Joan Smith: Stand up to the bullies and stop this online abuse

Three days ago, a well-known American blogger launched an unprecedented attack on the forum she helped to create. Revealing that she had been the target of vicious personal remarks and death threats for the past four weeks, Kathy Sierra said she had cancelled an appearance at a conference in San Diego and was staying at home, terrified, with the doors locked.

"I do not want to be part of a culture - the Blogosphere - where this is considered acceptable," she wrote, adding that she wasn't certain whether she would ever post again.

What finally drove Ms Sierra over the edge was a picture of a noose, posted anonymously by a blogger who wrote that all he wanted to know about her was her neck size. Someone else posted a photograph of Ms Sierra, her nose and mouth obscured by a device which transformed her into "nothing more than an objectified sexual orifice".

Sadly, there isn't anything unusual about these cowardly attacks, carried out under the cover of anonymity. They are merely the latest evidence of the way in which the internet has spawned a culture of vulgar personal abuse, and is thus in danger of devaluing the very notion of what it means to be a writer.

In a world where anyone with access to a computer can give an instant opinion, couched in intemperate or even threatening language, writing is rapidly being transformed in the public mind from a profession to little more than a typed form of speech. It is already having a disastrous effect on the status and income of professional writers, as we find ourselves under attack for continuing to assert the lasting value of what we do.

I'm sorry to have to say this about the internet, not least because when it is used responsibly it can be one of the most important resources for human rights activists around the world.

In some repressive countries, notably Iran, bloggers have alerted the outside world when women demonstrators were beaten by the police or strike leaders put in solitary confinement. The power of bloggers is demonstrated by the fact that the Chinese government employs some 30,000 people to take down sites promoting the idea of democracy, while Egypt and Vietnam regularly send young bloggers to prison.

But there is no denying that the internet, with its promise of being open to all, is not just vulnerable to abuse, but a vehicle for it. Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia "based on twin pillars of trust and tolerance" (in the words of its co-founder Jimmy Wales), is suffering a crisis of confidence after some of its entries have been repeatedly vandalised by people who want to make a childish political point or settle a score; there could hardly have been a worse moment for one of its editors to be caught passing himself off as a professor when he was actually a 24-year-old student from Kentucky.

The problems of the blogosphere are a worldwide phenomenon. Anyone who writes on contentious subjects in the online editions of British newspapers will be aware that some readers treat an invitation to post comments as an opportunity to unleash a torrent of personal abuse.

Some are satisfied by name-calling, while others go in for puerile sarcasm such as this fairly typical post from a newspaper website: "Does this kind of rant help you pull spotty girls with braces on their teeth in the sixth form common room?" (Misogyny, while not obligatory, is one of the most persistent themes of the blogger.)

This has created a problem that goes way beyond the distressing effect of vitriolic personal abuse - much of it too sexually explicit and offensive to repeat here - on individuals. If anyone can write, and much of what they produce is either information or complete rubbish, it's no wonder that the public is losing respect for writers who spend literally years finding the right form of words for a poem or a novel. The act of writing is being de-skilled to a point where it is no longer regarded as work, and what follows is a demand that all written material should be available to anyone who wants it without charge.

In this pseudo-democratic universe, the novel that has just taken me nearly five years to finish has no more value than a blog that someone dashed off in 10 minutes. The sheer quantity of words available on the internet has prompted a false analogy with the enclosures of common land in the 18th century, in which novelists, poets and historians are cast in the role of wicked landlords.

People who argue that the written word should be freely available on the net, regardless of its origin, behave as though the world is littered with glittering sentences and paragraphs, occurring as naturally as semi-precious stones. But what they are demanding, in reality, is the right to roam in my brain and my bank account.

It is inevitable that a medium like the internet, as well as inspiring and liberating people, should have the capacity to do a great deal of damage. The answer isn't censorship, but for sufficient people to find the courage - like Ms Sierra - to say that we do not have to tolerate abuse. There is no place in a civilised society for sexual slurs and death threats, and restoring respect for the act of writing would go some way towards creating a culture in which novelists, poets and playwrights could once again flourish.

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