This Essay Sucks So You Should Never Read Anything Ever Again
It’s not entirely true that comments sections are where brain cells go to die in agony. It’s only mostly true. Yes, there are some online forums (or fora, or foraminifera if you’re feeling shellfish) where there is reasoned, respectful debate, and the original content is as meritorious for sparking inspired followup debate as it is for its own existence.
I know. I’ve been on a few of them. No, I’m not telling you where. Such secrets are best kept by a few, lest exposure lead to disaster, and the whole thing get dismantled like a mystically effervescent trampoline in an episode of Community.
The other types of forums, though, well, I suspect you’ve found them for yourself. Frequently. They come in all shapes and sizes, with comment threads of all lengths and degrees of abuse of the English language. Indeed, I’m firmly behind instituting some sort of rating scale based on the density of “Your Mom” jokes on a per-post basis, simply to provide unwary readers[i] some idea what they’re getting into.
There are, however, certain threads that unite most forms of bad forum discussion. No matter where you go, these are the things that will get posted ad nauseum, ad infinitum, and often in all capital letters lest the author of the comment suffer the indignity of not being heard.
The most common can be boiled down to this: “I didn’t like the story/article/essay, so it’s universally invalid and wrong.” In other words, the commenter has decided that her or his taste should be the ultimate arbiter for any and all content posted, if not to the web in its entirety, then at least to the site in question.
Big deal, you say. Ignore it and move on. Generally, I do, but there’s something troubling underpinning that particular flavor of comment: the notion that the writer owes it to each reader to tailor their work to that reader’s taste. In other words, it’s a formal abdication by the reader of their responsibility to take charge of their reading choices. To stop reading stuff they don’t like and move on, rather than demand that material that others may enjoy be suppressed or not supported just because it didn’t match their personal taste. To commit the supreme folly of using one bit they dislike to make grandiose, melodramatic pronouncements about how they can never read a site or an author or suchlike again, because they had five minutes where the stuff they were reading didn’t give their eyeballs instant orgasms.
Hand in hand with that is the sort of comment generally made by the Lone Counterexample Ranger, which generally starts with “Game/Movie/Novel/TV Show X isn’t like that,” and which continues with an unspoken “and so everything you’ve ever said is wrong, wrong, wrong.” What’s also unspoken is the implicit “that I really like”. By ignoring the one movie or whatnot the poster likes, you’re apparently somehow insulting them, even if the thing they mention is either a lone example against a general argument, or not actually relevant. What matters, at least in the comments section, is that your hard work and lengthy effort to create a fully realized piece can be dismissed summarily with an “Oh yeah?”[ii]
Deep down, they’re really the same thing: an abdication of all responsibility onto the author. And while that may seem like an odd thing to kvetch about – after all, it’s the author who writes the bloody thing – there’s something pernicious underneath. The author’s job, except in cases of direct patronage or James Frey’s literary sweatshops, has never been to bend all of one’s efforts to pleasing a single reader. It is to create the best work possible, and to let the audience that finds that particular work interesting find it and enjoy it. The noisily entitled reader, on the other hand, insists that everything they read be tailored specifically for them. When there’s more than one of them on a particular forum, the math suddenly gets tricky. And if there’s more than one forum or blog or whatever, well, what’s the poor, beleaguered writer to do?
The answer, of course, is to keep writing. Trying to find and respond to each and every poster suffering from this sort of delusion that they are the sole intended audience is fruitlessly counterproductive. For one thing, time spent chasing this sort of stuff down is time you’re not writing. For another, by responding and, say, defending or clarifying your work, you’re giving the kvetcher exactly what they want: personal attention, an affirmation that their half-assed commentary is as valid as the subject of the comment[iii].
And, I’m not at all sad to say, it’s not. Thoughtful commentary? Yes, of course. Supported counterexamples? All good stuff, and worthy, and worth wading into. Just not the “make it all for me” tantrums that seem to have swamped the unwary waders in online discourse[iv]. But those are the readers’ responsibility, if they choose to pick it up, along with a mature understanding that not everything is for each and every one of them. “The food here is terrible, and such small portions,” said Woody Allen: the solution is to stop eating. And the solution for not seeing anything you like on the menu at a sushi restaurant when you hate fish is to go next door to the pizza joint, and not castigate the sushi chef for his “failure” to give you a Chicago deep dish. While you’re at it, remember that some folks might like sushi, too, and that’s OK.
Honest.
[i]Or vanity-surfing authors looking to drop in on any place online where their stuff is mentioned. You know who you are.
[ii] I offer as evidence the rebuttal to a recent article I wrote on the wimpification of modern vampires, whereby Nosferatu’s Count Orlok was cited as a counterexample. The rest, I leave as an exercise for the student.
[iii] To be fair, you have to admire their efficiency. It’s a lot more streamlined to get attention by shouting “You’re a poopyhead” than by actually creating something, after all.
[iv] The first person to comment on this with a “my blog comments section isn’t like that” gets absolutely nothing. You hear me? Nothing.
