In Mena Trott’s apologetic follow-up to her implosion at Les Blogs (video here) she poses a question to the blogosphere:
Is it possible to have the sort of productive face-to-face connection or conversation that Ben M. and I had offline in an online world? And what can we, as bloggers, do to facilitate that?
Here’s my take, Mena:
Yes, it is possible to have deep, exciting, terrifying, enlightening, and (most of all) productive conversations online. I’ve had many.
How do bloggers facilitate this? I’m sure not we all can: to facilitate the spread of productive conversation, bloggers must lead by example. This, in my mind, requires four things:
- Being able to respecfully, productively communicate in person
- Believing that we can conduct a similarly productive repore on the intraweb
- Taking care and caution to stip the non-productive bits from your online communication (this post was a great excersize of item #3), and lastly
- Taking even greater care when reponding to criticism, or to ideas or opinions you disagree with.
I, for a start, pledge to behave reasonably and productively in all off- and on-line discussion regarding this issue. I believe that I can. I believe we all can.
Thoughts, anyone?