{"id":4246,"date":"2010-04-13T11:38:19","date_gmt":"2010-04-13T10:38:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uk.cision.com\/?p=582"},"modified":"2010-04-13T11:38:19","modified_gmt":"2010-04-13T11:38:19","slug":"return-of-the-civil-discourse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/blog\/return-of-the-civil-discourse\/","title":{"rendered":"Return of the civil discourse"},"content":{"rendered":"
“Who are you all? Why don’t you stop hiding behind your pseudonyms and tell us about yourselves?”<\/div>\n

These questions<\/a> were asked by Polly Toynbee, by some reckonings<\/a> the most influential political commentator in the UK media, back in 2006, in the early days of the Guardian’s pioneering Comment is Free<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But there are increasing signs that Polly’s “vain hope” for “civil discourse” might not be as vain as once thought. As the New York Times reports<\/a> (H\/T journalism.co.uk<\/a>), both\u00a0the Huffington Post<\/a> and the Wall Street Journal<\/a> plan to revise their comment systems, doubtless raising questions at other mainstream news organisations where the freedom to comment anonymously has been as much sacred cow as it is well-established policy.<\/div>\n

According to the HuffPo’s\u00a0Arianna Huffington:\u00a0“As the rules of the road are changing and the Internet is growing up, the trend is away from anonymity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not everywhere, however. Unvarnished<\/a>, discussed by my colleague Andrea Weinfurt on the Cision US blog last week<\/a>, is\u00a0a site whose sole purpose is to provide a forum for anonymous business reviews – of \u00a0colleagues and bosses, of clients and companies, of anyone or anything. As Andrea concluded:<\/div>\n
\n

Unvarnished implies coarseness and more often than not, negativity. As a public relations professional, it\u2019s hard to control reputation when a site like Unvarnished provides a resource for people who have an axe to grind.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Unvarnished is regulated in so much as on-site activity is tied to Facebook profiles, but given much of the all-too-human behaviour that finds expression on social networks<\/a> this seems a less-than-convincing safeguard. The mainstream media might be moving toward cleansing their online presence of undesirables, but the Internet growing up?<\/p>\n

There, truly, is a vain hope.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Who are you all? Why don’t you stop hiding behind your pseudonyms and tell us about yourselves?” These questions were asked by Polly Toynbee, by some reckonings the most influential political commentator in the UK …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":289,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[184],"tags":[2881,2931,3529,7292,611,2205],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4246"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/289"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4246"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4246\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}