Microsoft geek blogger Robert Scoble looks like completing a week without posting to his lively and popular blog, Scobleizer. In his last post, he wrote:
This business just sucks sometimes and people forget you're human. They think they have the right to attack you personally just cause of what you write.
These people would never say this kind of stuff face-to-face but because it's on the Internet folks feel like they are allowed to be rude in ways they'd never think of being face-to-face.
One thing I notice is that most of the rudest are anonymous. I also discovered something else. The rudest ones are goons working on behalf of people or movements or, gasp, even other companies, and that they are trying to disrupt things by just being rude.
Sad to say, the Internet is no longer the preserve of a small number of mostly intelligent university-based life forms that it was more than a decade ago, and the civilization it once possessed has long since gone. The blogosphere also is no longer the preserve of a small number of mostly intelligent people that it was three or four years ago. The rabble has arrived; it isn't going to go away.
And the pseudo-religious nutters are always going to mount personal attacks because their made-up "facts" can't be sustained by rational argument.
The real problem is knowing how to respond, because it's clearly futile arguing with bigots who are not the least bit interested in truth. But the solution is not to remain silent. As a friend remarked in another context recently: "The point is that if you ignore what the idiots are saying, they end up being the only people talking."
Whether or not you agree with his views, the blogosphere is a less interesting and less intelligent place with a silent Scoble.
