking Power (Paladin Press; www.mikereevesonline.com).
This is an excellent article. I have on occasion shown my wife some of the e mails that I receive and she has been horrified. Yes, real people do read e mails and we should all think twice about what we write in them.
Jim Paris
Posted by: Jim Paris | January 25, 2011 at 10:10 AM