Don Marti in Do Not Feed the Troll: “The latest trend in the IT Media is trolling as business model. In the old days, trolling was a hobby. How many users of newsgroup or other forum could you draw into a pointless argument? But when a participant in an argument is either (1) visiting a comment form and seeing an ad, or (2) linking in to a blog post and giving you some Google Juice, then trolling becomes a business.”
That post is close to two years old. Meanwhile, shameless plays for traffic and obsessions with “popularity” of a mostly numeric form are more common than ever, given that more means serve the same ends, faster than ever.
Is anything other than vanity improved by that? I mean, besides checking accounts marginally enlarged by Adsense residues that remain where Google Juice has flowed? I mean, anything that matters: that adds substance to the world in some way.
Could it be that Twitter has become the gin cart of our time – not in all cases, but in enough to constitute a kind of methadone for TV addicts? Just a thought.
My point, however, isn’t about TV or Twitter, or SEO, or obsessive posting for its own sake. It’s about being constructive. Because I think life is a constant series of choices. Either we put our shoulder to a wheel, or we just take a ride. Either we build something, or we just occupy a space.
There are more ways than ever to be constructive in the world. Also more ways to loaf. The trick is to know when the latter is not the former.
[Later…] An example. I just learned that Chrysler has sold what’s left of its ass to Fiat. Wikipedia doesn’t mention that yet in its entry on Chrysler. I could go into Wikipedia and (perhaps) be the first to update it with this new info. Or I could make an intstructive post on my own blog, about how there are other Wikipedians, far more qualified (and obsessive) than I, ready to make those edits, and to do a much better job of it. Or, I could do neither. So, I posted. Was it worthwhile? Or should I have gone back to writing the book, or doing other Things That Matter? Not sure, actually.
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