LAZY SUNDAY #67: THE COMMENT THREAD

The thing that sets the inner tubes apart from virtually all other forms of media, maybe except for talk radio, is its ability to be interactive. Oh, you could always write a letter to the editor, that might or might not get printed, maybe or maybe not in an unedited form, sometime sooner or later – and often well after your point or the issue that prompted it had dropped from the Public consciousness and even your own list of things you actually gave a shit about.

The internet is different. You can be getting your two cents out there before whoever posted their own opinion has had a chance to get up from the computer, stretch and take a pee.

And not only do you get to comment on the original writer’s opinion, you get to comment on the other comments as well as the commenters, their friends, their family, their life style choices and whether or not they should have access to what’s obviously you and the planet Earth’s personal private stash of Oxygen.

It’s been often said that “Opinions are like a**-holes, everybody’s got one.” and when you start writing a blog one of the first things you notice is how many a**-holes there really are in the world.

Not you guys reading this, of course! You people are just about the smartest, kindest, most personable and apparently good-looking audience a guy like me has any right to deserve. Among fellow bloggers, I regularly refer to you as “All that Heaven will allow”.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  Differences of opinion (and just about everything else) are a fine thing. They make life interesting and/or challenging. And hearing somebody else’s take on a position you’ve taken can be enlightening or humbling in a lot of wonderful ways. The more we honestly intermingle, the sooner we’ll reach a consensus that probably works mostly well for most of us on anything.

Last week, I had a couple of guys respond in the comments thread to a video I posted on a fairly high-minded topic. And then they responded to each other in a way that was entertaining and enlightening not only to anybody reading their thoughts, but to the writers themselves. And that was very cool.

And I’m sure that’s the way the guys who invented the inner tubes thought it would all go.

But make the mistake of clicking on the comment threads of any newspaper story on even something as mundane as pet ordinances and before you’ve gone down half a page, you discover it’s all connected to and/or the fault of the middle east, homosexuals or The Obama. Empowered by anonymity and untethered from any need to be civil, people are capable of creating bile the stomach of a Vulture couldn’t secrete.

It’s a situation that could cause you to lose your faith in humanity, or what remained of it after you’d spent the day moderating the hate speech out of what gets submitted to your own blog comment threads.

A couple of days ago, the dependably sophomoric guys at College Humor released one of the most brilliant insights into our inability to use this amazing interactive tool to actually interact.

I hope it restores your faith in humanity’s ability to at least laugh at itself as much as it did mine.

Feel free to comment. And enjoy your Sunday.