I must crave my readers' indulgence as I reflect that this blog has now been running for just over a year. I have been prompted to muse about this by something which I was reading on the HE-UK list recently. A new forum for home educators has been started, called Other(wise) Inclined and the woman who started it mentioned the fact on the HE-UK list. Mike Fortune-Wood, owner of the list, rather sniffily expressed the view that nobody really needed another HE forum and he couldn't see why anybody would want to start one. Others agreed. This struck me as being a bit strange. Imagine if somebody commented here and said that they were starting a blog on home education and I told them that it wasn't necessary because there were already enough blogs on the subject! A little thought though, made things clearer.
I have noticed lately that very few people are posting on either the HE-UK or the EO list. I have observed the same thing about the Badman review Action Group. In fact, looking at a typical day recently, August 17th, I see that the HE-UK, EO and BRAG lists had a total of only twenty four posts. This blog, by contrast, had forty seven; in other words twice as many as the other three lists put together. The number of visitors who come here without posting is of course much greater than that. I must confess that I was a little surprised to discover that numbers of some HE sites have fallen so dramatically. I see that poor Mike Fortune-Wood has now been reduced to trying to drum up visitors for his website by pimping it on BRAG and other lists.
Why are so many people coming onto this blog? Well of course it might be that they are attracted by my facility for (hem, hem) turning out such brilliant prose. I am inclined to doubt this. The writing is competent, but not really worth reading for its own sake. Initially of course, many people came here to hurl abuse at me and denounce me as a traitor and quisling to the cause of home education. Those types seem to have left though. It certainly can't be my winning personality and engaging charm which draws people because, as is generally known, I am an exceptionally abrasive and unpleasant sort of fellow. Exchanging comments with me is about as agreeable as having root canal treatment! Perhaps I am asking the wrong question. Maybe its not that this is an especially wonderful blog, perhaps it's that the other places where home education is discussed have something about them which people don't like and they come here because it is different.
A couple of years ago, there were some very spirited debates taking place on the HE-UK and EO lists. I say 'spirited'; downright vicious would be more accurate. In fact I have never encountered anything like it in my life. New members would join, express an opinion and be immediately savaged. It really was quite exciting. Many of the people who hung out on those two lists seemed to be permanently angry. One or two of them are still around. Ruth O'Hare from Godalming, AKA firebird2110, for instance. Anybody remember the angry pixie from the Faraway tree? That's what she always reminded me of. Also a bit like some retired colonel in Tunbridge Wells, going purple in the face every five minutes over some imagined slight or other. Of course, these angry home educators provided a certain amount of innocent amusement, but the novelty swiftly wore off. Many parents would join the lists, watch what was happening and then leave. The atmosphere on those places really was poisonous, with people being bullied and driven off a lot. I have remarked before on the irony that some of the worst offenders seemed to be mothers who had taken their children out of school due to bullying.
Now I fancy things are a little different here. True, I piss people off with my smug arrogance, but then again some of the people who comment here piss me off, so honours are pretty well even on that score. What I do notice is that there do not seem to be any really unpleasant arguments; people give the impression of trying to find common ground. Also, there is a good deal of humour, which has always been lacking from some other blogs and Internet lists on home education. All in all, if one forgets about the odd mad chess playing father, I think that this is a rather good natured and easy going place to visit, compared as I say with some home education sites.
Well, that's it folks. I'm not much given to nostalgia, but nor did I feel able to leave such a significant anniversary unremarked. Normal service will be resumed tomorrow.
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Yes, you are ab.so.lute.ly right. Discussion is now, in most places, effectively banned.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Anonymous. Whereas here of course discussion is positively welcomed!
ReplyDeleteI started commenting on your blog only because you made some ill-informed remarks about children with special needs. I think that many other of your remarks are also ill-informed, so have felt obliged to continue to comment.
ReplyDeleteAs for 'my blog is bigger than his blog', of course if you had sampled posts on another day, you might have got a very different picture. I rest my case.
Dear me suzyg, you have rather sabotaged my thesis here. You mean that you log on wearily each morning only because you feel it your duty to comment? Hmmm, maybe that's why others are here as well. That's a sobering thought indeed!
ReplyDeleteSimon, that is why I used to come here, to make sure that the things you said which were wrong, were corrected.
ReplyDeleteHowever, it is refreshing to see interesting discussions going on so now I come back for those.
'It certainly can't be my winning personality and engaging charm which draws people because, as is generally known, I am an exceptionally abrasive and unpleasant sort of fellow.'
It's writing like that which makes me laugh too. And laughs are hard to get in most online HE places.
Also Julie is a friend and I like to see what she thinks about stuff :-)
Mrs Anon
Well..... whilst I don't always agree with Simon (or indeed other posters here) it is true that real subjects which pertain to education do get discussed on this blog. On many lists it is difficult to get a balance; some are purely factual (ie what exam board for maths? etc) and others are so "off the wall" (in my opinion) that I would never dare to join in the arguments!
ReplyDelete'Fraid so, Simon! Sorry to disappoint...
ReplyDeleteAre you a bit like a crusader then? A knight in shining armour, come to clean up the world of home education? How thrilling.
ReplyDeleteI too only come here to check and set the record straight from time to time, here being potentially more accessible to the general public than home education lists and groups. I bet most of your readers and commenters are of that ilk.
Happy anniversary.
Happy anniversary !
ReplyDeleteI really like the new forum, mainly cos the format suits me. (I have a real hate for email groups) and cos it's new I think there is less chance of me falling face first, unwarned, into an elephant trap constructed by past board wars.
Yours I come to because I am attracted to (NOT addicted to, not matter what the Sock Dropper says) debate. I think better, work out where I stand more easily and wean myself off sticking to initial snap judgments, in forum that focuses on challenge rather than support. I get challenged by not just your posts, but also the responses. It’s like a grown up jungle gym for the head. I get a good workout.
Pure support boards that are also rather impersonal thanks to the format leave me feeling both muzzled and bored. They remind me of the "expecting club/playgroup" I fist joined on village, nice at first, but I soon gravitated to "Current Debates" and made that my primary "home" for the stimulation of a brain that seemed to be on a fast track to "cauliflower" status.
Of course the above might be utter rubbish and I am in fact just the argumentative wotnot that some people (currently whinging for their lunch) accuse me of being.
Sorry for the delay in moderating the last batch of comments. I had to trek quite a way to pick up my daughter's AS results. She is currently in Cambridge for another summer school, one organised by the Sutton Trust. Anybody watching Channel 4 news at 7PM yesterday would have seen her giving her views about social mobility! She was speaking in her capacity as a deprived young person.
ReplyDelete"Are you a bit like a crusader then? A knight in shining armour, come to clean up the world of home education? How thrilling."
ReplyDeleteBack in the knife box with you, Ms Sharp!
"if you had sampled posts on another day, you might have got a very different picture. I rest my case."
ReplyDeleteI just counted the previous days posts. I suppose that if I had the time, I might start work n a statistical analysis, but life is very short.
" It’s like a grown up jungle gym for the head. I get a good workout."
ReplyDeleteThank you Sarah, I'm glad that you find it worthwhile visiting here.
" you made some ill-informed remarks about children with special needs."
ReplyDeleteThe remarks may have been foolish, misguided or mistaken; I doubt that they were ill-informed.
“Are you a bit like a crusader then? A knight in shining armour, come to clean up the world of home education? How thrilling.”
ReplyDeleteMore of a catalyst I think. He does do some cleaning up. I’d have happily stuck to my initial knee jerk reaction of “well how nuts is that ?” when first hearing about AHE/US/RUS if the discussion provoked by his posts hadn’t given me both food for thought and the motivation to go find out more. A convert I am not, but certainly it gave me the opportunity to get past black and white thinking, refined my understanding of the principles and the practice, find common ground and, ever the magpie, discover a rich seam from which I nick stuff that I can incorporate into both my version of HE and parenting.
He isn’t the destructive force some people perceive him to be. Those of us who read him, that are not AHEing, are not quite as stupid or easily led as some believe. If anything the contrast makes it easier to take a critical look at the substance of both the “anti” and the “pro” stance. IMO.
The “rah, rah, rah AHE is brill !! Boo, hiss to the “not non-coercive” parents who are all in one big, fat, nuance-free lump all together, cos they aren’t us !!!! ” support group context isn’t necessarily that persuasive for people who are looking at in from the outside with a “WTF?” mindset even before they peeped in and felt alienated from the get go.
The same goes for discussion relating to regulations. It was the contrast of the positions that gave me kick up the bum to think rather than just react.
@Sarah: 'More of a catalyst I think. He does do some cleaning up.'
ReplyDeleteYes, he has certainly been a catalyst, and there have been some very thought-provoking discussions. But I'm not sure that he should be congratulating himself for this! I'm another who comes here to set the record straight and to counteract his point of view on several important issues, AE versus adult-led education and Badman/regulation in particular. Finding stimulating discussion is a bonus. I usually find this when commenters are talking amongst themselves and ignoring Simon!
And I think he's wrong in his assessment of the "good-natured and easy-going" atmosphere of this blog in contrast to the lists. I have always found HE-UK to be full of wise, tolerant and kind people, with plenty of humour. The threat of Badman affected HEors badly and there were some over-reactions on the lists, which is understandable considering how threatened many people were feeling, but in less dangerous times the lists are full of the same kind of stuff, from the same people mostly, that you have found here. There has been much more nasty, vindictive stuff here, quite a lot of it coming from Simon himself.
Just to remind you Amum, of the sort of 'wise tolerant and kind people, with plenty of humour' that one finds on the HE-UK and EO lists, here is a fairly typical exchange from last summer. Maire Stafford, who was instrumental in driving off at least five people from the lists to my certain knowledge by her bullying, had called me a '/%&*^'. I responded good naturedly by saying:
ReplyDelete'Sorry Maire, I'm not sure what an /%&*^ is. Could you be a little more specific?'
Imagine my surprise when I received a private message from somebody using the name Maetuga. She said:
'I think she meant to say "authoritarian motherfucker son of a bitch asshole." Just a guess, though.'
I am thinking here Amum, that we have very different ideas of what is meant by the words 'wise, tolerant and kind'! I have many other examples of this sort of thing, including some vile emails sent by Maire Stafford to a mother whom she disagreed with on the HE-UK list.
"AE versus adult-led education "
ReplyDeleteNicely put.(although I am staking my claim for both autonomy and child-led as equally applicable in aspects of my ALHE, because I’m getting all territorial now ( ; )
I don’t doubt there is a reaction to not only recent political events, but a far longer term sense of feeling threatened and misrepresented by people who have taken only the merest glance at the concept of AHE/US/RUS and knee jerked so hard and so fast that it is amazing they don’t have a black eye.
Yes, there are some lovely people, saying interesting things on lists, forums, blogs and groups all over the net.
It’s just rather unfortunate that they can often be seen unintentionally misrepresenting "the others"…. whilst making a heartfelt plea for the misrepresentation of what they do to cease.
It’s equally unfortunate they don’t comprehend why anybody not of their ilk would feel rubbed up the wrong way at the exclusionary loaded terms they use in the middle of …… a protest about the lack of comprehension regarding how they feel on the wrong end of exclusionary loaded terms.
And I don’t see any solution because the language is so firmly woven into the fabric of the concept that it appears fixed. (Except sheeple. That’s just gratuitous. And eyeball roll inducing given the intense scattering of exhortations “to respect” in the same conversation. I think some people believe that modeling behavior is something you fake for kids cos the bar needs to be higher for them, rather than live it yourself for real)
I’m not even really sure that there is a critical mass who sees a two way solution to miscommunication as desirable or necessary.
Don't forget, Simon, that there might be many people on the lists you have mentioned who are wary about what they say solely because they know that you frequent them and what they say might end up in the public domain.
ReplyDeleteThere's more than one way to 'drive people from the lists'.
"there might be many people on the lists you have mentioned who are wary about what they say solely because they know that you frequent them and what they say might end up in the public domain."
ReplyDeleteI am aware that I am to some the bogey-man of home education, but I think that you are crediting me with too much influence. All the home education lists have local authority officers, civil servants, psychologists, journalists and many other types on them. I thought that this was generally knows? Some are there at the invitation of the list owners. I have mentioned before that Paula Rothermel, although not a home educator, has been on the HE-UK list at Mike Fortune-Wood's invitation for years. How on earth do you suppose that local authorities and the Department for Education keep in touch with what home edcucators are up to? Do you realy imagine that they are forced to depend upon the few scraps of information which I let fall here about what is going on on the Internet lists? Get real, suzyg. Focusing upon a few hate figures like me, Ed Balls or Graham Badman is no doubt a pleasant enough pastime for some, but the real world is a bit more complicated than that. One gets the impression sometimes that some home educators feel that problems in the world of home education are caused by a handful of annoying individuals and that if I could only be assassinated, along with a few others like Graham Badman, then things would settle down and return to the way they were in the 1990s. In fact, people like me reflect the zeitgeist rather than shape it. I am like one of those little figures in a weatherhouse that comes out when it starts raining. I indicate the weather; I do not make it!
I will no longer mention anything personal on the lists, and that is entirely because of you, Simon. I don't feel safe there any more, and I don't want my personal life broadcast across the internet. You can take all the credit for that, Simon.
ReplyDeletePull yourself together and get a life, Amum.
ReplyDelete" I don't feel safe there any more"
ReplyDeleteFeeling safe on the internet, as in life, is only an illusion. A secret is not a secret if shared with another person, let alone a whole list full of them.
I take the line of not putting anything out there that I would mind being public knowledge.
Little groups and online clubettes can be very seductive at creating a false sense of security, you never know who is in them unless they had to apply in person, with ID and having their references checked. And even then you are taking a risk cos trust is not a contract.
You made the right choice to censure in non-private space, because you are an adult who understands the consequences of being too free with one’s words.
Take responsibility for your (very sensible) choice to limit what you put out on the interwebs, or you render yourself powerless, like a little girl running scared of marauding "Simon Shaped Monsters under my Bed" instead of a grown woman who learned a valuable lesson. One she can pass on to her children when they too risk getting seduced into indiscretion via email or insecure groups online.
"running scared of marauding "Simon Shaped Monsters under my Bed"
ReplyDeleteI couldn't help chuckling out loud when I read this, Sarah. Like you, when I am typing stuff on the Internet I assume that it will soon be freely available to everybody! As it says in Luke's Gospel, 'What today you whisper in a locked room will tomorrow be shouted from the very rooftops'.
" Like you, when I am typing stuff on the Internet I assume that it will soon be freely available to everybody!"
ReplyDeleteI think that is MORE true of places that give the impression of being "private space". I've been slap bang in the middle of so many unanticipated board wars and the more "group based" the format the more vicious they can become, because it is so much more personal and there is often the undercurrent of playground–esque power struggles.
The worst I saw was a disagreement over a fairly unimportant debate which blew up out of control and a teacher was forced into resigning from her job and moving to another state because a noisy minority decided that lifting her posts about personal stuff and sending them to her school’s director and her students was fair play in their tenacious (and rather odd under the circs) belief that they held the moral high ground.
She thought she was in a "safe, friendly environment" when she wrote the posts, they were there for months before it all went bent and her whole family paid a disproportionate price for a minor indiscretion.
If it isn't something I can live with the world knowing I said, I tend not to write it. I’m responsible for my reaction to any provocation and I’m not keen on handing over my power by dancing to somebody else’s turn on the basis that I can blame them for what I said and the damage I caused to my reputation by saying it. Which is why I post under my real name, that acts as a brake, because free from the false illusion of anonymity I think I am less likely to slip up and blurt post.
Doesn't always work, I've had to stand by a few rants posted in anger, but the consequences are minor and I don't want to go back and delete because I'm not keen on trying to go back and repaint myself, as some kind of paragon who never loses her rag or gets all irrational about something, via some hasty editing.
I think the only people I don't censor myself with, to at least some extent, are my husband, my sister and her husband. Those three I trust.
Anybody else. Not so much. That started in kindergarten when my best mate told another friend my biggest secret (which I can’t remember) despite crossing her heart and hoping to die.
On the internet, where people (who would never sink that low in a RL setting) will indulge in "poison pen" and other nasties, because released from having to look somebody in the face they lower their moral code, not on your bleeding Nelly.
"If it isn't something I can live with the world knowing I said, I tend not to write it."
ReplyDeleteIsn't that the truth. Somehow chatting on the Internet seems a deal more ephemeral than writing a letter on paper, but whereas the letter can be burnt or lost, nothing ever vanishes once its on the net! I have had old posts of mine sent to the editor of a national newspaper and even, incredible as it may sound, submitted as evidence to a select committee! You are right, the more private that you think the group is, the more likely this is to happen. It's strange, but I had rather assumed that everybody understood this. Like you, if I say something idiotic on a list or reveal more than I should about my private life, then I blame myself, nobody else. It's very flattering when somebody tells me that I am solely responsible for this phenomenon, but I can't really take credit for it! It's just how things are.
"It's very flattering when somebody tells me that I am solely responsible for this phenomenon, but I can't really take credit for it! It's just how things are."
ReplyDeleteSo, because everyone knows 'bad things happen', it's OK for you to do 'the bad thing'? Because people know it happens, they must have 'been asking for it'?
You may not be solely responsible, but why do you choose to have any responsibility for it at all? It's a free world and you could have chosen not to repeat other peoples words in a much more public and google-able area of the internet than the one they originally posted them on, especially as it is against list rules (and no, just because other people do it, it doesn't make it 'right' for you to do it too, why not take the moral high ground for a change).
Whilst it is true that anything one puts out on the internet is essentially public (or at least one should consider it so) many people are unaware that this is the case.
ReplyDeleteIt would, however, be a happier place if people were less vicious with their re-postings and quotes. And posting something said in a private email - however irritating or insulting it may have been - is just bad nettiquette.....
Could we all just be a little more gentle with each other please? Especially with people who have obviously recently had a happy bubble burst like Amum? I think a few people were somewhat harsh with her.
And just for the record I think the main reason for the quiet on the lists is that people are exhausted from last year and wanting to spend extra time on their children this summer - compared to last where they were possibly too busy ...? At least my unscientific and unscruitable study of many of my home educating colleagues and friends has informed me of this.
"Somehow chatting on the Internet seems a deal more ephemeral than writing a letter on paper"
ReplyDeleteNo cooling off period when queuing for a stamp or stomping around looking for a postbox chuntering to yourself and gently simmering down.
On the phone you have the immediacy, but the personal contact, a voice, that helps you remember there is a real, live “hurtable” person on the end of your words, balances that out.
Net based communications allow you to de-humanize the person/people you are speaking to (especially if you’ve never even met most of them and they have non-names like “lop-eared783”) and speak your currently infuriated mind without enforced time to calm down first.
"You may not be solely responsible, but why do you choose to have any responsibility for it at all?"
ReplyDeleteIf I were a forgiving and good natured sort of chap, then I might not have been irritated when the list owner of HE-UK forwarded one of my posts to the online comments section of a national newspaper. I might also, had I been that sort of person, not been annoyed to see a campaign of lies and smears being orchestrated against me on that same Internet list. However, I am not a forgiving and good natured person at all. I have no intention at all of letting people screw me around and when this sort of thing happens I usually do react. Why not go onto HE-UK, anonymous and ask Mike Fortune-Wood about this, not me.
"Especially with people who have obviously recently had a happy bubble burst like Amum?"
ReplyDeleteI rather assumed that Amum was a grown woman and not a vulnerable child! In either case, perhaps it is good that she has learned not to be too trusting while using the Internet. Going online while encased in a 'happy bubble' sounds a little risky to me. Besides, when somebody tells me that I am single handedly responsible for her disillusionment, I do feel apt to be a little snappish. This is a public site and everything which we post here can be read by everybody with access to the Internet. I don't think it does any harm to remind people of that sometimes. Anyway, for all anybody knows to the contrary, I might myself have had a happy bubble burst recently!
"Could we all just be a little more gentle with each other please? Especially with people who have obviously recently had a happy bubble burst like Amum? I think a few people were somewhat harsh with her."
ReplyDeleteI'll hold my hand up and apologies for being unnecessarily snippy.
I get frustrated when a happy bubble gets burst and this isn't immediately recognized as a good thing. Which is a bit rich of me cos I learned by experience too and it took several burst happy bubbles before I got the picture.
Amum, I'm sorry I was bitchy, I could have made my point without being snotty about it.
I'm also sorry I had to called on it, rather than listen to the twinge after I posted and apologise off my own bat straight after without having to be prodded.
"If I were a forgiving and good natured sort of chap, then I might not have been irritated when the list owner of HE-UK forwarded one of my posts to the online comments section of a national newspaper."
ReplyDeleteSo you got your own back on Mike by posting some random person's words here who just happened to write to a list Mike runs? How can this be considered fair even on an eye-for-an-eye basis? Shouldn't you have limited yourself to hitting back at those who had hit out at your rather than unsuspecting others? It's a bit like the bully who picks on another child because they are picked on by their father.
"So you got your own back on Mike by posting some random person's words here who just happened to write to a list Mike runs? "
ReplyDeleteNo not at all. This is really old stuff and I am not sure why you are so anxious to dredge it all up. Four people went out of their way to take posts of mine from the HE-UK list and circulate them. They did this in combination with a campaign of lies about me, such as that I was a colleague of Graham Badman, that I had infiltrated the HE-UK list under false pretences and so on. These women were Julie Garrett, Ruth O'hare, Maire Stafford and Ali Edgley. Since that time I have not been over-scrupulous about mentioning their names here and also quoting them. I am not entirely sure what your motive is for going into all this again. Personally, I thought this was all over and done with.
"No not at all. This is really old stuff and I am not sure why you are so anxious to dredge it all up. Four people went out of their way to take posts of mine from the HE-UK list and circulate them."
ReplyDeleteBut you have posted email texts from people other than these 4. That was my point.
"I am not entirely sure what your motive is for going into all this again. Personally, I thought this was all over and done with."
You mentioned the recent quietness of some of the lists and someone suggested that your presence there may have something to do with it, this flowed into why that might be. Wasn't your post the last one to appear on the 'Home Education Outcomes and Histories' list? Maybe they have a point.
I feel rather inclined just to let this topic die. if you really believe that it is my supposed presence on the lists that is preventing people from posting, then you are entitled to your opinion. I think you overestimate my importance.
ReplyDelete"You mentioned the recent quietness of some of the lists and someone suggested that your presence there may have something to do with it"
ReplyDeleteYou don't think that perhaps the biggest known killer of any online community, the long drawn out flame fest, which escalates and draws more and more people in, ever more polarized, ever more trapped in black and white thinking, with an vision of White Knight v Black Knights, with the line in the sand for what goes in terms of "foul on play" being perceived ever more as a one way moral code...might be a more likely explanation for the current situation rather than a lone poster ?
It’s very tempting and comfortable to pick a single scapegoat for all the ills, but one person can’t have a fight all by themselves, they need an adversary (or fifty) to join in, or they sit arguing all by themselves. Looking a bit odd.
The biggest killer of a community is where the “pacifist” majority see the people they AGREE WITH in the initial bust up, baring their teeth and ripping into the adversary en masse.
It can make them scared that they at some point in the future could be on the wrong end of that tactic.
It can make them feel like they don’t really know these “warrior” people at all cos they didn’t see that streak in previous conversations.
It can make them doubt that the principles they believed these people held are of the firm, rather than the fair weather, variety.
So they revert to lurking instead of posting, cos it feels safer. And they are right on the money, cos typically once the “en masse aggression” genie is out of the bottle it doesn’t usually go back in.
If the original adversary ceases to be an issue (or is temporarily unavailable) a substitute does tend to be sought out, and then another, and then another.
The problem with these blow ups is that the ensuing drawn out dog fight is addictive and it is hard to let go of the excitement of the hunt and just go back to chatting nicely, cos in comparison it feels a too pedestrian and mundane.
On some level a huge chunk of the non-combative members know that, and a self protecting withdrawal beings.
I know to the people involved this feels unique, but to be honest from the outside, it is a textbook example of community wither by extended “board war”.
Very shrewd observations, Sarah.
ReplyDeleteNot that shrewd, I’d love to take credit, but it's a pretty well understood phenomenon.
ReplyDeleteIt's that common that you can assume than most sizable communities will get infected at some point or the other and when it is left unchecked loads succumb to a fatal dose of it.
The massive commercial sites tend to fare better cos they have a constant flow of new blood and tend to head things off at the pass by indentifying the protagonists and slapping them around the head with TOS to avoid others getting sucked in to the point where it explodes. They are protecting their ad revenue stream and don’t give a bugger what people are fighting about, so they tend to wallop it out of the community with a heavy, but even, hand.
That's why they often try to limit people to PMs rather than email, so they can be on the look out for the typical off board "wind each other up into rightous indignation and stratagise as a tag team, pass it on, go convince lop-sear987 to say she agrees when I say X and you back me up, take care with floppymummy56, cos I think she is a MOLE !!!" communications that are a headsup that something nasty is bubbling.
The prognosis is not so great where the board owners are positioned on one side of the "battle" or the other, cos they don't have the necessary emotional detachment from the fight to protect the community as a whole from a wider infection that starts to become as much a part of the group's identity as the original theme itself. Those groups tend to just die off as the non-combative members who have found the whole thing uncomfortable to watch, not nice to be immersed in, or tense to the point of censoring themselves in case they set something off again(or bring a rain of similar verbal kick boxing down on their own heads)….bugger off and start their own communities for a fresh start.
Of the fresh starters, those that understood that the dynamic is the key issue keep an eye out, stomp hard at the merest hint of revival and have good chance of doing a phoenix from the flames. Those that think the issue was the specific people involved, rather than the dynamic itself, are often left wide open to a repeat performance and the same fate.
"You don't think that perhaps the biggest known killer of any online community, the long drawn out flame fest, which escalates and draws more and more people in, ever more polarized, ever more trapped in black and white thinking, with an vision of White Knight v Black Knights, with the line in the sand for what goes in terms of "foul on play" being perceived ever more as a one way moral code...might be a more likely explanation for the current situation rather than a lone poster?"
ReplyDeleteYes, I recognise your description of flame wars and the results, I've seen it a few times over the years. I've no idea how influential Simon has been with regards list activity. It wasn't my suggestion in the first place (I think suzyg first mentioned the possibility and Amum said that this is why she doesn't post much now). I did query his theory that it's OK to post strangers email messages, previously posted on an ungoogleable email list, on his googleable blog because someone else (not the same person) had done the same to him previously.
I mentioned that Simon's post was the last one to appear on the 'Home Education Outcomes and Histories' list and suggested that this *may* be connected with people not wanting to post personal information if Simon has access to it. It's also possible that nobody else wanted to post. There were no flame wars to blame for the end of posting there though.
I'm not a regular reader of the lists Simon was/is a member of and was not reading when he was contributing so I've no way of knowing how influential his contributions were, I just have the comments here to go on. I regularly read a list that Simon has not belonged to on which activity has continued as normal despite energetic debates last year. However, there is no reason to assume that Simon or the lack of Simon causes these outcomes. All we have to go on really is individual claims that this is why they don't post.
" I did query his theory that it's OK to post strangers email messages, previously posted on an ungoogleable email list, on his googleable blog because someone else (not the same person) had done the same to him previously."
ReplyDeleteAs I have remarked before, it got to the point when everybody on the HE-UK list was circulating posts of mine and it seemed to me that so many people were doing it that the posts to that particular list were no longer regarded as being private. This is the only list that I have ever reposted from. When Wendy Crickard was seeing Linda Waltho MP last year, she asked for people to dig up old posts of mine from the HE-UK list. Many people were helping, including Janet Ford, and there did not seem to be any concern at all about privacy. I rather assumed after that that nobody was bothered about privacy on that list. I have not done this with any other lists because I assume that messages there are meant to be private. I belong openly to many HE lists and do not seem to have driven anybody off! Obviously if everybody on a list, including the owner, is circulating messages posted there in the public domain, then one must assume that there is no question of anybody being bothered about privacy.
" I did query his theory that it's OK to post strangers email messages, previously posted on an ungoogleable email list, on his googleable blog because someone else (not the same person) had done the same to him previously."
ReplyDeleteI'd guess that the bulk of the protagonists, when unheated, know that they have stepped over lines they would normally consider sacrosanct.
But with their collective danders up and stepping over lines having been established as “game on” for all, they are too involved in the heat to really reflect upon it.
Going to a be a while before anybody involved has the space and inner peace to do much reflecting.
I'd also guess that had a good number of “not involved” people from the community continuously and OVERTLY even handedly called on ALL parties to cease and desist with the stepping over of lines from the onset then it would have been more effective. But who can blame them for ducking for cover ?
As is, I think the continuation of stepping over lines or refusal to apologise for doing so, is as much a protest against one sided moralizing as it is about the original bust up.
Not to forget that when somebody posts as "anonymous", for him I think it is going to have the effect of looking like another attempt by "the other side" to strategize him into silence (and letting them claim victory) rather than a genuine plea from somebody who doesn't have a dog in the hunt.
"As I have remarked before, it got to the point when everybody on the HE-UK list was circulating posts of mine and it seemed to me that so many people were doing it that the posts to that particular list were no longer regarded as being private."
ReplyDeleteEveryone? Now that's an exageration if ever I've heard one. What about the lady you quote in your post of the 20th July, 'A sad but not unusual story'? Had she circulated posts of yours elsewhere? If not, what did she do to deserve her post being quoted? Of course the internet is not private, but it is good manners to observe Netiquette. Maybe you should change your description to 'irritable, ill mannered, middle aged man'.
"Maybe you should change your description to 'irritable, ill mannered, middle aged man'."
ReplyDeleteSorry for going on so. I'm feeling a bit irritable and old today - I blame the heat...