Comments
Comments. Not just comments. Iraq blog comments. I have never seen a ruder more opinionated team of commenters in my life.
Sure, there is the odd smattering of sincerity from a small group of people who really are interested in dialogue, and people are going to disagree at times - but for the most part comments on blogs blogged from Iraq resemble a goddamn propaganda war. You know, I have no objection to war being fought with words (in fact being of peaceful inclination I prefer it over bombs and tanks and guns and dubious interrogation techniques) but I have every objection to manipulative plants, crank trolling and over-effusive insincere praise.
Look what you guys are doing. Take a young blogger. A teenage kid who has every right to ordinary teenage comments exchanged with ordinary teenage mates, as most teens online get to do. But oh, no, this young teenager is in Iraq, and as such is inundated by routine hoxhax from adults who know damned well better. The Mosul Star has turned her comments off. I hope anyone who reads this who has over-used her bandwidth feels ashamed. But I very much doubt it, shame knows no boundaries apparently.
I had to get that out, just take a look at the post beneath this one. 100 comments and all for the most part from the same two or three people. If someone writes asking about participating in this blog, what do I say? I say "- sure!" "Go ahead !" But frankly, when people write asking that these days I tend to feel a little embarrassed because I haven't had time to clean out all the downright plain rude foulmouthed language that some commenters just can't seem to help dropping.
As N says, you want that kind of talk - you have a forum.
2 Comments
i do agree with you very much emigre! there's something wrong with the commentsections in the bloggosfere, and although you can see this 'everywhere'; it becomes quite quickly quite nasty in the iraqi bloggosfere.
maybe it has something to do -also- with the hierarchy in the commentsections (who's first is first), which can have as a consequence that a whole blog is sort of hijacked. so, the 'architecture' of the commentsections should be changed, let's try to invent something else, probably by bothering digi-wizzkids and web-designers.
cecile
I'm sorry that Najma had to turn off her comments section, too. I guess the comments got overwhelming. But to see how bad it can really get, you guys should check out the Angry Arab's blog (Angryarab.blogspot.com). There it seems that all the rules of discussion have been thrown out the window so that the discussion is NOT about the news, but about attacking other commenters. I do think this is a strategic blog hijacking (and not in the conspiracy theory kind of way).
Anyways, I hope people stop harassing your blogs. Sorry Najma that you had to turn off your comments.
Salamat/Peace Out.
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