David Friggieri | Sunday, 12 July 2009

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Opinions are like arschlochs (with apologies to Brüno)

“On websites, hundreds of opinions hang as comments beneath each post or article, like ticks on the belly of a hedgehog. On news sites, commentators suck in objectivity and shit out subjectivity until the original truth, poisoned, dies. Memes, and in particular opinions, have become the dominant form of life.”
Julian Gough writing in Prospect, April 2009

The Times of Malta’s on-line comment facility is proving to be an interesting, if dubious, experiment in open democracy. Unsurprisingly, like the real thing, it has attracted its own detractors who have called it a triumph for “Maltese relativism”. Established media pundits appear to be both exasperated and morbidly entertained by “The People’s” assault on reason, periodically lampooning them in the modern world’s version of the stocks. The barbarians, in other words, are at the castle door, angrily brandishing their daily opinions alongside their more discrete vote every five years.
While we’re often tempted to identify more or less universal social phenomena and behaviour as ‘typically Maltese’, the limits of participative democracy, the democratization of knowledge and mass access to the media have been raising questions – and eyebrows – for some time now. In The Cult of the Amateur, Andrew Keen makes the controversial claim that sites like MySpace and YouTube encourage mediocrity, narcissism and conformism. He accuses the ‘ideologically superficial’ Web 2.0, which made these participative spaces possible, of threatening to undermine traditional culture. “Is Google Making Us Stoopid?” Nicholas Carr asked from the pages of The Atlantic.
Nonetheless, if we ignore the bigger picture for a while and focus on The Times’ comment boards and a handful of popular blogs, a few observations can, I think, be made.

1) The first thing that comes to mind as you scroll down the violet boxes is that we take ourselves far too seriously. People commenting often demonstrate indignation (occasionally verging on horror) about something or someone else’s point of view. The preferred default positions seem to be ‘attack’ and ‘defence’...in other words, very tense.

2) We don’t budge a centimetre from our original position. Have you ever witnessed a situation in which A enters the debate brandishing Strong Position X but leaves it having admitted that maybe – just maybe - the guy who challenged him may have had a point? Rarely, right?

3) Insults. The lasting impression is that people have their finger on the trigger most of the time and that things get personal very, very quickly. A virtual Wild West might look a little like this.

4) Opinions are sacred and everybody’s got one. The problem is that they are rarely backed up by anything other than a hunch, a feeling or a dislike. For obvious reasons a community of hunches makes for a strange sort of discussion.

5) Entertainment value. In small doses, on-line debates provide a certain degree of entertainment, possibly in a kind of Jerry Springer/Big Brother type of way. Inevitably, the end result is quite similar to reality TV: you’re left with a bitter taste in your mouth, feeling slightly nauseous and quite possibly asking yourself whether keeping abreast with what’s going on really justifies your coming back for more.

6) Interestingly, the best columnists appear to attract the fewest comments. Why do Mark-Anthony Falzon’s erudite articles seem to leave people cold? Don’t Ranier Fsadni’s nuanced pieces get people’s juices flowing? In the battle for audience share, stridency seems to beat sophistication hands down every time.

7) A serious lack of humour. This, more than any other, is perhaps the most Maltese factor of the lot. Those who comment like to state, exclaim, opine, put their arguments across, define, criticize, praise, cheer, give the thumbs up or the thumbs down, categorize, insult, diss and SHOUT!!! Humour, it seems, doesn’t come so easy.

I’d say that these factors are but some of the reasons which militate in favour of including a library in Renzo Piano’s City Gate project and I’m pleased to see that the master himself had factored it into his original plans. The idea seems to be gaining momentum. But more on that in two weeks’ time.

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