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Aug. 8th, 2008 09:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
avevale_intelligencerThe Countess belongs to a "tele-befriending" group organised by the RNIB. Every week she gets a conference call in which she and a number of other partially sighted people get to chat.
There is a moderator.
With great power comes great responsibility. With small power comes...well, I don't know really. But Jan is finding it maddeningly frustrating that every time the conversation turns to something in which two or more of them are actively interested, or becomes in any way even the slightest bit intense, or touches on a subject that is not what might be called "upbeat"...the moderator steps in, squelches it, and makes them talk about the weather. Literally. What she thinks she's there for, what makes her think she has to do that, why they don't rise up in a body and shout in unison "WE'RE TALKING HERE!!!"...these are mysteries beyond my meagre understanding. But it signals a common problem, I think, that people whose sole task is to keep the conversation flowing and take action only in extreme cases of aggression or obscenity somehow get the idea that their job is to emasculate the conversation, and step in whenever they don't like something someone's said. Worse still, they become so obsessed with preventing anyone from talking in a way they consider upsetting that the subject of the conversation itself escapes them completely.
One could imagine a situation in an online forum, say, devoted to the supporters of some product or other, where a non-supporter of same logs in and starts making trouble. As long as he keeps his language clean and his emotional affect flat, the moderators will let him say or imply any damn thing he pleases, that the product is crap, that the supporters are idiots, that the producers of the product are either engaged in or contemplating engaging in some dishonest practice. When a supporter of the product becomes justifiably enraged at this and begins to argue, the moderators are at once alerted, because heavens, this poster is not being Nice. And because they're only scanning for non-Niceness, they have no idea what provocation might have caused it. The troublemaker, secure on his assumed moral high ground, carries on doing what he's doing, and the poster who gets angry because the thing he is supporting, the thing he loves, has been attacked...will be penalised.
What a good thing that doesn't happen in real life.
There is a moderator.
With great power comes great responsibility. With small power comes...well, I don't know really. But Jan is finding it maddeningly frustrating that every time the conversation turns to something in which two or more of them are actively interested, or becomes in any way even the slightest bit intense, or touches on a subject that is not what might be called "upbeat"...the moderator steps in, squelches it, and makes them talk about the weather. Literally. What she thinks she's there for, what makes her think she has to do that, why they don't rise up in a body and shout in unison "WE'RE TALKING HERE!!!"...these are mysteries beyond my meagre understanding. But it signals a common problem, I think, that people whose sole task is to keep the conversation flowing and take action only in extreme cases of aggression or obscenity somehow get the idea that their job is to emasculate the conversation, and step in whenever they don't like something someone's said. Worse still, they become so obsessed with preventing anyone from talking in a way they consider upsetting that the subject of the conversation itself escapes them completely.
One could imagine a situation in an online forum, say, devoted to the supporters of some product or other, where a non-supporter of same logs in and starts making trouble. As long as he keeps his language clean and his emotional affect flat, the moderators will let him say or imply any damn thing he pleases, that the product is crap, that the supporters are idiots, that the producers of the product are either engaged in or contemplating engaging in some dishonest practice. When a supporter of the product becomes justifiably enraged at this and begins to argue, the moderators are at once alerted, because heavens, this poster is not being Nice. And because they're only scanning for non-Niceness, they have no idea what provocation might have caused it. The troublemaker, secure on his assumed moral high ground, carries on doing what he's doing, and the poster who gets angry because the thing he is supporting, the thing he loves, has been attacked...will be penalised.
What a good thing that doesn't happen in real life.