Times They Are a Changin'

So about this time last year, after months of keeping everyone posted on our pregnancy and about four weeks after we got Annabelle home, I started receiving some pretty startling and nasty comments on the blog. No point in going into details but it was some of the worst things anyone could say to a new parent of a medically fragile child. I would delete the comments as soon as I saw them so that no one else had to be subjected to them and I ended up rejiggering the site so that all comments had to be approved by me before they would post. Magically the nasty comments stopped.

Dooce is one of the most popular blogs on the Internet (language warning). It is crass and irreverent at times but also poignant and reflective at other times. Apparently the hate mail she gets is staggering. So she decided to figure out a way to cash in on it and started an off-shoot site called dooce.com/hate where she posts the hate mail along with gobs of money-making advertisements (WARNING: It is not a nice place – I couldn’t get through more than a couple comments before my blood pressure started to rise and I had to shut it down).

Well the other day The Daily Coyote had an interesting take on the “hate mail” phenom.

Teaser:

I get hate mail, too, and it, too, rapidly leaves my mind. When I first started getting hate mail, it did affect me, though not for the reason most people would assume. It didn’t make me feel bad about myself - rather, my thoughts were more along the lines of, “this person doesn’t understand the whole picture - they’re jumping to an ill-conceived conclusion, and I must clarify the situation for them because then they’ll understand!” Naive? Perhaps. Major time suckage? Absolutely. I have since come to a place in myself where I allow people out there to hold whatever conclusions about me that they do, simply because I have things I’d rather be doing with my time than convincing strangers I’m decent.

I just find the whole subject fascinating and thought you might as well.

And while we are on the subject of how the Internet is changing things, I saw an interesting post on whether the Internet is dumbing down society.

Teaser:

The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That’s because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.

It’s almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn’t a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they’d leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.

Enjoy!