Old-guard bloggers petition for kinder, gentler comment sections

"There's this new generation' that has grown up online only knowing blogs as having snarky comment areas and never realizing it used to be a personal, intimate space where you'd never say anything in a comment that you wouldn't say to a friend's face."

That's a quote from Matt Haughey, a quote that's haunted me for a month, ever since I saw it on Rex Sorgatz's Fimoculous blog.

Rex and Matt are self-identified members of the "old guard" - guys that started blogging before blogging was cool - before journal scripts and social networking sites put every angsty teenager and every narcissistic college student on the Web.

I started my first blog in 1992, when Web publishing required a degree of technical skill. The requirement for HTML coding created a barrier to entry, so the only people who had blogs were geeks who already made Web pages for a living, or dedicated diarists who really had something to say.

Or, in my case, people who were so simultaneously lonely and full of themselves that every random thought in their head was deemed worthy of publication.

The Web was a smaller, more intimate place then. Blogs were like diaries - raw, emotional and real, with none of the self-conscious hedging that goes on now.

These days, even blogs from "the overshare gang" read like magazine copy.

Haughey is lamenting the dehumanizing effect of modern blog comments, where sincere questions and emotional disclosures are met with banality and scorn.

I think the culprit, beyond the well-documented effects of anonymity and the general pettiness of human beings, is the culture of snark that has come to dominate writing on the Web.

"Snark" is actually a contraction of "snide" and "remark." These days, snark is a writing style, like the worst kind of celebrity journalism, wrapped in a faux-intimate first-person style.

A snarky writer is the ultimate outsider. He's outside of everything, poking fun at the elites, tearing down institutions with insults and dry humor. That's all well and good when you're an underpaid assistant poking fun at editors from Conde' nast (www.condenast.com).

But somewhere along the line we stopped using snark on the people who "deserved it" and started snarking at normal people. In fact, with the advent of e-mail and open comment sections, many bloggers have discovered that the line between celebrities who are worthy of scorn and normal people who are just doing their jobs is a very thin line indeed.

I remember tearing into Ken Levine when he mocked my favorite television show on his blog. Ken is an Emmy-winning writer/producer/director - the creator of some of the most popular shows on television. Exactly the kind of elitist celebrity jerk that it's safe to make fun of - until he shows up in your comment section and turns into a real human being.

Suddenly this Hollywood luminary, so famous I couldn't really conceive him as a person, was addressing my comments and taking me seriously. He tried to be polite and respect my opinion, and it's very hard to snark at somebody after that.

We could blame it all on Nick Denton, I suppose - publisher of the infamous Gawker sites. Gawker didn't create snark, but I'd say they perfected it - applying the snarky writing style to everything from fashion to video games.

Snark is fun to write and fun to read, unless you're on the receiving end. It's fun to sit in the cheap seats and throw tomatoes at the stage, but what happens when you read an article or get an insider e-mail and are suddenly forced to see your target as a real human being?

What if all the celebrities we enjoy making fun of are just hard-working artists struggling to make a living, struggling to stay on top of this shifting mountain of pop culture crap?

Sure, a lot of idiots get famous by accident, but what if some of them actually deserve what they have?

And what about people who aren't celebrities at all? What about the army of normal people who share their thoughts and feelings on public blogs - where every confession, every lament and every honest question becomes a straight line for strangers to pounce on?

I don't know the answer. I don't know if we can get back to a "simpler time." I was on the Internet at the same time Mark Haughey was and I'm not sure this golden age even exists.

I remember mocking people and being the target of cruel jokes back in the days when blogs were called bulletin boards and you had to dial in to them one at a time.

I don't think we can ever really un-snark the Web, but we're definitely seeing a backlash. Writers like Choire Sicha and Jess Coen rebelled against the culture of snark established by Gawker and have tried to make blogging a kinder, if not entirely snark-free, enterprise.

Figures like Keith Gessen, Julia Allison and Emily Gould have taken it on the chin for their unironic sincerity and come out as wry, almost heroic figures by charming their critics and refusing to shut up.

I don't hold out much hope for reform, but maybe we can start small. Try to make the blogs and forums you frequent a safe place for sincerity. Next time a blogger takes a chance or reveals something personal, bite your tongue and reward him for it.

Spending too much time immersed in blog culture can ruin you for real communication. Every straight line starts to look like a big, fat softball cruising across the plate, waiting to be hit out of the park with a clever insult or a snarky turn of phrase.

But being funny isn't everything, and what we're destroying may be worth more than a laugh.

CONFUSED? Wondering who these people are? Check the online version at www.michaelduf.net.

(Michael Duff's column, Internet Buzz, is distributed by Morris News Service).