Safari 5 has support for “extensions” – something Firefox has had forever and which Chrome jumped on right away. These are what we used to call “plug-ins” – bringing additional functionality to your browser. Unlike the old days, though, when you needed plugins for a slew of different media formats, these are mainly to add things like a GMail Inbox indicator or an ad blocker or an “Add To Amazon Wish List” 1-click button.
And then there’s “Shut Up”, which is a plugin that uses common bits of HTML to know where to find comments on a website – and remove them from view.
I’ve been keeping a blog of some sort for over eleven years now. It’s bopped around different places, using different formats and things, but for the first five or six years – barring a six-month experiment with Blogger as the back end – I didn’t have comments available. In fact, of the blogs I read, some of the most critical once don’t have comments at all.
It’s a tough thing, comments. Occasionally, if things break just right, you have something like Deadspin Up! All Night, which for a while was the closest thing to the old Zone I’ve seen since (it spawned at least two other blogs just from like-minded groups of commenters on this one last post per day). Or EDSBS, which has long since stopped being a Florida football blog and turned into some sort of collective performance art. And supposedly Ta-Nehisi Coates at the Atlantic has quite a well-curated comment section that actually brings something to the table.
And then, at the other end, there’s…well, everything else. The comments at al.com are pretty much rock bottom, and YouTube is right there alongside, but for the most part, venturing into the comment section of any major news website is a complete waste of time and may make you want to stick a gun in your mouth. Especially if you ever taught high school English. Hell, middle school English. I probably wouldn’t have comments if I had my druthers, but I can’t be arsed to figure out how to turn them off. Besides, it’s not really an issue for most individual bloggers.
Because here’s the thing: I’m basically standing on a platform I built myself (with help from my brother-in-law) and I’ve put up a body of work which I like to think reflects my knowledge, experience, and ruminations over a period of – gosh, four years or so now. It’s not particularly sharp, it’s not particularly insightful, and it probably doesn’t add too too much to the world’s storehouse of wisdom – but it’s mine, and I pretty much stand by it.
Here’s the thing, though: the opportunity cost of a blog is exactly zero relative to a comment. You need a computer and Internet access anyway, and Blogger and WordPress and Tumblr and TypePad Micro and Vox and Livejournal and I don’t know what else – they’re all free at the point of use. Basically, when you post a public comment on a blog, you’re saying “I am entitled to the use of your platform and bullhorn for my own opinion.” And for a personal blog which pretty much nobody reads, that’s fine. However, on bigger blogs or sites, it deteriorates rapidly – because given Internet access and practical anonymity, the average individual turns into a 14-year-old boy, with all the intelligence, wisdom, sensitivity and grammar that implies. The caliber of graffiti on the back wall of my high school was an order of magnitude smarter than the kind of bullshit that accompanies most any online news story, and God help you if you venture into the darker corners of the Internet.
I say that to say this: I think that for the most part, website comments are part and parcel of an extremely unfortunate trend of public life in this country. We have reached a point in this Year of Our Lord 2010 when we give everyone an equal right to be heard, irrespective of maturity, qualification, or even sanity. In the real world, if you’re parked at a stop sign and a crazed homeless person starts to crawl into your window screaming about Majestic-12 and the alien menace, do you enter into a discourse with him and try to reason with him and show him the flaws in his logic?
No. Hell no. You stomp the gas and lay a patch right through the intersection and peel out of there. If necessary, you whack him in the face with your coffee mug to make him let go of the window.
The problem is, on the internet, there’s an army of deranged nutters, and they’re everywhere. If you want to enter into a serious discussion on CNN.com, or ESPN, or (fill in literally ANY newspaper’s website), well, God bless you, but you’re not going to get it. You’re going to sink into a steady swamp of trolls, flamers, and outright morons who are still relying on that free AOL disk they got on a copy of George magazine.
We’ve made serious public discourse impossible in this country, because we’ve allowed everyone to play. You don’t have to be reasonable, you don’t have to be logical, you don’t even have to exist in the same reality as those of us who have green grass and blue skies in our world (well, at least in November and December). And for those of us who want public life to be carried on at a slightly more erudite level than a shit fight at the monkey house, we’ve been reduced to two and a half choices. We can either not go to that part of town at all, or we can go there with the windows rolled up and blacked out, resolutely staring forward and ignoring the bumping and banging outside.
Or you can lean over and punch your hanger-on in the face. The downside of that is that once you engage in the shit fight, the monkey invariably gets shit all over you.