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Wednesday, June 07, 2006

INANITY. Last week, I posted an entry about my father, who died in 1999. Probably a mistake, given that a blog is essentially an open letter to the universe. I expressed the fact that I missed him and tried to render a brief portrait that exposed some of both our strengths and weaknesses. Writing about him was part of a decision process that's still underway, about whether or not maintaining this small conduit to the outside world is still worth the time and effort it requires, whether it's ever had any value in its two-and-a-half years of existence, and whether or not I should continue it. One regular reader had previously identified the question I was grappling with in his comment on the May 9 entry:


In our blog, he usually calls himself Brizoni, and the abbreviated signoff after his kind words was touching. That's what commenters can do for you, especially in a small blog like InstaPunk, where we have just a few hundred regulars apart from the occasional Instalanche or Michellanche that bring in thousands.

I wanted to acknowledge, and thank, Brizoni and others like him, even though the decision is still unmade. I also thought it might be a good time to address another circumstance that many bloggers deal with, what I call the "unknown commenter," who comes in on a periodic or one-shot basis to attack you. I got one of those in response to the entry on my father. He listed his name as "Dave." He said:


All of us who permit comments have received missives like this. There are only a few different ways to deal with it. We can screen commenters ahead of time by asking for identifying information -- like a valid email address -- to deter the worst of the haters. We can delay posting comments until they've been vetted and delete the ones we don't like. We can ban the worst offenders altogether. We can ignore their comments. And we can respond if they make worthwhile points or need a smacking.

Instapunk.com has never used any of the pre-screening tools, and we don't delete unflattering comments. In two-and-a-half years, we've banned only one commenter. And, frequently, we respond, mostly when we feel the readership as a whole might enjoy the cut-and-thrust. We dish it out on a regular basis, and it seems only fair that we be prepared to take it as well.

That was my initial feeling about "Dave." The internet is a free-fire zone, our door is always open, and if he wants to take a shot or two, so be it. But being in a more than ordinarily contemplative mood, I began to realize that Dave's comment was a kind of archetype and deserved some categorical response. I get tired of reading the term "troll" in other blog comment sections. My guess is, the people who are called trolls don't ever quite understand the basis of the contempt they inspire. I thought it might be helpful to all the Daves out there to explain just how much you give away about yourselves in your supposedly anonymous comments. And perhaps if I do it right, other bloggers might regard this singular analysis as a useful link to offer their own Daves.

Why do I describe this particular Dave as an archetype? Because he uses an absolutely formulaic and transparent approach to his hit-and-run attempt at wounding the blogger's vanity. It begins with the implied statement of personal superiority:


Yes, I do. It's called blogging.  And since you have no way of knowing that I don't stand six-eight and weigh in at 340 lbs, the "little fella" appellation can only represent your appraisal of my intellectual stature compared to yours. Perhaps you'd better do something to start proving your claim. But in the archetype of the unknown commenter, this is never offered. Dave he is, and Dave he will remain, hiding inside a brown bag without reference to his own blog, other published works, accomplishments, experience, or anything one could connect to a resume. He is a voice out of the ether, something like the whisper of an obscene caller.


The masterfulness of Dave is that he fulfills the formulaic requirements so swiftly, in so few words, without the spewing that usually obscures the bones of the archetype. The step that always comes after the unproven declaration of superiority is the immediate display of deficiency -- logical, grammatical, educational, moral, psychological, political, etc. In this case, he's already logically off point. The entry is clearly about a sense of doubt and personal loss, not about the presumed divinity of the writer. No disrespect to my father? Right. Whatever Dave is mad about predates this piece, and he doesn't give a damn about what personal emotions he might be trampling. He has a hard-on about InstaPunk, and he couldn't care less that this probably isn't the right time to pursue it. But most people out there do have a sense of pitch about human emotion, and they know something important about you if you don't, Dave.


Now we're getting to it. The real motivation that drives the unknown commenter to force his attack, regardless of its relevance or timeliness. That's the third part of the archetype. It's always really about them, not you, the obsessive expression of a longstanding grudge, against you or someone or something else. In this instance, he has stored up hostility about the persona of InstaPunk at Instapunk.com. His own irrational reaction blinds him to the possibility that there are complexities he hasn't considered, even if they could be divined by attention to available evidence. For example, he overlooks the fact that Instapunk is both an individual contributor to the website and the title of the site as a whole, which complicates the use of names. He hasn't bothered to discover that entries signed by Instapunk tend to be the only ones that do use the singular personal pronoun rather than the editorial 'we.' He doesn't suspect that some contributors, not all, have a business need for everyone's anonymity because they are conducting transactions in the government sector. And finally, he is too obtuse to realize that InstaPunk is currently referring to himself in the third person because he is critically examining the persona named Instapunk with some degree of doubt and indecision. This is always one of the major identifying criteria of the unknown commenter; he doesn't quite get what's going on in the arena he's so superior to.


The butchered putdown comes next, always with a revealing indicator about what might constitute real authority since no personal credentials will ever be cited by the commenter. This one's perfect. "let me see if I can do an effective imitation of your inflated style of prose." Well, you can't, Dave. You've given too much of yourself away. You've been to college, I grant, but you also cite one of the lowest common denominators of pop wisdom as an indisputable authority. John Lennon is your idea of an eloquent literary critic? It doesn't take a luminary to call things 'shit.' In fact, it's usually the spoor of the ignorant confronted by complexities they're ill equipped to understand. The theory of relativity is 'shit' to a crack whore.

It's also a neon sign signifying the presence of the unknown commenter. He hasn't the wit to refute anything actually said or written by his target. He puts his own ill chosen words into the mouth of his target and then, responding to his own stupid straw man, denounces the stupidity of the target. Not exactly terse? No. Nor coherent. Not exactly Hemingway? No. Your words, remember. And what is your understanding of Hemingway, anyway? What is it, exactly, that you admire about him? That he's a famous name you can drop in the absence of any personal information about yourself? That you seem, to yourself, sophisticated for citing him as a great writer who is presumably better than a small-time blogger? Or is it that he writes short sentences, short enough for you to understand. It was the great liberal Norman Mailer who observed that those who most abhor long sentences are those who simply can't read well enough to understand them. It was also Mailer who remarked that For Whom the Bell Tolls was Hemingway's attempt to prove that he could write long sentences -- and failed in the attempt.

Different Daves will apply the butchered putdown differently, of course, and there's little point in digging deeply into this Dave's invisible line of thought. What matters is that they if they were truly interested in matters of the intellect, they would be prepared to plumb the depths of the propositions they offer as declarations of fact. They never are.


Finally, the fancied coup de grace. This tends to be a scattershot list of imputed crimes against the superior sensibility of the unknown commenter. (The Chomsky entry he refused to address in specific terms is here.) Oddly enough, it's almost always a poorly worded, badly spelled and punctuated bullet list of non sequiturs intended to prove that anyone who does listen to you is a pathetic moron compared to the unknown commenter. If they reference anything you've written, they don't seek to refute it or contend with its principal arguments, merely to condemn it by edict and half-assed anecdote.

Why go through all this? For the list of components that make up the archetype. Here they are:

1.    Implied statement of personal superiority. No personal ID, info, or website.

2.    Immediate display of deficiency. Failures of logic, fact, grammar, spelling.

3.    Obsessive expression of pre-existing grudge. Non-responsive to subject entry.

4.   "Doesn't Quite Get It" factor. Oblivious of context.

5.    Bungled putdown. Incompetent, irrational, irrelevant insults.

6.    Lowest common denominator of pop wisdom (e.g. Bush lied, people died, etc)

7.    Fancied coup de grace. Expressions of triumph about points not proven.

It's a dance of the seven veils, and depending on how incoherent the unknown commenter is, the veils can be removed in any order. They wonder why they are banned, why they are termed trolls, why they are treated with no respect, why they are ignored. Perhaps it's time they learned.

Dave, are you listening? And by Dave, I do mean all you Daves. Our prescription for what ails you was documented long ago by our own Chain Gang. If you prefer another course, learn how to think and write like an adult. Or get your own blog. Or, better yet, get a life of your own.

Only trying to help. As usual.

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