Sydney Morning Herald urban affairs columinst Elizabeth Farrelly recently fell foul of one the big fish that inhabits the shallow, stagnant intellectual pond that passes for Australia’s right wing intelligentsia.
As a result, Elizabeth found her personal blog infested with insulting comments from the Big Fish’s Internet followers.
What focused their ire was Elizabeth complaining about a delivery truck parked across a bike lane. A bit like this genius.
The funny thing with the righteous defence of the poor truck driver’s rights to privacy and blocking cycleways is where it the driveways to the gated communities for self-righteous and entitled self retirees that these commenters inhabit were blocked in a same way many of them would be reaching for the blood pressure pills.
One of the great things about the Internet is that it allows all of us to have our say without going through the gatekeepers of the newspaper letters editor or talkback radio producer.
The down side with this is that it gives everyone a voice, including the selfish and stupid – the useful idiots so adored by history’s demagogues.
Luckily today’s Australian demagogues aren’t too scary and the armies of useful idiots they can summon are more likely to rattle their zimmer frames than throwing Molotov cocktails or burning the shops of religious minorities.
Most of these people posting anonymous, spiteful and nasty comments are really just cowards. In previous times their ranting and bullying would be confined to their family or the local pub but today they have a global stage to spout their spite.
These people are the irritating mosquitoes of the web and they are the cost of having a free and vibrant online society.
It’s difficult to have a system where only nice people with reasonable views that we agree with can post online. All we can do is ignore the noisy idiot element as the irritations they are.
This is a problem too for businesses as these ratbags can post silly and offensive comments not just on your website but also on Facebook pages, web forums and other online channels.
Recently we’ve had a lot of talk about Internet trolls, notable in the discussion is how the mainstream media has missed the point of trolling – it’s about getting a reaction from the target. In that respect The Big Fish and his army of eager web monkeys have succeeded.
The good thing for Elizabeth is her page views will have gone through the roof. That’s the good side of having the web’s lunatic fringe descend upon your site.