I doubt it. And I read the New York Times article called "On the Nice Internet, Caring Is Sharing/Websites Like Thought Catalog and Upworthy Aim to Uplift."
The word "nice" only appears once in the article, in the sentence "Mr. Magnin is an architect of the nice Internet." Alex Magnin is the chief revenue officer of Thought Catalog, which has, according to Magnin, "some awesome writers" writing "stuff people love and can relate to" within "a vision of building something great and wonderful." So I guess if your vision is of building something, you're an architect, but if it's great and wonderful, is it nice? It sounds like what's built that's great is your own traffic, and "stuff people love" just means headlines people click on impulsively — all that crap about puppies and kittens and amazing you and breaking your heart... all the sentimental tweaking of human curiosity.
What does that have to do with niceness? Later, the article uses the term "feel-goodiness," which I actually don't feel too good about, but it's closer to the game these websites play. They're trying to make people feel good or at least feel that they will feel good if only they click to the next place over there. But there's nothing nice about treating people that way. The website isn't nice. It has a damned low opinion of the people it's exploiting.
"Nice" is a funny word though. It has all these quite negative, now obsolete meanings: foolish, silly, simple, ignorant, absurd, senseless, wanton, dissolute, lascivious. If we may resurrect all that, of course, there's The Nice Internet.
July 17, 2014
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Where can I find those wanton, dissolute and lascivious websites? All the really nice ones seem to be in the British tabloids.
Gather around the virtual table and share a nice meal.
It's like The Blaze, they put these headlines in place that make you want to click, which now has the opposite effect on me. Annoying.
I have no experience with ThoughtCatalog, but I get bombarded by my lefty friends on FB who link to stuff from UpWorthy all the damn time.
It's a slightly more ideologically genteel version of Talking Points Memo, but it's incredibly cocooned in its world of left-wing moral smug. Actually, I prefer TPM, because at least you know for them it's politics as blood sport, rather than UpWorthy, which is Josef Stalin meets the Church Lady.
Nice internet? Give me a break! Everyone knows that the internet is a vile machine fueled on hatred, resentment, porn, and cat videos.
Can't stand upworthy. I never click on upworthy links, which are all advertised as "He thought this was just a dull day until something fabulous and exciting happened" -- and you click on it to see a dog jumping over a goat, or some such drivel.
Maybe the 'nice' in the article is the midwest version of nice. And that isn't too nice at all.
Looks a lot like Progressive bullshit about white privilege and what feminism really is...
From the main page:
36 Bumper Stickers
20 Steps
33 People
14 Insults
15 Things
10 Things
07 Reasons
21 Types
23 Truths
16 Things
22 Things
+
Plenty of things for people who like nice things.
Frivolous, silly, or whimsical may be better word choices than "nice" here.
Useful is more important.
Century Link bombards DSL subscribers with daily (!) snail mail offering Smart Home everything monitoring and/or some TV service.
They spend my entire DSL bill on postage.
People dropping landlines is making them cast about for alternative income.
They also cut expenses. If a repairman retires, they don't replace him.
Phone outages are fixed "within two business days" instead of the same day.
The world apparently is going wireless.
I'm with the Young Hegelian: It's candy-coated ideology for the most-part, where a 'hip' Left-liberal worldview meets the market and internet memes, taking advantage of sentiment.
The fact that it's being sold or promoted as 'nice' or some indicator of a great new business model is just sad.
Upworthy doesn't "aim to uplift".
It aims to get traffic with linkbait and to push a Progressive agenda.
They were pretty clear about the political intent when they launched it.
(Naturally it rapidly got blocked on FB, and would have for the linkbait even if it had been politically neutral.)
Nice is a city in Provence.
I hang out occasionally on a grrlpower fan site called "The Mary Sue". They recently merged with some damn fool geek-cool site that is more traditionally space-nerd oriented. Now there are wilting flowers complaining that the site is no longer "safe", by which they mean that the comments don't provide the approving phatic chorus their timid and fragile souls require. What's really sad is that this site is big on tough-girl, feminism and all that rot. They want strong female characters, but then folks start gassing on about triggers and "safe places" and all the wilting-flower infantilization that makes me question how they can reconcile the two conceits at the same time.
"Nice" always makes me want to quote Sondheim:
"You're so nice.
You're not good,
You're not bad,
You're just nice.
I'm not good,
I'm not nice,
I'm just right."
Mitchell H.,
Yours was only the second use of "phatic" (see? it gets the red-underline treatment even here!) I've encountered in my lifetime, and the first to make me look it up.
The first was in C.S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength, which is coincidentally the thing I think of now whenever I run across "NICE." There, it's the "National Institute for Co-Ordinated Experiments, and not "nice" at all. I note that it is also the "National Institute for Health and Care Excellence" in the UK (which is "NIHCE," but who's counting?) and the "National Initiative for Care of the Elderly" in Canada (slogan: "We care together").
"Is there really something called "the Nice Internet"?"
If there is, it's probably just 1% of it. The rest tends to be either naughty or mean.
Really, though, forget nice or its antonyms. What I want is "The Intelligent, Thoughtful Internet". Too many dumbasses blather too much dumb crap online for me to think that the 'net's reflection upon society is even a remotely complimentary one. 99% of the stuff on Twitter, and near equal percentages of stuff on news sites, opinion blogs, comments sections, and the like occasionally rises to the "inane but benign" level. Too much stuff sinks to the muck and starts digging. Very, very few places are genuinely enlightening or entertaining.
Who cares if stuff's not "nice". The real tragedy is that too much of the content on the 'net is utterly stupid.
Are these websites targeted towards (or do they appeal more to) certain types of people? One gender, maybe? Does exploiting the low opinion the site owners have of their targeted audience pay off, and if so can we draw any conclusions from that?
Just wondering.
Michelle: I picked it up from a writer I used to follow, eluki bes shahar (aka "Rosemary Edghill"), who was describing different narrative styles, and why the "phatic chorus" is popular among ideological SF writers and feminist fantasy writers of the time. Basically, it's a style in which different characters in a "dialog" actually just trade off statements of opinion, so that it may be difficult to tell who exactly is speaking which line, because there is only one valid argument which is not so much being debated, as resonated into existence.
She probably picked it up from CS Lewis. I have never read the Perelandia trilogy, I'm mildly embarrassed to have to report.
Indigo by default. There's the disconnect.
It wouldn't surprise me to see Zucker or someone try to start a "nice" Internet so their friends in the government would have an excuse to crack down on the "not nice" ones they don't approve of.
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