The quality of public debate now is lamentable. Demoractisation in the form of online comment threads has seen the public squander rather than seize the opportunity for reasoned argument. Why was anything else expected? Comment threads attached to online newspaper blog posts and articles exhibit all the clamorous qualities of the crowd or the imminent threat of the mob. The daily ritual of surfing the web has evolved its own responsive behaviour. Perhaps it is the invisibility and unknowability of the virtual community that intensifies the various offenses attached to TROLLING. It is certainly the invisibility of this community that makes their expressions of resentment, disgust, and hatred all the more intimidating. Surfing the web is made all the more depressing by reading public comments. With blogging comes an ocean of effluence dragging the reader into its downward spiral of ill-consideration, calculated offensiveness, unmerited pessimism. You are exposed to a range of trolls the likes of which you'd prefer to forget exists in real form on the street and in your personal lives. Wading through comments threads is like subjecting yourself to multiple shocks since language and tone are injurious. You begin to wonder the point of it all. You question why it is that a journalist or writer whose style and logic is faulty must be met with a barricade of abuse and gleeful self-righteousness. How can this build or contribute to 'debate'? This is not a conversation; it's a bitching session whose sole function is to spread the comment maker's own foul resentment. Reasonable and fair people feel sympathy for the blogger and indignation at the public's remarks. Much space and time is dedicated to debunking wild accusations and assertions and dispelling the pessimism so beloved of the troll. In other words, debate is defense against trolling.
As in society, as online: the public likes to upset and offend. Otherwise known as 'speaking the truth' and 'talking plain' in language that people can understand but rarely spell and punctuate correctly, trolling and bile-making on comment threads is the new form of distributing negativity and, on occasion, hatred. Which brings me to supporters of the British National Party. Potty-mouthed, intimidating, expressing the imminent threat that their hollow and proud voting at the booths poses, BNP supporters and voters like to preach more than they practice. Speak to the Times journalist who was 'ejected', Nazi putsch-like, from a recent BNP gathering in an East London pub, about the party's attitudes to freedom of speech. Having benefited from values they fail to uphold for others, the BNP exhibits all the traits of the nascent dictatorship that in all truth they happen to be but which they are (minimally) succeeding in convincing a fair few others of being the precise opposite. Reading comments in support of the BNP is like viewing a sea of two- and one-fingered gestures. On occasion you are likely to sense the suppression of a certain salute. Scrolling down the comment thread attached to any New Statesman article on the BNP is like finding yourself in the dark corners of the playground threatened by the school's head bully and his vengeful but ultimately cowardly acolytes. Reading their 'words' is as if Obama's sun-kissed optimism has found a nihilistic underside, with more than a whiff of sulphur coming through to repulse the more reasoned and decent of us. Less 'Yes We Can' than 'YES WE WILL'.
A basic rule of thumb for those wishing to be vigilant and deconstruct the language and rhetoric of the BNP and its 'impassioned' followers is to study irony until you are sharper than Paul de Man. And then it might be a good idea if you could study cognitive reasoning, because there's nothing more startling than to read the fantasy world blurtings of the BNPer and consider that people can make such connections and express them, supposedly in rational terms, in language. What gets me with the BNPer is that when they talk about the 'evil Labour Party' you suspect they're actually talking about themselves. How, you beg yourself to answer, would a BNP government (perish the thought, banish it from the mind of the decent person) NOT see us all descend into animal savagery, spiralling terror, uncontrollable murderous impulses, just like in the final days of the Third Reich? How, you ask yourself on your hands and knees, can a rational mind that has known since birth the language it uses equate Labour with fascism (and not giggle at the projection involved in such rhetoric)? Whenever, in a moment of unguarded flat-cappery, you mouth the words 'plain-talking' and 'truth', kick yourself to reposition that innate intelligence of yours and ponder how it is you have ended up sharing the phrasing of a nationalist who is lucky enough to have Shakespeare under its belt but who demands to excavate meaning itself in that writer's mother tongue? (For a start, they would ban Shakespeare on the basis of The Merchant of Venice and Othello.)
Mention of plain talk and truth makes me want to curl up with Ulysses and live my life by its chaotic language as a matter of principle.
