One day, when a doctoral thesis is written about the evolution of leftwing blogs in the UK 2000-2010, a special footnote will be reserved for the decision by Harry to mete out some revolutionary justice to annoying comment posters.
I can sympathise with Harry's dilemma. As one comment pointed out, the banned parties will wear their expulsion as a badge of honour. As another rejoindered, so what, as long as they do it somewhere else. Purging idiots from your blog is hardly limiting free speech given how many other internet outlets there are for every nano-division of fringe polemic on the political spectrum.
But the Harry's Place ruling is relevant to another dilemma that is sometimes discussed in the blogging pen at Observer towers. The question is not just 'how much do we tolerate venomous ranting and sheer trollishness?' but 'how much does the British blogosphere want to look like the US one?' Harry has, it seems, and I may be wrong here, steered his blog towards a more civil and consensual approach to debate.
There aren't all that many blogs in the UK, probably around 900,000, around a tenth as many as there are in the US. (Accurate numbers are hard to get.) So inevitably the anglophone internet has evolved a culture that is predominantly American. For those of us who admire much about American culture this is no bad thing. Libertarianism, unpretentiousness, heart-on-sleeve candidness, individualism are all part of the blogosphere DNA inherited from its US conception.
But there are also features of the US political landscape that have conditioned the way debate unfolds on blogs: the extraordinary divisions opened up by George Bush's election, the confrontational relationship between the media establishment and the conservative heartland, the White House's successful bullying of newspapers that has left a gap in the market for uncompromising anti-government comment, the mobilisation of post-9/11 national solidarity to paint political dissent as unpatriotic. These are factors that have informed the whole tone of political blogging, making it aggressive and dogmatically anti-media.
Some of those factors are reflected in the UK. The divisions over Iraq, for example. But not all of them. British culture meanwhile is traditionally hostile to zealotry, wary of dogma and inclined to prick earnest polemic with humour. Which means that the conversation between and on British blogs could evolve in different direction. One that is, for want of a better word, more polite.
Perhaps I am way off here. Perhaps I am inadvertantly calling for some sort of tame bourgeois blogosphere. If people prefer to read spiteful sparring over Iraq, George Bush, who loves America, who hates America, who hates Freedom, who hates human rights, or indeed, whether or not Oasis are rubbish (they are), I'm sure they'll let me know.
