Jeneane has been writing a lot – about betrayal, personalities and fairness, and in a perverse way finding and celebrating her troll-ness … in a series of back-and-forths with Dave Winer. and in the process maybe getting juiced about blogging again.
Which I think makes sense. It reminds me of a line by Leonard Cohen … “the crack is how the light gets in”.
Real human conversations, unwashed by corporate missions or values or unfiltered allegiance to a flag and the many myths furled in that flag, are messy, faltering, attention-challenged concatenations of a shared search for decoding meaning.
And it’s all too easy to find and reinforce points of view that mirror our own.
Which is where flaming and trolling come into their own. I often find that they are a reality-check. My first impulse is to decry, in my conversation with myself, the stupidity, short-sightedness and ignorance I think I see. Sometimes that feels right. At other times, it makes me stop and think about my own perceptions and biases.
It satisfies me that I read … a lot ! and think … a lot ! and encountering trolls and flaming usually serves to remind me of why I think and read a lot, and how I can work at responding to my desire to be an effective, considerate and yes … judgmental person.
Flames shine light on my thinking and help to expose it’s warts … in my conversations with myself.
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