Why the blogosphere is full of hate
29 January 2009 — Comments (View)
Look at your blog posts, your Twitter updates and anything else you post publicly. Even if you’re as big a cynic as me, if the ratio of mean to nice/neutral is much worse than 3:1 then you’re part of the problem.
At times like these and especially with columns like these, I’m reminded of the Gottman ratio.
Gottman came to the theory behind the Gottman ratio in his research on marriage and divorce. It’s simple.
The number of positive interactions should outnumber the number of negative interactions by a ratio of somewhere between 5-7 to one. When the ratio falls below that, you will remember the overall experience as being negative.
This conclusion has a couple of corollaries in this context, first of which is that Malcom Gladwell is a git.
Why? Because he used Gottman’s research and his ability to accurately guess a marriage’s survival chances in a very short space of time as an example, in his book “Blink”, of the expert’s pseudo-mystical ability to quickly guess correctly.
And he forgot to explain Gottman’s theory or why it’s extremely easy to use as a heuristic to quickly and accurately guess whether participants will come to view an experience as an overall negative or positive.
Another corollary is that Paul Carr’s ratio of negative outnumbering the positive by three to one would still result in an overall culture of bile and negativity.
The terrifying thing is that it would still be an improvement. Our minds are built in such a way that the negative outweighs the positive by more than five to one. The entire blogosphere is built around the precepts of resentment, anger, sniping and general negativity. If we don’t go out of our way to add positive interactions to ours and others’ weblogging lives, the blogosphere is doomed to be unpleasant.
