Violent Acres has become something of a community watering hole lately. Not in the sense that V lets us post comments directly to her blog. Instead, readers have resorted to using Digg as a comment system, creating Violent Acres Talk as a comment-enabled mirror, and trackbacking to their own blogs.
Sure, some other blogs generate this response. Violent Acres isn’t a unique, totally isolated phenomenon. It’s a nice little island, but it’s not the only island.
The interesting feature of the community formed around V is that the members primarily remain anonymous. Over the years we’ve heard that using pseudonyms is taboo, childish. In this instance, the average voice is anonymous.
A real consequence of this is that debates center around ideas and opinions prominently. Personal attacks take a backseat to ripping apart someone’s position.
It’s not prettified and cleansed for safe viewing. These are the raw issues that huge portions of the people won’t even think about. V brings up a topic and the community tears into it. No definitive result comes out of it. But—for every open-minded participant, they come away better informed and exposed.
If the media vanguard won’t do it, the bloggers will. About damn time.
Posted in Free Speech, Language, Lifehacking, Meme, Philosophy, Politics, Psychotic, Social Networking, Violent Acres, Writing
