A recent blog regarding Judi Dench’s rather impassioned response to a negative review from Charles Spencer got me thinking about retaliation to bad press, or indeed retaliation to anything in written form and especially within the new found forum of internet blogging.
Any form of aggression on paper (or screen) seems to eventually belittle both sides (in this case Dench’s discomfort is obvious but Spencer also comes out in a bad light for revealing this letter). At the time of the initial burst of fury things can come out of one’s mouth in a diatribe of reasonable or not so reasonable abuse, whether it be in defense or attack. But the transiency of language means that all this hot air melts away, only to remain in peoples’ rather changeable memories. But when these angry phrases (Dench was supposed to have written that Spencer was ‘a shit’) are forever encased in ink, they suddenly become an embarrassing cloud that will hang around for a lot longer after.
Words written in the heat of the moment seems to be something that bloggers should recognise. Aiming to make the process of arts journalism a less formalised and more immediate act, bloggers write opinion pieces in short bite size chunks – hoping that deeper discussion of their point will be taken up by readers in the comment boxes below. The desired result is a documented discussion forum where ideas are presented and chewed over with the immediacy of speech and in some threads this is the case. But what seems to happen more often is that commenters use these moments to write aggressive attack or defense pieces on the original blog and so a gladiatorial lion pit emerges – you better be prepared to defend yourself or get out of the ring (for a particularly virulent example of this, see the scorn heaped on the poor well meaning Adopt A Playwright scheme).
Theatre Workbook 