Forum Following

When looking for an online conversation to follow, I found myself on The Athens News website looking at the Editor’s Notes section. This section allows the editor to make comments and/or clarifications on current news stories in the area. One that caught my interest is about the ongoing debate of how a local student should be tried for a drug charge and involuntary manslaughter because he provided a dorm-mate with magic mushrooms. The student then later ate the mushrooms and fell from his dorm window to his death. The editor gives a brief summary of what exactly is going on with the case and his opinion on how the student who provided the mushrooms should be tried and for what. The page can be found from the following link:

http://www.athensnews.com/editorial/editors-blog/28697-manslaughter-charge-in-drug-death-is-overdoing-it

After the editor’s original comments, you can see further comments posted by five different readers. These five different people give us a very wide range of responses to look at and analyze. The first reader, Kandi, only poses a question to the editor specifically that really doesn’t follow along with the message that the editor was trying to get across. The editor responds to this directly by adding a comment to Kandi’s specific post.

The second user to comment, Seancho, begins to engage in what feels like a debate over the legality of the drugs themselves and not on the charges that have been proposed. He seems to be fanning the flames of debate by calling into question the editor and Athens residents past drug use. In a second post, Seancho then changes his topic to a section in the Athens new that appeared years ago that gave advice and information on drugs of different varieties. It seems that this user is looking for someone to talk drugs with him rather than give an opinion on the originally posted topic.

Another user, Townie, makes some similar comments but has them relate to the topic much better, helping give another side to the reasoning for the proposed charges. Also, a general comparison to morphine is given by the user RR, but doesn’t provoke any further discussion, besides for an almost identical restatement of the question by Seancho.

The final post by Patricia Gerrald is one of extreme use. She provides a personal response to the issue at hand and also sites specific lines From the Ohio Revised Code that apply to the case at hand. She also cited where the information could be found. Gerrald did not use slang terms or condisending tones like some of the other users who commented, allowing readers and the editor to take her opinion much more serious than the rest of the comments. This can be seen in the Editor’s remarks to her post, which were much lengthier and in depth than his comments on other’s posts.