The Case Against Anger

If you're reading this, then you must be a networked-type person, an interconnected, blogosphere-dwelling, online-flourishing sort of a human. If not, then what on earth are you doing here?
As a person in the bridge generation between those who struggle famously to integrate computers and the web into their lives (like my mother) and those for whom Web 2.0 is their blood type (like my daughter), I have a love-hate relationship with all of the forces of connection and social networking. Similarly, I am both drawn to and repelled by the hasty rhetoric, political, artistic, religious, etc. that swirls around so many websites.
Cultural critic Lee Siegel has written a book, Against the Machine, in which the negatives of the Internet society are explored. What I find just as interesting as Siegel's anti-net argument, however, are the words of John Lanchester, who reviewed the book in the New York Times. Lanchester points out the frequent anger that lies beneath a great deal of Internet discussion as well as in the pages of Siegel's book.
Anger, I would suggest, rarely does the work that we hope it will do, either in public life, private life, or, for the purposes of this post, in the education world. Anger can be a great motivator, but it must be carefully controlled if its motivation is going to lead to genuine accomplishment.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/03/books/review/Lanchester-t.html?_r=1&ref=books&oref=slogin