A fair warning to bloggers for civility; apathy a problem, too

In the coming weeks, county voters will have a chance to address some of those problems. Voters will get a chance to change the county government to a county manager system from its current strong-chairman system. And Winder residents will get a chance to overhaul city leadership at the ballot box.

And yet, for all of these important issues hanging in the balance, too many Barrow Countians are focused on petty and personal issues, or they’re totally disengaged from what’s happening around them.

That disconnect became very clear in the last few weeks as comments by bloggers to our barrowjournal.com newspaper website have taken an even uglier tone than usual.

Last weekend, I posted a note to our bloggers on the website calling for more civility in their comments and for bloggers to stay on topic with the story rather than wandering off into unrelated issues. We get thousands of visitors a week to the barrowjournal.com website and what bloggers portray there is often the worst side of Barrow County.

Alas, it didn’t take long for the blogging comments to my request for civility took on some ugly comments and wandered off topic.

So much for my appeal to the angels of man’s better nature.

Certainly, we have some ugly comments on the websites of the other newspapers we publish in the area. But nothing compares to the vile, inane and insipid commenting that has become routine in Barrow County.

I’m all for open discussion and debating. I’m always suspicious of government agencies where there is never any dissension or serious debate. I embrace the concept that from the arena of debate comes the best decisions. Pretending there are no problems and holding hands while singing together doesn’t reflect the real world.

Unlike many of my colleagues, I don’t really have a problem with people posting comments behind a veil of anonymity. While I don’t give much credibility to those who don’t have the courage to use their real names in comments, I do have a respect for some of the ideas they express. If you recall American history, it was a group of men dressed as Indians who anonymously threw tea in the Boston Harbor as a protest to British rule.

But as one colleague also reminded me in this debate, it was also men dressed anonymously in white hoods and robes who terrorized and murdered Jews and blacks in this nation at one time.

So the veil of anonymity can be used for good and bad. Today in Barrow County, that veil is often being used in ways that remind me more of the KKK than of our Founding Fathers.

And frankly, I’m tired of it. We provide an open forum for people to debate important community concerns and that forum is increasingly being hijacked by screwballs and small minds whose comments foam at the mouth. These people are engaged to the point of obsession.

So we’re going to aggressively delete ugly comments until the blogging community begins to police itself. If you want to make vile and personal attacks on others, then start your own blog site and have at it. But you won’t have an open stage with the Barrow Journal from which to spew your garbage. We’ve been liberal in allowing comments, hoping that the more vile bloggers would get bored and move on.

They didn’t and the delete button is my new friend.

But perhaps just as bad as those nutty bloggers are those in the community who just don’t care, people who are mostly disengaged.

For all the intense coverage of events in Barrow County, there is a large degree of apathy in some areas. Many citizens appear to just tune out any kind of public discussion.

Perhaps that’s due in part to the nature of the community where so many people live, but commute to work elsewhere. They have a bed in Barrow, but their focus and time is spent in other places.

This disengagement appears to be especially true with newer residents to the county. The divide between these “newcomers” and Barrow’s “old-timers” is wide. The integration of Barrow’s new residents into the political, social and cultural fabric of the county has been slow. One’s pedigree of nativity and family connections continues to play a large role in the political and social structures of the community.

Whatever the reasons, there is a deep disconnect between some Barrow residents and the larger community they live in. That’s a very unhealthy situation. No new leadership will grow unless it is cultivated and today, those fields appear to be fallow.

So to all the bloggers a fair warning: Keep it clean and on topic, or you will be deleted.

And to all of those who are disengaged with the community, we need your voices to be heard, too.

Mike Buffington is co-publisher of the Barrow Journal. He can be reached at mike@mainstreetnews.com.