I couldn’t have said it better myself……

I think there is an audience for that truth claim. I think “our culture” helps define the audience. The perceived cultural threat seems to be against “civil disobedience” as a speech act. However, the point of disobeying is confrontation and escalation. In effect, the pepper spraying was a first order perlocutionary effect sought by the actors of disobedience for the consumption of the audience and the sought after second order effect.

I find it useful to compare the “Don’t tase me, bro! meme with what we know about events surrounding the pepper spray cop meme.

I’m glad you linked to the previous post, the tiered system is a better solution.

I do think the tiered system is an idea worth trying, being more obviously an attempt to balance quality with inclusiveness. A group of newspapers could get together to do something like sbnation does, with a single (pseudonymous) log-in for commenting along with tiers of added responsibility for regular users that have shown they are adding value to particular sites within the network. It’s labor-intensive, which is fine for a sports site where people are happy to be volunteer groundskeepers, as it were, and would probably be fine for a newspaper that were already a community website. I should check back on patch and see how they are handling it.

I wonder (by the way and off-topic) if you have looked into how newspapers and other news organizations are networking, by the way, as that seems to be one of the opportunities of the web. Something more clever than just linking to somebody else’s movie reviews, I mean. Linking from a local news story to other localities’ stories, particularly connected to big corporations or other institutions that have both a Big National and Many Local stories. Maybe this is old stuff, just not well done in my town, which wouldn’t be a surprise.

Thanks,
-V.