Online platforms can be entertaining but are subject to the same standards that are applied to publication of letters in print, says Keith Gottschalk.
Cape Town - The Cape Argus published a witty piece written by a remarkably bright, and remarkably cosmopolitan, 16-year-old girl. This Grade 10 schoolgirl teased around with that old joke about someone who – instantly after arriving in South Africa or Cape Town – is asked by defensive locals what she thinks of the place.
Her answers played on her experiences of what her questioners really wanted to hear – and how this was usually predictable by their colour! Top marks to a star pupil of Cape Town’s French School: Mademoiselle Kine Dineo Mokwena-Kessi.
Her chatty piece generated a staggering, unprecedented 1 369 comments. Sadly, huge proportions of these were abusive, either to her – or between the commentators themselves – and included the inevitable racists.
This comes against a background of a drip of white racist assaults against blacks in Cape Town. The satirist Pieter-DirkUys was more precise than conventional political scientists when he analysed what had stopped, and what had not stopped, in 1994: “In 1994, white racism ceased to be politically correct.”
This recent increase in racist assaults and verbal abuse shows that white racists feel increasingly confident that there are no consequences for their words and actions.
Independent Online set up a panel of lawyers, journalists, and an IT professional for advice on what improvements are achievable with its online platforms.
The panel recommends that IOL should, like the Mail & Guardian, edit its online contributors before publication. They think that this would require two extra assistant editors, at a time when internet competition and declining newsprint sales force companies to retrench journalists to survive.
If this proves unaffordable, two of the panellists recommend that IOL should as a second-best solution end its online comment facilities.
But hey, there is no reason to reinvent the wheel. The Cape Argus and Cape Times and their sister newspapers have always edited letters to the editor, selecting the best half-dozen, and trimming them down to the space available.
These assistant editors have long developed implicit borders as to how aggressive polemics may become, and which level of personal abuse is a cut-off. They are the obvious staff to apply the same standards to e-mails sent to an online forum as e-mails sent to the editorial page.
One practical challenge is that letters to the editor follow a 24-hour cycle for selecting, rejecting, and editing, while e-mail forums may operate with as little as a 24-second delay. It is clearly not affordable to have editors online every minute for, say, 18 hours daily, to delete trash and cranks.
But an online forum does not have to be run for instant gratification. Many online e-mail forums already require once-off registration, and are edited just like a newspaper.
If, for example, IOL refreshed its online forums every hour or second hour, on the hour, their readers would swiftly adjust to that cycle.
And if the editors simply selected the best one or one-half dozen e-mails and SMSes an hour, readability and attractiveness would go ballistic.
My proposal ticks the boxes for doability.
For a piece to provoke 1 369 comments is a once-a-year phenomenon. More usual is that a piece generates zero responses, or less than a dozen. Many SMSes and e-mails are one-liners, or otherwise still much shorter than most print letters to the editor, and so take far shorter time to select or reject.
Online pieces do not have to be edited for length, so this saves still more editorial time. For an experienced editor to run her eye over 10 or 30 e-mails and delete all but the six or eight best reads would take less than half an hour out of each hour or two-hour cycle.
One upside would be that the bulk of comments – brainlessly banal and boring – would vanish. When wannabe contributors know they are competing to be selected, they will try harder to be bright. The lazy who recycle abuse, stereotyping, or urban legends, will drop out. And not a minute too soon.
Far more readers will be attracted to, and stay loyal, to those online forums moderated to be intelligent, witty, original, and well informed. This will also be commercially appealing to advertisers.
Another aspect where it is not necessary to invent the wheel is anonymity. Newspapers who do not permit pen names except in rare circumstances, cringingly allow even the most defamatory online abuse to be anonymous.
Facelessness encourages crank minds to spew verbal abuse – which they would feel embarrassed by if attaching their name was compulsory. IOL must apply the same standards to print and online forums. No name, no e-mail.
If personal circumstances mean you cannot appear in public with your name, then you must make your case to the editor as a deserving exception.
None of this need prevent online forums for being more funky and hip than print letters. No one proposes stopping their fad acronyms, slang, and zany grammar and punctuation.
I just propose that onliners should have to use their brain cells productively and positively.
I also propose that IOL invite Kine Dineo Mokwena-Kessi to write one provocative contribution every six or 12 months.
* Keith Gottschalk is a political scientist at the University of the Western Cape.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
Cape Argus