Even the moderated forums I’ve observed or participated in have allowed entry to the inevitable person several notches below the rest in reference points and maturity (and, not infrequently, literacy), lacking any compensating modesty, who basically stopped the show by posting something excruciatingly naive, profoundly dumb, syntactically garbled, or some combination thereof. By tacit agreement, that individual gets to hijack the discussion, with no one — including the moderators — having the courage to intervene. […]
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I begin to see possibilities for multipurposing much of what I generate for this blog and for other outlets. Subscribers to Photocritic International and visitors to this blog can expect further multimedia offerings here, on a regular basis henceforth. In 2012 I intend to develop a line of ebooks, and to further energize all the sites that comprise Photo Education Online, the consortium to which Photocritic International belongs. […] The tribulations of Kodak and Olympus impinge less directly and severely on the field of creative photography, where I concentrate my attention as a critic and journalist. Yet they too seem to signify the end of an era in which major-league companies identified so strongly with photography constituted an industry from which no one anticipated anything but ongoing strength and steady growth. […] This year I found it necessary to fire a client, declining to undertake a second rewrite of a commissioned photo-book introduction. Both the editor and the photographer insisted that I refrain from discussing at any length the socially and politically charged subject matter of the pictures, demanding instead that I address the images purely in formalist terms, preferably by making comparisons to great painters of the past. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |
Forumization and Its Malcontent (2)
I frankly don’t know how to respond to the question “What makes the opinion of a certain highly informed person more valid than that of someone who is not informed?” To paraphrase, what makes the opinion of someone who knows something about a subject more valid than that of someone who knows nothing about it? This query seems to conflate the belief that everyone’s entitled to an opinion (with which I agree) with the notion that all opinions carry equal weight (with which I certainly disagree). […]