The Spleen-osphere

This is my first foray into the world of blogging and I feel like a lamb chop in a lions’ den.

Cyberspace is chock full of sociopaths. People whose mouths foam like an overpoured bubble bath and live in a state of almost spiritual rage. Reading newspaper blogs, I get a strong visual image of the reluctant hack committing opinions to the blogsphere with all the enthusiasm of a Great War tommy clambering out of a trench. Sure enough, moments later, the vitriol arrives. Anonymous, web lunatics with names like ‘Buffalo Bill’ and ‘Stalker66′ funnel months-worth of life's frustrations into a few lines of Homeric rage.

During a travel journalism class at the LSJ a month or so ago, I asked our tutor about blogging and mentioned Max Gogarty. Max, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, was 19 and preparing for a Gap year trip to India. The travel editor of Guardian Unlimited in his finite wisdom asked Max to post blogs during his trip…he agreed, submitting his first on the eve of his departure. It was full of the kind of enthusiasm and navel-gazing you'd expect from a 19-year old. BIG mistake.

A day later the blog became a chasm: you needed to scroll for 5 minutes to reach the bottom of the bile. Most was aimed at Max, some at the travel editor and plenty at his Dad who had written for the Guardian and was accused of nepotism most foul. A sample post: “I get up every morning at 6am, haul myself onto the tube to travel to my godforsaken job, where I sit for 9 hours before heading home for gruel and bed, only to repeat it all the next day. Can I have a blog too?” — that was one of the more supportive posts.

I hadn't realised my tutor was Paul Gogarty, Max’s dad. He didn’t mind talking about it but looked harrowed. He’d had nothing to do with Max’s commission but said he had plenty to do to get his son to come back again. He also posted a piece on the site a day or two later, begging posters to go easy on his son and pointing out that he'd had nothing to do with Max's commission.

…of course, that’s the extreme end of the blog spectrum and lots of comment is not at all pathological. But, to paraphrase the old aphorism, it ain’t hard to tell between an anonymous poster with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.