Get your balls, pucks, Scrabble boards and packs of cards away from me – all I want is space to be together, ideally with a coffee or a glass of wine, says writer Emily Watkins
There used to be a convention of having authors who would, at least occasionally, write deliberately-enraging opinion articles in magazines. In my experience, they were typically at the end of magazines. Maybe not outright wrong articles, but they’d make statements that many readers of the magazine would object to.
The idea, as I understand it, was to — and this was before social media, in the Internet-based sense of the word, developed a focus on this — drive engagement. People would write letters to the editor complaining and arguing against it, and then the magazine could print some of these in the next issue in the letters section.
John C. Dvorak was the most-prominent example of this that I recall — he put articles in a few computer magazines — and was notable in that I recall him publicly-admitting on one occasion that he did this, that it wasn’t just that he happened to have controversial opinions.
Huh. Looking at his WP article, it looks like he just died last week.
Anyway, my point is that I could believe that publications might still have authors who do this sort of thing.
There used to be a convention of having authors who would, at least occasionally, write deliberately-enraging opinion articles in magazines. In my experience, they were typically at the end of magazines. Maybe not outright wrong articles, but they’d make statements that many readers of the magazine would object to.
The idea, as I understand it, was to — and this was before social media, in the Internet-based sense of the word, developed a focus on this — drive engagement. People would write letters to the editor complaining and arguing against it, and then the magazine could print some of these in the next issue in the letters section.
John C. Dvorak was the most-prominent example of this that I recall — he put articles in a few computer magazines — and was notable in that I recall him publicly-admitting on one occasion that he did this, that it wasn’t just that he happened to have controversial opinions.
Huh. Looking at his WP article, it looks like he just died last week.
Anyway, my point is that I could believe that publications might still have authors who do this sort of thing.
Yeah, exactly why it feels gross to signal boost it.