Max 19 goes on holiday and tells you about it in the Guardian

T

tom pr

Well-known member
UFO over easy said:
I swear every day I get more and more irritated by the sad, incredibly boring people whose only character trait is priding themselves on how 'bitter and twisted' they are.. it's just lazy really, and the frustrating thing is you can't say anything to them or even begin to get say anything against them, or they'll just start dancing around chanting about how they got the better of you, and how awfully funny it is that you fell for it
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100%

And someone already linked his facebook profile on the guardian's site- he doesn't seem that bad.
 
hucks

hucks

Your Message Here
UFO over easy said:
I feel really sorry for the guy.. I'd probably remember something like that for a long long time.

I swear every day I get more and more irritated by the sad, incredibly boring people whose only character trait is priding themselves on how 'bitter and twisted' they are.. it's just lazy really, and the frustrating thing is you can't say anything to them or even begin to get say anything against them, or they'll just start dancing around chanting about how they got the better of you, and how awfully funny it is that you fell for it
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As Tom PR said, 100pc

But what happened to the guardian? Why is it a mecca for the disillusioned, the bitter and the broken?

A genuine question: how come the blogs, as they call them, are full up with right wing comments (check out the one supporting Hillary Clinton from a - GASP- feminist perspective today)? Have these cunts got nowhere better to go?
 
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M

mms

sometimes
i dunno the internet just seems to be a place where alot of cowardly misanthropists get to express their views, just one look at comments on youtube and literally anything featuring someone black will have a racist comment etc, people are both horrible and totally stupid. It really is grim and it's enough to make you want to stop using the internet sometimes.
 
N

noel emits

a wonderful wooden reason
I always imagine a load of little Beavis & Butthead type characters populate places like youtube comments. I think they are mostly 14 year old kids, I hope so anyway.
 
M

mms

sometimes
youtube is so vast it's impossible to manage
there are a shitload of far right videos up there and skrewdriver crap.
 
Grievous Angel

Grievous Angel

Beast of Burden
hucks said:
But what happened to the guardian? Why is it a mecca for the disillusioned, the bitter and the broken?
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You can say the same about dissensus on a bad day :).

There's lots of disillusionment etc in left politics. Partly this is a reaction to interminable defeat since Thatcher. Partly this is because a lot of people in left politics just aren't very nice.
 
M

mms

sometimes
Grievous Angel said:
You can say the same about dissensus on a bad day :).

There's lots of disillusionment etc in left politics. Partly this is a reaction to interminable defeat since Thatcher. Partly this is because a lot of people in left politics just aren't very nice.
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that's true about anything but i'm beginning to thing personally that the internet is a particularly savage place. People say things to complete strangers which are incredibly nasty, it's really gone from a place of possible utopia to a concept where everything is free, with no responsibility, there is no real feeling that you should behave respectfully and responsibly because potentially no one knows who you are and people are just there to be scorned.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
mms said:
that's true about anything but i'm beginning to thing personally that the internet is a particularly savage place. People say things to complete strangers which are incredibly nasty, it's really gone from a place of possible utopia to a concept where everything is free, with no responsibility, there is no real feeling that you should behave respectfully and responsibly because potentially no one knows who you are and people are just there to be scorned.
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It's like a playground with no teachers or assistants, you mean!
 
C

crackerjack

Well-known member
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/feb/17/internet

When Max Gogarty, a 19-year-old gap-year student, landed a coveted blogging spot on which to chronicle his two-month backpacking adventure around India and Thailand, he could have never predicted how his moment of triumph would backfire so spectacularly.

But within 24 hours of his first posting on the guardian.co.uk travel pages, the teenager was swamped by a tidal wave of internet hate mail as he became a victim of the phenomenon of 'going viral'. As the north London teenager was touching down in Mumbai, hundreds of comments - many vitriolic - were appearing not only on his blog, but on scores of message boards and social networking forums, including Facebook and high-profile gossip sites such as Holy Moly.

The astonishing reaction was provoked when surfers spotted that he had the same surname as Paul Gogarty, a travel writer who occasionally contributes to the Guardian. Readers presumed he was a privileged public school boy whose father had secured him the blog spot and whose gap-year travels were being funded by the newspaper.

The resulting 'cyber-bullying' has now forced Max, an occasional scriptwriter for the E4 teenage drama series Skins, to ditch his weekly blog while he and his family cope with the consequences of global internet exposure.

Max, who introduced himself as living 'on top of a hill in north London...spending any sort of money I earn on food and skinny jeans', was last night alone in India at the beginning of his trip, while his father accused his detractors of class hatred and envy. 'It's the conformity of the comments, the cruelty, the smug self-righteousness and envy. It's all so bitter and full of bile. The exposure is terrifying,' said Gogarty Snr. 'He's out in India on his own. We were all feeling upset at him going away anyway. But this...this tsunami of hate. We just cannot believe it. Max is a talented and hard-working boy. He is what he is - a middle-class kid who goes to a comprehensive and managed to get four As and is supporting himself by working in a cafe.'

He said his son was invited on to a young writers' group at London's Royal Court Theatre, and from there he began writing for Skins before being offered the travel blog. 'There is no nepotism. I hardly ever write for the Guardian,' said Gogarty. 'He is not an attention seeker. He is just bright and 19 and middle-class - and that's a crime in Britain.'

Max's debut blog on Thursday, an innocuous, possibly gauche, account of his preparations for his trip, attracted so many comments that other websites soon seized on the debate. He now appears on Wikipedia under the section on 'nepotism', alongside Kim Jong-il of North Korea and George W Bush.

Eventually Gogarty felt compelled to weigh in himself, posting: 'Max won't be writing any more blogs, I thought I'd bring all those heroic internet warriors the good news. Max's trip (which he paid for himself I'm afraid - sorry) has got off to the worst possible start and he's feeling pretty grim You may like or dislike the blog, but the cruelty is shocking, if quintessentially British.'

The blog attracted almost 500 comments on guardian.co.uk before it was closed. The director of digital content, Emily Bell, said the mood had changed after the intervention of Max's father and the comments had become more critical of the website and its editors' decision to commission and publish the blog: 'They were much happier to give us a kicking instead of him.'

She added that 'going viral' happened reasonably regularly, but was unpredictable. Other recent examples included the DJ Mike Read's blog supporting Boris Johnson for mayor of London, which had a record 1,132 comments. An intimate email, allegedly sent by Claire Swire to her boyfriend Bradley Chait in which she is said to have referred to a sex act, also went round the world. Of the comments on Max's blog, Bell said: 'A lot of this is quite funny, but not for Max. As publisher, we have a duty of care to him.'

In her own online blog, Bell wrote: 'We're used to it, but it is still an absurdly awful experience for the individual on the end of the monstering, particularly if you are a relative novice.' She added: 'Perhaps an open blog post was not the best place to publish it.'

Some contributors were uneasy over the tone of many comments. One wrote: 'The amount of hate, envy and hypocrisy that's been on display here is shocking.'

But others compared Max to Nathan Barley, a loathsome fictional twentysomething London media type in the Channel 4 sitcom of the same name. One asked, 'Whose son is Max then?', while another predicted, 'Oh, Christ. This guy's going to get an absolute hammering.' Yet another added: 'Don't show Derek Conway this - he'll be most upset.'

Still others urged him to continue the blog and answer the critics, but his father said: 'We just want him to be left alone. It's scary and the exposure is so horrible. He's a strong kid and I think he is moving on. Max himself made the decision to pull it and I think it is a mature decision.

'People have said "stay and fight". But there is no way - whatever he writes next week, it would be pilloried. It's a no-win situation. He has seen some of the blog. He has said to me that he doesn't like the media world now. He doesn't want to go into it any more.'
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fokse vektaire xeven

fokse vektaire xeven

Arab Nazi
Grievous Angel said:
There's lots of disillusionment etc in left politics. Partly this is a reaction to interminable defeat since Thatcher. Partly this is because a lot of people in left politics just aren't very nice.
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we can update that. disillusionment in left politics now has got a lot more to do with what happened after Blair- ie they magically disappeared from the political mainstream. there is no notional "opposition" of any kind so a lot of people feel disenfranchised and disconnected. also the guardian is a liberal organ really rather than a "left" one. i don't think a newspaper that regularly features articles on hugely overpriced consumer goods can be considered left leaning.

mms said:
it's really gone from a place of possible utopia to a concept where everything is free, with no responsibility, there is no real feeling that you should behave respectfully and responsibly because potentially no one knows who you are and people are just there to be scorned.
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the internet gives the voiceless a voice free of responsibility as you say so i suppose we shouldn't be surprised that sociopathic views etc are so prevalent. i have to say tho i've been shocked by the sheer volume of prejudice (in general, rather than in this case). does lead you to wonder how many seemingly operational members of society are internalising such feelings :eek:
 
fokse vektaire xeven

fokse vektaire xeven

Arab Nazi
i'm not saying it doesn't have its upside ;)

from my brief scanning of the comments in this case it seemed a lot of them were as motivated by envy as anything. i'm not sure anything too enlightening was said. it doesn't make me angry, but then i don't read the paper and have no investment in how it is or isn't run. possibly the derek conway thing being in the public consciousness at the moment might have been a contributory factor to the reaction this got...it certainly seems a little disproportionate.
 
M

mms

sometimes
fokse vektaire xeven said:
i'm not saying it doesn't have its upside ;)

from my brief scanning of the comments in this case it seemed a lot of them were as motivated by envy as anything. i'm not sure anything too enlightening was said. it doesn't make me angry, but then i don't read the paper and have no investment in how it is or isn't run. possibly the derek conway thing being in the public consciousness at the moment might have been a contributory factor to the reaction this got...it certainly seems a little disproportionate.
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you'll always get nepotisim, networking and that sort of thing in workplaces, sometimes its a mistake sometimes it works.

here its like ppl were waiting for a moment just like this - even if it was complete negative over reaction and really quite poisonous, a bomb only explodes once and this was the general target.
it makes me wonder what this is all about, were these guardian readers, do they like the paper, does it make them angry, do they support it? It seems different from say daily mail comments boxes, which just seem to give any article grumpy wildly right wing support.
 
C

crackerjack

Well-known member
mms said:
it makes me wonder what this is all about, were these guardian readers, do they like the paper, does it make them angry, do they support it?
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There are valid criticisms to be made of The Guardian - namely that for a left-liberal paper it's unhealthily preoccupied with the lives and lifestyle choices of the urban (esp. London) middle-class. This poor guy just became the target for a lot of that resentment.

The rest of it is pure bile, largely from people who seem unaware that hanging round blogs making snide comments is just as much of a cliche as MC kids going east to "find themselves" and "look at poverty" (terms that appeared a lot in the comments but nowhere in the original article).
 
M

mms

sometimes
crackerjack said:
There are valid criticisms to be made of The Guardian - namely that for a left-liberal paper it's unhealthily preoccupied with the lives and lifestyle choices of the urban (esp. London) middle-class. This poor guy just became the target for a lot of that resentment.
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that's true - it has a tendency to read like that private eye column cartoon it's grim up north london mixed with bridget jones diary and a kind of arts council funded hello magazine nowdays.
no one can afford anything they have in their long lifestyle pieces or get hold of the food etc.
 
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